27532738
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Tootech writes:
The online auction of the righthaven.com website domain name got under way Monday, with bidders having until Jan. 6 to submit offers.
A judge has authorized a receiver to auction the intellectual property of Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, the newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer.
The auction is aimed at raising money to cover part of Righthaven’s $63,720 debt to a man who defeated Righthaven in court.
The man, Wayne Hoehn, and his attorneys defeated Righthaven when a judge threw out Righthaven’s lawsuit against him over Hoehn’s unauthorized post on a sports betting website message board of a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by columnist and former Publisher Sherman Frederick.
Hoehn was a defendant in one of Righthaven’s 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010.
27191108
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Tootech writes:
Ever wonder what it's like to work for the IT department of the CIA? Be prepared to go through a lot of scrutiny if you want to work in the Central Intelligence Agency's IT department, says chief information officer Al Tarasiuk.
And it doesn't stop after you get your top secret clearance. "Once you're in, there are frequent reinvestigations, but it's just part of process here," says Tarasiuk, who also gets polygraphed regularly, though he won't be more specific.
For those senior IT managers who are the "privileged users," meaning system administrators, "there is certainly more scrutiny on you," Tarasiuk says. "It's interesting: there's so much scrutiny that a normal person might not want to put up with that. But it's part of the mission."
18040928
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Tootech writes:
A Colorado sheriff's online database mistakenly revealed the identities of confidential drug informants and listed phone numbers, addresses and Social Security numbers of suspects, victims and others interviewed during criminal investigations, authorities said.
The breach potentially affects some 200,000 people, and Mesa County sheriff's deputies have been sifting through the database to determine who, if anyone, is in jeopardy.
"That in itself is probably the biggest concern we have, because we're talking about people's personal safety," Sheriff Stan Hilkey said.
The FBI and Google Inc. are trying to determine who accessed the database, the sheriff said. Their concern: That someone may have copied it and could post it, WikiLeaks-style, on the Internet.
"The truth is, once it's been out there and on the Internet and copied, you're never going to regain total control," Hilkey said.
Thousands of pages of confidential information were vulnerable from April until Nov. 24, when someone notified authorities after finding their name on the Internet. Officials said the database was accessed from within the United States, as well as outside the country, before it was removed from the server.
16534616
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Tootech writes:
From The Oops they did it again Dept: A GANG of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the FIFTEENTH time in France.
The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the "pneumatic tube" that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room.
They then sucked rolls of cash totalling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock.
Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years.
A spokesman added: "They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.
16347740
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Tootech writes:
mobile-marketing company claimed Friday it would go out of business unless a federal judge orders T-Mobile to stop blocking its text-messaging service, the first case testing whether wireless providers can block text messages they don’t like.
EZ Texting claims T-Mobile blocked the company from sending text messages for all of its clients after learning that legalmarijuanadispensary.com, an EZ Texting client, was using its service to send texts about legal medical marijuana dispensaries in California. “T-Mobile subjectively did not approve of one of the thousands of lawful businesses and non-profits served by EZ Texting,” according to New York federal lawsuit.
The suit against T-Mobile, which controls about 15 percent of the U.S. mobile market, comes as the company just announced it was raising its texting prices, which some claim is an abuse of its market share. And the case comes amid a fierce debate surrounding net neutrality, with net giant Google claiming that wireless carriers should not be bound by the same rules as wireline carriers.
Even the New York-based texting service acknowledges that the case raises novel issues. “At the very least, EZ Texting has raised serious questions about the legal ability of a wireless service provider, T-Mobile, to block its customers from exchanging text messages with EZ Texting’s customers,” according to the suit.
A similar text-messaging flap occurred in 2007, but ended without litigation, when Verizon reversed itself and allowed an abortion-rights group to send text messages to its supporters.
T-Mobile, of Bellevue, Washington, said in a statement: “We believe the claims in the lawsuit are meritless.”
16080584
submission
Tootech writes:
A massive cache of previously unpublished classified U.S. military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed.
The documents constitute the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents.
The documents are expected to be published in several weeks.
Overton, who discussed the project with Newsweek, didn’t say how many documents were involved or disclose their origin, but they may be among the leaks that an imprisoned Army intelligence analyst claimed to have sent to WikiLeaks earlier this year.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been charged with improperly downloading and leaking classified information, disclosed to a former hacker in May that he had given WikiLeaks a database covering 500,000 events in the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. Manning said the database included reports, dates, and latitude and longitude of events, as well as casualty figures.
A leak of this sort would vastly dwarf the cache of about 75,000 documents that WikiLeaks published in July from the Afghanistan War.
16035662
submission
Tootech writes:
The federal agency in charge of protecting other agencies from computer intruders was found riddled with hundreds of high-risk security holes on its own systems, according to the results of an audit released Wednesday.
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, monitors the Einstein intrusion-detection sensors on nonmilitary government networks, and helps other civil agencies respond to hack attacks. It also issues alerts on the latest software security holes, so that everyone from the White House to the FAA can react quickly to install workarounds and patches.
But in a case of “physician, heal thyself,” the agency — which forms the operational arm of DHS’s National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD — failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes
“The majority of the high-risk vulnerabilities involved application and operating system and security software patches that had not been deployed on computer systems located in Virginia,” reads the report from assistant inspector general Frank Deffer.
16007186
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Tootech writes:
Julian Assange has requested a new lawyer to represent him during a rape investigation in Sweden because his previous brief, Leif Silbersky, was not engaged enough with the case.
Assange wants Bjorn Hurtig to represent him as authorities continue to investigate the allegations, according to AP.
Various alleged Wikileaks insiders are busy giving anonymous briefings to the press in support of, or opposition to, Assange's continued role as spokesman for the organisation.
Assange told Sweden's TV4 that he had never blamed the CIA for the "smears".
He said: "I don't describe other people's private lives. I don't describe my own private life, because it's private. That is the correct discretion for all people to have and is certainly the correct discretion for a man to have. However I've never done anything unconsensual in my private life...in Sweden or anywhere else."
15536666
submission
Tootech writes:
Google could be ready to turn Gmail into a communications hub by adding the ability to make phone calls from the Google Chat interface.
CNET has learned that Google is testing a Web-based service within Gmail that will allow users to place phone calls from their in-boxes. It's launched from the Google Chat window on the lower left-hand side of a Gmail page and allows users to place and receive calls from within their contacts through a user interface that strongly resembles the one used in Google Voice.
Google has been edging in this direction for some time. Google Talk was released years ago as a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) desktop client, and it has also spent a lot of time and money evangelizing Google Voice, a service that transcribes voice mails and allows users to have one phone number that rings multiple phones
15492046
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Tootech writes:
An Iranian journalist imprisoned in that country without trial since June 2009 is suing telecommunications concern Nokia Siemens for allegedly providing the surveillance equipment that led to his capture.
Isa Saharkhiz went into hiding following Iran's 2009 presidential elections, after publishing an article branding the Grand Ayatollah as a hypocrite who was primarily responsible for vote tallies widely regarded as being fraudulent. According to a complaint filed in federal court in Virginia, officials with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iran tracked him down with the help of cellphone-monitoring devices and other eavesdropping gear provided by Nokia Siemens.
“Defendants knowingly and willingly delivered very capable and sophisticated equipment for unlawful intercepting, monitoring, and filtering of electronic communications ('Intelligence Solutions') to Iranian officials,” the complaint alleged. “In effect, defendants are directly involved in the unlawful censoring and monitoring of journalists, activists, and citizens in Iran by supplying the government of Iran with the technology needed to perform interceptions, monitoring, controls, content filtering, deep packing filtering and network scanning.”
15400680
submission
Tootech writes:
From the were not going to take it anymore Dept: Computer game companies use increasingly complicated software to protect against piracy. But these efforts can frustrate gamers, who protest that the protections restrict legitimate game play.
Last week, Ubisoft, a company accused of using a draconian and convoluted protection scheme, backed down by announcing that its new game RUSE would use a less restrictive scheme.
The change highlights the tension between gamers and game companies regarding copy protection schemes. And it shows how companies struggle to balance fears over copyright infringement and the demands of their customers.
Legitimate copies of games, like other pieces of software, usually come with a unique code that unlocks it. But game companies are concerned about rampant sharing of pirated games online and the speed with which hackers can break ordinary "digital rights management" (DRM) schemes.
Earlier this year, Ubisoft launched a game called Assassin's Creed 2 with a controversial new "always-on" DRM scheme. The game required a player to be online so that it could check in with the company's servers to verify that the gamer had a genuine copy. Some players grumbled about the scheme before it even launched, and worried that the game would be unplayable if the company's servers went down, or if players didn't have a network connection. There was more trouble once the game went live--Ubisoft's servers couldn't handle the load of players, which meant that many people who had bought the game couldn't play it.
15332282
submission
Tootech writes:
Coming soon to an IPhone commercial soon will be apple saying "want to secretly record coversation without people knowing and have it stand up in court, well there's an app for that" Well according to a lawsuit filed against someone, A decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.
Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,” (.pdf) the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.
Friday’s decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which involves a civil lawsuit over a secret audio recording produced from the 99-cent Recorder app, mirrors decisions in at least three other federal appeals courts.
The lawsuit concerns a family dispute over the making of a dying mother’s will. Days before the Connecticut woman died, her son secretly recorded a kitchen conversation between the son, mother, stepfather and others over how to handle her estate after her death.
15029080
submission
Tootech writes:
So you wonder what happens when an ISP recieves a a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI well have a read of the ISP owners fight to not have to turn over everything and the sink to the FBI. The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still can’t reveal what information the FBI sought. Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it.
