Previous entertainment industry-led attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay torrent search engine haven't been successful, but the Swedish police are still trying to help out. Consequently, next week, the site will be blocked to anyone from inside the country who tries to visit it -- because it's being added to a list of child-pornography sites that Swedish ISPs block. A Pirate Bay admin writes on his blog that the police say that "if the content is still there next week", they'll add the site to the list -- but they won't specify what the offending content is (never mind the the site doesn't actually host and content on its own). It's highly unlikely it's actual child porn, though of course the entertainment industry has no problem equating file-sharing to child porn. But since the Pirate Bay is nothing more than a search engine, can Google expect to be blocked in Sweden soon? Yahoo? MSN? After all, chances are those sites link to at least one piece of copyrighted content.

Filed under: Cellphones

Well, that didn't take long -- the hacker crew of IRC channel #iPhone has managed to enable shell access to the iPhone just a week after its release. There's not a lot to the hack -- the iPhone's 30-pin dock connector features the same pinouts as the iPod, so creating a serial connection simply involved connecting up a resistor, ground, and RS-232 level converter and running a few commands from iphoneinterface. The resulting shell is pretty basic, but features a TFTP client -- meaning that we should see a flood of attempts to open the iPhone up in the coming weeks (as if we wouldn't anyway).

Read - hackint0sh announcement
Read - iPhone shell command list

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

A few years back, we had the story of one spyware/adware vendor whose surreptitiously installed adware would also remove competing firms' adware, leading to a bit of an argument between two such firms. However, as the really scammy action has moved on to botnets and organized crime groups (rather than venture funded adware firms), it's perhaps no surprise to see the same thing happening in the botnet world. Apparently, one trojan botnet system also has code that disables competing trojans on compromised computers. While it's nice that they're getting rid of one nasty piece of malware, it appears that the criminals behind the removed botnet software are none too pleased -- and have been attacking their rivals back, starting with a denial of service attack on the machine where the other scammers host some files. While you often hear about rival gangs elsewhere, it's not often you hear of such rivalries within cybercrime. Perhaps that actually means that there just aren't enough new suckers out there, and the scammers finally have to start fighting over the gullible set that's already been identified.

One of the major beneficiaries of the increased interest in alternative energy has been ethanol, which has seen a surge in investment activity, despite questions about how efficient or "green" it actually is. Historically, one of the more bona fide alternative forms of energy has been solar power, although it has always been hampered by issues of cost effectiveness. But it appears that the technology may finally be getting its day in the sun, so to speak. The solar power sector has been well represented during the recent IPO boom, particularly firms from China, which have raised $1.1 billion collectively from public investors. Of course, by virtue of their being from China, these companies are taking advantage of two separate simultaneous booms.

Over the years, there have been tons of articles about Wikipedia -- some more ridiculous than others. The haters of Wikipedia are pretty common, though, as you read what they have to say it often becomes clear that they don't actually understand Wikipedia and believe it's something it's not. However, the NY Times Magazine this past weekend has a more interesting -- and, frankly, "neutral" -- article on Wikipedia that looks more at the people who keep Wikipedia going as well as Wikipedia's impact on news coverage. It notes that Wikipedia is often much better than offshoot Wikinews when it comes to keeping up with breaking news. However, what's most interesting is hearing the various quotes from the various volunteers who keep Wikipedia going. Despite what you may have read from various Wikipedia critics, the folks who devote so much time to Wikipedia take it, and its principles of neutrality, incredibly seriously. While there may be nothing really new in the article, it's one of the first that I've seen that gives a more reasonable picture of how Wikipedia's biggest supporters view the site -- and it works quite well as a response to people who insist that Wikipedia couldn't possibly be trustworthy (or that it somehow is an affront to "experts" -- when that's not the case at all).

A few weeks back, the media pranksters, The Yes Men, pulled off their latest prank. They got on stage at a gas and oil conference, pretending to be an ExxonMobil exec and a member of the U.S. National Petroleum Council and proceeded to pitch a new product called Exxon Vivoleum, which would be made from the remains of people who died due to global climate change. The two men were soon escorted off-stage and out of the building. No matter what your opinion is on the topic of energy companies or climate change, it was a pretty amusing prank. It got it's week or so of play in the news and on some talk shows and had started to fade away. However, now it's popping back up because someone (and no one seems to know who) has convinced the Yes Men's ISP to pull the plug on the Vivoleum parody site (via Slashdot). On top of that, the ISP is demanding that all mentions of Exxon be removed from the Yes Men's own website, or their email will be turned off. This, of course, would suggest that Exxon was behind the complaint that got the site pulled. If that's the case, then Exxon is overstepping its bounds. Parody is protected free speech (and Exxon's lawyers know this). Furthermore, simply mentioning the name of Exxon doesn't infringe on their trademark. Abusing intellectual property law to shut up critics can backfire badly. Already, this is causing the Vivoleum story to get added life after it had started to fade, and now it could open up questions about whether Exxon is abusing intellectual property law as well.

Apparently, late last week there was a well-coordinated spam attack directed at senior executives at various companies. The spam was personally addressed to CEOs, CIOs and CFOs among others, and contained an attachment to what was supposed to be an invoice, but what was actually a trojan horse program to hide on the network. The purpose, obviously, is corporate espionage, but it's interesting to see that spammers figure that the higher up they aim, the more likely they are to get a hit -- especially with the various stories about senior execs at big companies who still don't quite understand how email works. Of course, it's not clear that anyone has actually fallen for this yet -- so it's unclear if the targeting is effective (or if we'd ever know if it turned out to work). In the meantime, it is interesting to see spam scams become increasingly more sophisticated (and personalized).