Anonops #10: Stop SOPA

Its Over 9000!!! [Original Video and Audio]

LOLPRAH: OVER 9000 PENISES!

Tom Cruise Scientology Video - ( Original UNCUT )

Message to Scientology

Operation Payback - Anonymous Message About ACTA Laws, Internet Censorship and Copyright

Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Website During Live Confrontation

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http://www.thinq.co.uk/20(...)persecute-anonymous/
NATO leaders have been warned that WikiLeaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.

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From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world

(Reuters) - It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.

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Forbes: Stupid GoDaddy Deserves Boycott

More than 70,000 domains lost in less than a week with an organized protest scheduled Thursday. That’s what support for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act has cost tacky domain registrar GoDaddy so far.

“It’s an obnoxious, annoying, shallow, sleazy company founded by a man, Bob Parsons, who shares all of those attributes,” is what SF Weekly blogger Dan Mitchell says about the company is a post entitled “GoDaddy’s Wall-to-Wall Awfulness.”

In it, he details what makes GoDaddy one of the least classy companies in the whole Internet industry. As Mitchell describes the company’s sins:


. Inane and sophomoric, if often effective, marketing, meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Parsons has repeatedly referred to how edgy his company and its commercials are. If you have to call yourself edgy, you aint edgy.

. Arbitrarily yanking sites from the Internet. This fits in with GoDaddys (supposedly former) support of SOPA.

. A CEO who loves killing elephants. Really, if you enjoy shooting elephants, as former CEO (now executive chairman) Parsons (who reliably comes off as a complete jerk) did earlier this year, theres something wrong with you.


There is also the issue of the 2006 phantom IPO that was announced and later pulled, supposedly because of media criticism.

How stupid does a company have to be to take an aggressive stance on a hugely controversial issue and then abruptly reverse itself unconvincingly, to be sure when customers start noticing? If you want to look like a gaggle of idiots, thats perhaps the best way for a company to do it.

What was GoDaddy thinking?

Either the company had a valid reason to support SOPA and I can think of some or it did not. I will presume the company is less stupid and more gutless, so they had a good reason for supporting SOPA but lacked the guts to take fire when that position became known.

SOPA, depending on what side you are on, would either stop sales of counterfeit goods over the web or blow web security and privacy sky-high. While I support the noble goal stopping crime, technical troubles make SOPA unworkable. I have written elsewhere that the only way to effectively deal with piracy is to engineer a better or new Internet.

You have to wonder about the lack of corporate good sense that led GoDaddy into this mess. Did they think nobody would find out about their SOPA support or that customers wouldnt care? Surely, they didnt believe Internet enthusiast customers would actually welcome GoDaddys SOPA support?

I have never liked GoDaddy and dont even admire their success. I think we are past using busty women to sell Internet services as blatantly as GoDaddy has done. Their pricing takes advantage of, well, people dumb enough to buy Internet domains based upon a models bra size. Whod have thought GoDaddy itself would be as moronic as the company seems to believe its customers to be?

After founder Bob Parsons proudly showed off his ability and willingness to go to Zimbawe and shoot an elephant, I think the answer became pretty clear. As IT World said last March, the company went from racy ads to the truly offensive and called Parsons an idiot in the subhead.

If GoDaddy were to just go away, the world and Internet would be a better place. If I had any domains there to pull, they would already be gone.

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Op woensdag 28 december 2011 22:55 schreef summer2bird het volgende:
Door welk land is de SOPA eigenlijk bedacht?

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SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions

The Internet's most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option--possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP--but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

"There have been some serious discussions about that," says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. "It has never happened before." (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

Web firms may be outspent tenfold on lobbyists, but they enjoy one tremendous advantage over the SOPA-backing Hollywood studios and record labels: direct relationships with users.

How many Americans feel a personal connection with an amalgamation named Viacom -- compared with voters who have found places to live on Craigslist and jobs (or spouses) on Facebook and Twitter? How would, say, Sony Music Entertainment, one of the Recording Industry Association of America's board members, cheaply and easily reach out to hundreds of millions of people?

Protect IP and SOPA, of course, represent the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty.

There are early signs that the nuclear option is being contemplated. Wikimedia (as in Wikipedia) called SOPA an "Internet Blacklist Bill." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put "maximum pressure on the U.S. government" in response to SOPA.

The Tumblr microblogging site generated 87,834 calls to Congress over SOPA. Over at GoDaddyBoycott.org, a move-your-domain-name protest is scheduled to begin today over the registrar's previous--and still not repudiated--enthusiasm for SOPA. Popular image hosting site Imgur said yesterday it would join the exodus too.

Technically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult to pull off. Web companies already target advertisements based on city or ZIP code.

And it would be effective. A note popping up on the screens of people living in the mostly rural Texas district of SOPA author Lamar Smith, Hollywood's favorite Republican, asking them to call or write and voice their displeasure, would be noticed. If Tumblr could generate nearly 90,000 calls on its own, think of what companies with hundreds of millions of users could do.

If these Web companies believe what their executives say (PDF) about SOPA and Protect IP, they'll let their users know what their elected representatives are contemplating. A Senate floor debate scheduled for January 24, 2012 would be an obvious starting point.

"The reason it hasn't happened is because of the sensitivity," says Erickson, "even when it's a policy issue that benefits their users." He adds: It may happen."

Or it may not. It would change politics if it did.

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Another SOPA Casualty: Imgur To Leave GoDaddy

Yesterday, we discussed the mass exodus domain registrar GoDaddy has been dealing with due to their SOPA support, something GoDaddy backed off of, but only after the damage had been done.

While Wikipedia represents perhaps the most famous of the sites willing to leave GoDaddy’s service, another popular service, Imgur.com, is in the process of moving its domain away from GoDaddy’s index. While Imgur’s popularity is not on Wikipedia’s scale, seeing how it’s the image hosting service of choice for Reddit members, its popularity has grown exponentially over the last year.

Now, it appears as if GoDaddy’s previous SOPA support will cost them another popular domain:

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stillgray twitterde op vrijdag 23-12-2011 om 20:09:59 XKCD and Imgur are both hosted on GoDaddy. They should move to a better host in opposition of #SOPA reageer retweet

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imgur twitterde op woensdag 28-12-2011 om 11:05:25 @stillgray It's in the works. reageer retweet

As pointed out by Gameranx, and other bloggers who fear SOPAs impact, SOPA poses a direct threat to the kind of content Imgur features, which explains their desire to move. Yes, GoDaddy backtracked, but clearly, some doubt the sincerity of GoDaddys new, anti-SOPA stance.

twitter:

peeplaja twitterde op donderdag 29-12-2011 om 17:38:47 Today is the domain transfer day. Remember to move the domains away from godaddy #sopa reageer retweet

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Op donderdag 29 december 2011 18:05 schreef YazooW het volgende:

Heb ik iets gemist ofzo?

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Judge refuses to quash subpoena of Twitter account used by person linked to Occupy Boston

A Suffolk Superior Court judge today ruled against a motion by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to quash a subpoena for information from Twitter about a user involved with Occupy Boston.

On December 14, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley filed a subpoena with the social networking site, asking for account information about a user named “p0isAn0n,” who is believed to have ties to the Occupy Boston movement.

Attorney Peter Krupp, on behalf of the ACLU, filed a motion to invalidate the subpoena based on First Amendment grounds.

But after a sidebar conference between the lawyers that lasted mor ethan 30 minutes, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol Ball today ruled against the ACLU.

After the hearing, Krupp declined to talk about the specifics of the conversation between lawyers and the judge. But he said the attorneys representing the Twitter user will consider whether to appeal the decision.

“When an administrative subpoena is used to get information that’s protected by the First Amendment, that raises particularly troubling issues,” Krupp said.

Krupp declined to identify the real name of the Twitter personality, who calls himself Guido Fawkes online, and did not say whether he lives in the Boston area. He was not present at today’s hearing, Krupp said.

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'Investeer minder in blauw op straat en meer in internetrechercheurs'

Er moet minder geïnvesteerd worden in blauw op straat en juist meer in internet- en informatierechercheurs. Daarvoor pleit Martin Sitalsing, de korpschef van Twente, in een vraaggesprek dat morgen in de Volkskrant verschijnt.

Volgens Sitalsing zou het politiewerk moeten verschuiven van repressie naar intelligence. 'We moeten onze informatiepositie verbeteren zodat we ons voorspellend vermogen vergroten. Als we informatie goed gebruiken, kunnen we niet alleen meer voorkomen, maar ook meer oplossen.'

Afwijkende patronen
Zo is hij in Twente een project begonnen, samen met onder meer de KLPD en het Israëlische informatie- en beveiligingsbedrijf Athena, om een softwaresysteem te ontwikkelen dat alle openbare informatie scant op afwijkende patronen.

'Door de juiste informatie te verzamelen, kun je mensen tijdig op andere gedachten brengen en criminelen een poot dwars zetten', zegt Sitalsing. 'De politie moet zich veel meer richten op preventie.'

Sitalsing vertrekt half januari bij de politie. Hij wordt directeur van Bureau Jeugdzorg van Groningen. De komst van de nationale politie, de grootste verandering sinds 1993, gaat hij missen. Vanaf volgend jaar wordt de politie centraler aangestuurd.

Eilandjes
De 26 korpsen, die nu nog te vaak opereren als onafhankelijke eilandjes, worden samengevoegd in tien politieregio's. Waar nu nog de burgemeesters veel zeggenschap hebben over de lokale inzet van de agenten, zal straks vanuit Den Haag en de regio meer bepaald worden.

Sitalsing: 'Er is ons verzekerd dat er ruimte blijft voor de lokale inkleuring. Maar de burgemeester kan straks alleen wat zeggen als de openbare orde in het geding is. Het humane aspect van het politiewerk wordt dan een zaak van de Tweede Kamer. Nu kan de regionale politietop hier nog een standpunt over innemen.'

Hoewel Sitalsing voorstander is van de grootscheepse reorganisatie, maakt hij zich zorgen over de toenemende invloed van de politiek op het politiewerk. 'Ik vrees dat de minister zich straks voor ieder lokaal incident moet verantwoorden in de Tweede Kamer. Dat kan handelingsverlegenheid tot gevolg hebben. Het gevaar is dat het belangrijker wordt voor de politie om je aan de procedure te houden dan om het probleem op te lossen. Zodat je aan de minister kunt zeggen: sorry dat de patiënt is overleden, maar de procedure is wel goed doorlopen.'

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GoDaddy bows to boycott, now 'opposes' SOPA copyright bill

GoDaddy, the domain register targeted by online activists in response to its enthusiasm for a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills, has finally denounced the legislation in response to a boycott scheduled for today.

Warren Adelman, the company's chief executive, said today that "GoDaddy opposes SOPA," meaning the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is facing a House of Representatives committee vote next month.

A GoDaddy spokeswoman confirmed to CNET this afternoon that "we oppose PIPA, as well." That's the Senate bill known as Protect IP, which will be debated on the Senate floor January 24. (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

The idea of boycotting GoDaddy began with a protest thread on Reddit and was aided by Jimmy Wales' announcement last week that "Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy." It inspired GoDaddyBoycott.org, which urged Internet users and companies to "boycott GoDaddy until they send a letter to Congress taking back any and all support of the House and Senate versions of the Internet censorship bill, both SOPA and PIPA."

GoDaddy did itself few favors by only saying it no longer supported SOPA -- but pointedly not criticizing it -- and declining to answer questions from CNET and customers who asked for further clarification. Accusations of interfering with customers' attempts to leave, which appear to have arisen from a misunderstanding, didn't help.

Neither did gleeful attempts by competitors to lure away GoDaddy customers. At least half a dozen GoDaddy rivals responded with anti-SOPA promotions: NameCheap dubbed December 29 "move your domain" day, offering below-cost transfers with the coupon "SOPASUCKS" plus a $1 donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other registrars such as Dreamhost, HostGator, Hover.com, and Name.com have offered similar anti-SOPA promotions. NameCheap even offered step-by-step instructions titled: "How to transfer a domain from GoDaddy."

After GoDaddy began to back away from SOPA last week, customers-turned-activists demanded a full repudiation. A discussion thread on GoDaddy's support forums said: "Until GoDaddy gets a clue and changes their stance to being opposed to all SOPA-like legislation... my business and I and our network of influence will continue to boycott you."

Today's newly contrite statement from Adelman, the CEO, did just that:

. We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy's prior support for SOPA, which was reversed. GoDaddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from Hollywood's movie and recording studios and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially at offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to force search engines, Internet providers, and other companies to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty. It's opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies and Internet users, who often cite free speech concerns.

Before this public relations debacle, GoDaddy had been an enthusiastic supporter of expanding copyright law to deal with "parasite" Web sites. In testimony (PDF) before a House of Representatives hearing this spring, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones endorsed Domain Name System (DNS) blocking as a way to prevent Americans from accessing suspected piratical Web sites.

Jones said that DNS blocking is an "effective strategy for disabling access to illegal" Web sites. It can "be done by the registrar (which provides the authoritative DNS response), or, in cases where the registrar is unable or unwilling to comply, by the registry (which provides the Root zone file records -- the database -- for the entire TLD)," she said.

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Veiligheidsdiensten krijgen mogelijk meer aftapbevoegdheden

_{Door Joost Schellevis, vrijdag 30 december 2011 10:55, views: 4.039}

Het kabinet onderzoekt of de veiligheidsdiensten ruimere tapbevoegdheden voor internetverbindingen moeten krijgen. Op dit moment mogen alleen gerichte taps worden gezet, maar straks mogen wellicht virtuele vangnetten worden uitgehangen.

Minister Hans Hillen van Defensie schrijft in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer dat wordt nagedacht over ruimere tapbevoegdheden. Nu mogen veiligheidsdiensten, zoals de AIVD en MIVD, wel 'internettaps' zetten waarbij internetverkeer wordt afgeluisterd, maar die moeten gericht tegen een bepaald persoon worden ingezet. Nu onderzoekt het kabinet of het mogelijk moet worden om ook ongerichte interceptie in te zetten. Daarbij wordt een vangnet uitgehangen, waarna de veiligheidsdiensten in alle verkeer dat wordt onderschept kunnen zoeken naar relevante informatie.

Ongerichte interceptie mag op dit moment ook al voor communicatie in de ether; de veiligheidsdiensten mogen bijvoorbeeld satellietcommunicatie onderscheppen. Het idee om deze bevoegdheid naar internetverbindingen uit te breiden werd geopperd in een rapport van een commissie die toezicht op de veiligheidsdiensten houdt. Hillen informeert de Tweede Kamer 'in de loop van 2012' over de precieze plannen.

Bits of Freedom, dat de Kamerbrief van Hillen ontdekte, zet vraagtekens bij de uitgebreidere tapbevoegdheid. Die zou ervoor kunnen zorgen dat de veiligheidsdiensten onschuldige internetgebruikers in hun gedrag kunnen volgen. De afgelopen jaren heeft de overheid al meer greep op internetcommunicatie proberen te krijgen. Zo moeten internet- en e-mailproviders informatie over het internetgebruik van hun klanten bijhouden. In de Verenigde Staten tappen veiligheidsdiensten al langer ongericht internetverbindingen af.

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Privégegevens 270 Nederlanders online gezet na kraak Anonymous

De internetbeweging Anonymous heeft de privégegevens van 270 Nederlanders online gezet, waaronder PVV-Kamerlid Marcial Hernandez en een aantal journalisten, bankmedewerkers en ambtenaren. Dit meldt Security.nl.

Het gaat om creditcardgegevens, namen, adresgegevens, telefoonnummers, e-mailadressen en wachtwoorden. Hiermee is gemakkelijk creditcardfraude te plegen. De gegevens zijn tijdens een aanval op de commerciële Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst Stratfor buitgemaakt. In totaal zijn de gegevens van meer dan 860.000 personen online gezet, waaronder dus 270 Nederlanders, zo analyseerde Security.nl.

Stratfor is een bedrijf dat tegen betaling analyses over bijvoorbeeld veiligheid aanbiedt. Het bedrijf wordt regelmatig aangehaald door mediabedrijven als CNN, The New York Times, de BBC en Reuters.

Abonnement
PVV-Kamerlid Marcial Hernandez had een abonnement bij het Amerikaanse bedrijf, wat hij met zijn Tweede Kamer-mailadres registreerde. Verder zijn er ook accounts door het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, Economische Zaken en Buitenlandse Zaken geregistreerd.

Ook journalisten van het AD, Volkskrant, NRC en Het Parool zijn in de lijst terug te vinden, inclusief creditcardgegevens. Hetzelfde geldt voor de ambassades van Peru en Japan in Nederland en organisaties zoals Greenpeace, Amnesty Nederland en het Internationaal Strafhof. Stratfor bood gisteren getroffen klanten een jaar lang gratis identiteitsbescherming aan.

Vooral buitenlandse bedrijven en instellingen zoals Goldman Sachs, het Amerikaanse leger, de luchtmacht en IM Global zijn slachtoffer van de digitale kraak. Anonymous zegt dat het de creditkaartgegevens heeft gebruikt om voor een miljoen dollar aan donaties voor liefdadigheidsinstellingen op te halen.

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Memo to feds: Stop using the same passwords for personal and work accounts

Recent and future government victims of the hacker collective Anonymous may want to stop using agency passwords on nonwork websites, say officials with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which learned that lesson the hard way.

During the weekend, hacker activists purportedly from Anonymous leaked the apparent passwords and some credit card data of federal subscribers to intelligence publisher Stratfor, according to the attackers' online messages. It is unclear whether the clients, whose government email addresses also were revealed, were using any of the passwords for federal government systems. But in Arizona, Anonymous allegedly unlocked state government systems by stealing and reusing the passwords officers used to access their personal email accounts and nonwork websites, said Officer Carrick Cook, spokesman for the police department.

"People were using the same password for a lot of different things," he said. "Cops are kind of silly when it comes to that and using the same password twice."

A former Anonymous member said some of the functioning passwords came from pornography websites. Jennifer Emick, who became a security consultant after abandoning the group's antics, said the police had registered on the elicit sites using their government e-mail addresses and government passwords. The attackers, who either operated the porn sites or hacked them, entered the customers' passwords into their corresponding government accounts to see if that would open department databases, she said. It worked, current Anonymous members confirmed.

The cyberbandits, who claimed to be angered by Arizona's tough immigration policies, were able to expose hundreds of personal email correspondences, phone numbers and passwords of officers.

"If you are going to sign up for a porn site, use a throw away email account not your real email," Emick said.

Cook said he didn't know all the details but one gateway for hackers was the officers' personal Web mail accounts. From the office, some police had forwarded work emails to their personal accounts that displayed their computer credentials. "Once they got into the work email system -- into the mainframe -- they could get into the server," he said.

After the attack, police were instructed to create stronger passwords that contained a certain number of characters, letters and numbers, Cook said. And they were prohibited from using any personal account passwords as government logins. Also, officers now must either contact the system administrator or enter a current password to change their codes. There are no password reset questions, such as, "What is your mother's maiden name?" Cook was unsure if the department has forbidden officers from forwarding work emails to personal Web mail accounts.

He acknowledged the protective measures cannot stop a person intent on penetrating department systems. "I know it's making it more difficult," Cook said, but, "It's not going to prevent another hacking issue."

During the past year, the FBI has arrested about 20 cybercrooks aligned with Anonymous, mainly in connection with attacks on sites, such as PayPal, that stopped servicing the anti-secrets publisher WikiLeaks. Most recently, on Dec. 13, bureau officials announced that they apprehended a Connecticut member for allegedly shutting down GeneSimmons.com, the official fan page of the KISS performer.

Cook said more than 15 individuals around the world have been arrested on charges related to the Arizona crime.

Stratfor's website, which has been down since the weekend, is expected to remain offline another week for review and adjustment, Stratfor officials said.

"We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained," Stratfor Chief Executive Officer George Friedman wrote on the company's Facebook page Sunday.

On Wednesday night, he posted an update, stating, "our investigation and coordination with law enforcement is ongoing." National Journal reported on Tuesday that the FBI is aware of the breach. Nextgov and National Journal are both owned by the Atlantic Media Co.

The FBI declined to comment.

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Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.

They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.

The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.

Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson.

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” he said.

The same thinking applies to Twitter and other social networks — and the reasoning became clear last week, when a Massachusetts district attorney subpoenaed Twitter for information about the account @OccupyBoston and other accounts connected to the Boston movement. (To its credit, Twitter has a policy of giving users the opportunity to contest such orders when possible.)

“Those networks will be perfectly fine — until they are not. And it will be a one-day-to-the-next thing,” said Sam Boyer, an activist turned web developer, turned activist again, who works with the New York City occupation’s tech team.

A move away from mainstream social networks is already happening on several levels within the Occupy movements — from the local networks already set up for each occupation to an in-progress, overarching, international network project called Global Square, that Knutson is helping to build. Those networks are likely to be key to Occupy’s future, since nearly all of the largest encampments in the United States have been evicted — taking with them the physical spaces where activists communicated via the radically democratic General Assemblies.

The idea of an open alternative to corporate-owned social networking sites isn’t novel — efforts to build less centralized, open source alternatives to Facebook and Twitter have been in the works for years, with the best known examples being Diaspora and Identica.

But those developments aren’t specifically focused on protest movements. And the Occupy movement’s surprising rise in the U.S. has added new impetus to the desire for open source versions of the software that is playing an increasingly important role in mobilizing and connecting social movements, as well as broadcasting their efforts to the world.

One challenge that all of the new efforts face is a very difficult one for non-centralized services: ensuring that members are trustworthy. That’s critical for activists who risk injury and arrest in all countries and even death in some. To build trust, local and international networks will use a friend-of-a-friend model in Knutson and Boyer’s projects. People can’t become full members on their own as they can with social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

“You have to know someone in real life who sponsors you,” said Knutson.

To Boyer, it’s more important to identify someone as trustworthy than to ensure that their online name matches a passport or birth certificate.

“I respect pseudonyms as long as they treat them as pseudonyms and not as masks,” said Boyer. In other words, someone shouldn’t hide behind a fake name to get away with bad behavior — in an extreme case, infiltrating the movement to spy on or sabotage it.

Thirty-six-year-old Knutson, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, started the year as an observer of politics before evolving into a committed OWS activist. His metamorphosis started during public-employee strikes in February against proposed policies of Governor Scott Walker that would affect their benefits and collective-bargaining rights.

“Before this year we had the idea that things maybe were starting to improve a little,” he said. “But when things started happening in February we were like, ‘No, no. Things are getting worse.’”

While organizing a “Walkerville” protest camp in June, Knutson met, over Twitter, members of Spanish protest movement 15M. They had just built a web site, Take the Square, to track occupations around the world, from Tunisia to Madrid. He also met Alexa O’Brien – founder of campaign-finance-reform organization US Day of Rage and a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street. After OWS kicked off, Knutson came to the East Coast for a while, visiting New York, Boston and Philadelphia and joining with other techies in those cities.

Through all those connections, Knutson has focused on building the technology for an international occupations network. But the politics are tricky. “Some of the people in Spain are kind of resentful of OWS, because they got all of the credit,” he said, noting that the Spanish occupations started first and are still far bigger.

As a counterpart to Knutson, Sam Boyer focuses on the US occupations, building tech for a collection of interlinked social networks across the country with the working title Federated General Assembly, or FGA. Working on Occupy has brought him full-circle.

When he was an undergrad in 2005, Boyer, who is now 27, took a job at the Student Trade Justice Campaign, an organization focused on trade policy reform. In 2007, he wanted to build an online platform for individual chapters to organize into groups and to link those groups for national discussions – essentially what the FGA is meant to do. But Boyer couldn’t build it, he said. “I didn’t even know how to program at the point that I started with it.”

So Boyer started learning, and falling in love with, Web programming; and he switched from being mainly an activist to mainly an engineer. His specialty is an open-source content-management system for web sites called Drupal, which FGA will run on.

Knutson, Boyer and the other Occupy geeks don’t have to build everything from scratch. “These are standards that have been around for a while, and we are not reinventing the wheel,” said Boyer.

For instance, the projects will rely on set of technologies known as Open ID and OAuth that let a user sign into a new website using their logins and passwords from social networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Those technologies let you sign up for a new service by logging into a Twitter or Google account, which vouch for you to the new site without giving over your password or forcing you to get yet another username and password to keep track of.

In the new OWS tech, an activist’s local-occupation network can vouch for a user to another network, and the local networks all trust each other, they all trust that activist. Someone can sign into one network and post and comment on them all.

Some sensitive posts, say about civil disobedience, would be private. Others, like a statement of demands or press release, would be public, but only trusted members of the network could create them.

FGA wants to differentiate itself from the the me-me-me narcissism of Facebook. It has a strong focus on groups — working together on topics like alternative banking or electoral reform.

And there’s a lot of work today. Currently, the group aspects of Occupy web sites are a cacophony.

“You get there, and the first thing you look at is this useless activity feed,” said Boyer. Every comment – whether a brilliant idea, a troll comment or a me-too pile-on – pops into the list as it’s generated. “You’re only guaranteed that one person really thought that post was a good idea – not the whole group,” he said.

In the FGA system, each group has a discussion on what information to push to their home page, such as a description of an event, a blog post or minutes from a meeting. “In the same way that, when you look at Reddit, you know that the articles on top are the most upvoted, the user could know that posts appearing on a front page represent the concerted agreement of the group,” said Boyer.

The activist coders also want to be able to push and pull info to and from the rest of the movement. The idea is that they can have disparate systems that label info with shared tags that will, some day, make it possible to enter a search on any one site and pull precise results from around the world.

Ed Knutson’s job is to get those sites talking to each other, even though the content may be in different languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) and created with different content management systems, or CMSs, such as Drupal or Wordpress. The Global Square network will connect not through those systems but through “semantic Web” standards designed to link up disparate technologies.

One key standard has the wordy name Resource Description Framework, or RDF, a universal labeling system.

If an occupier wants to post the minutes of a meeting, for example, they might type them in the appropriate text box in the content management software running the site. That software pushes the information to an RDF database and tags it with some universal label – it could be called “minutes” or any other term that all the occupations agree on. The local occupier might also select “Group: Alternative Banking” from a dropdown list, and that label would be added as well. Using the same labels allows all the sites to trade information. So a search for minutes from an Alternative Banking group would pull up records from any occupation with that kind of group.

With RDF, sites can work together even if they run on different content management software, such as Drupal (as in the FGA) or Wordpress (as in the Spanish M15 group).

“The handoff point is that everything goes through RDF,” said Knutson. “You don’t care if they have a Drupal site or some kind of Frankenstein combination of different stuff.”

The problem the coders face will be the same one that’s faced the web for years – getting people to agree on standards and to then adopt them. One long-running attempt to do this quickly is called Microformats – a way of including markup data in HTML that’s invisible to an human visitor, but which can be understood by their browser or by a search engine. Examples include marking up contact information so that a reader can simply click contact information to add it to their address book and annotating a recipe so that search engines can let you search for recipes that include ’spinach’.

These linkage and collaboration capabilities would be useful well beyond the Occupy movement.

“I think any type of small or medium-sized group or a team that has one person in eight different cities,” could use it for collaboration, says Knutson. And he sees no reason against spinning off the tech to businesses.

“Every small and medium business owner is a member of the 99%,” said Knutson. “Furthermore, exploring relationships with businesses… is pretty important to having a tangible impact.”

“A lot of what we are tying to do is build a better conversation so that this cacophonous discussion can be more coordinated,” said Boyer. As an analogy, he recounted an OWS workshop from a conference on December 18 in New York City when the moderator asked everyone to shout out their best idea for the movement.

They were probably all good ideas, said Boyer. But he couldn’t hear any one of them through the noise of the others.

The Web of trust among networks, RDF labels that link data across occupations, working-group consensus on what to post – all are designed to help the right people connect to each other and to the right information. “Let the sheer number of people who are interested get out the way of the many things actually happening,” said Boyer.

But for now, all those ideas are just that – ideas. And whatever does emerge will come piecemeal.

Sam Boyer hopes to launch in the following weeks what he calls a stepping stone — a roster of occupations around the world called, for now, simply directory.occupy.net. M15’s Take the Square site has provided something like that since May, as have other sites. But directory.occupy.net will be unique in using RDF and other technologies to label all the entries. It will also allow people from each occupation to “own” and update their entries.

“The directory should be useful, but it’s not our big debut,” said Boyer. He’s hoping that will be sometime in the spring, when a rough version of the FGA social network launches.

The Global Square Knutson is helping to build is finalizing its tech and will launch, probably in January, with basic linkages for various Occupy sites to trade messages, re-publish articles and allow cross-commenting on them.

“I’d say it would be a pretty major accomplishment to get a couple of the [web site] systems that everyone is using, like ELGG and Drupal and media wiki and maybe Wordpress” to work together, he said.

But even just having the discussion has been a big deal. “It’s hard to get people to even think about that kind of stuff.”

#Anonymous: Message of Solidarity

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

antisec teaser 12/29 (legit)

> Can I haz candy?
> :3

Greetings Global Pirates! Having fun riding the waves of the Global Financial Meltdown? We sure are.

Did Bradley Manning get his fancy LulzXmas dinner yet?

hm... guess not.

Still trying to lock him up for life?
Still think we're just joking around?
That's OK. The time for talk is over.

So now let's talk... about cocks:
It's time to dump the full 75,000 names, addresses, CCs and md5 hashed passwords to every customer that has ever paid Stratfor.
But that's not all: we're also dumping ~860,000 usernames, email addresses, and md5 hashed passwords for everyone who's ever registered on Stratfor's site.

> ...
> WTF?!?!
> Did you say 860,000 accounts????
> Did you notice 50,000 of these email addresses are .mil and .gov?
> fuck men...we're pretty much screwed up now...tinfoil hat please here..
> yeah, for the lulz \:D/
> sounds illegal...
* / me phones police
> holy shit, like frontal crash at 180mph!!!
>
> lol xD

We almost have sympathy for those poor DHS employees and australian billionaires who had their bank accounts looted by the lulz (orly? i just fapped).
But what did you expect? All our lives we have been robbed blindly and brutalized by corrupted politicians, establishmentarians and government agencies sex shops, and now it's time to take it back.

We call upon all allied battleships, all armies from darkness, to use and abuse these password lists and credit card information to wreak unholy havok upon the systems and personal email accounts of these rich and powerful oppressors. Kill, kitties, kill and burn them down... peacefully. XD XD

Is that it? 0h hell n0.

On New Years Eve, there will be "noise demonstrations" in front of jails and prisons all over the world to show solidarity with those incarcerated.
On this date, we will be launching our contributions to project mayhem
by attacking multiple law enforcement targets from coast to coast.
That's right: once again we bout to ride on the po po. Problem, officer? umad?

Candiez, pr0n and cookies for LulzXmas:

quote:

Now The Largest Game Companies In The World Have Dropped Support For A Bill The Internet Hates

Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics — some of the largest video game companies in the world — have all pulled their support for an online bill that could encourage censorship online, according to an updated list of supporters of the bill.

Those three companies all supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when it first entered Congress, according to a report from Joystiq in November.

SOPA, along with the PROTECT IP act in the Senate, give content-producing companies the right to order a take down for a website that they believe is infringing on a copyright. If you even host links to content that infringes on a copyright, you have to take it down.

If not, the copyright owner can request that the infringing site has its advertising and transaction revenue cut off. Or it can request that a domain name — like businessinsider.com — be blacklisted and rendered inaccessible.

quote:

Presidential Candidate Ron Paul Slams SOPA

A few days before the election circus in the US will start with the Iowa’s caucus, presidential candidate Ron Paul made a comment on the pending SOPA bill

“They want to take over the Internet,” he said.

“Can you imagine how much we’re going to be curtailed in the spreading of out information if we lose the Internet?”

Paul says that while SOPA is claimed to stop piracy, it’s mostly going to invade the privacy of citizens and restrict their freedom.

Ron Paul currently leads the majority of Iowa polls.

quote:

Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship

Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.

The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

The project's organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.

Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.

Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit - usually only for brief periods of time - but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.

The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.

"The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let's take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities," Mr Farr said.

quote:

SOPA Debate Highlights Congress’s Ignorance

The divide between new technology and what the government understands about it threatens the U.S., says Clay Johnson of Expert Labs.

When members of Congress earlier this month considered the Stop Online Piracy Act — better known to anyone who actually hangs out on the Internet as #SOPA — the most notable feature of the debate turned out to be the sheer ignorance of the elected officials discussing it. One after the other, members of the U.S. House of Representatives professed — nay, bragged about — approaching this weighty legislation from the vantage point of someone who is not “a nerd” or a “tech expert.”

Nerds and tech experts, and plenty of savvy Internet users who don’t consider themselves either of these things, cringed in unison. They retaliated with an Internet meme, of course, an open digital letter informing Congress that it is finally “No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.”

The episode — and the backlash it engendered — raised serious questions about how much personal expertise is required of elected officials with the power to regulate technical niches, from stem cell research to Internet commerce. But, perhaps more importantly, it raised this question: Where do members of Congress get their expertise? They don’t all arrive in town as born experts on medical cost curves and equity derivatives.

“If the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, chose to ignore Washington,” said Clay Johnson, who works on just this question as the director of engagement at Expert Labs, “then we’d be having hearings about biopharm drugs or hearings about the FDA where you’d hear members of Congress saying, ‘I’m not a biologist, but…’ or ‘I’m not a bio-scientist, but…’”

This doesn’t generally happen, though.

“If you look at just about any other industry,” he went on, “you see members of Congress very well versed in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. And that’s because there’s a lobbyist there who’s constantly telling them what it is that they want.”

The tech world, Johnson argues, doesn’t do this very well. Congress could be more educated about the Internet and technology. But he turns this problem on the people who’ve been complaining about it: if your member of Congress doesn’t know how the Internet works (or why SOPA would in fact harm its basic architecture), that means no one with a vested interest in its regulation has turned up in Washington to try and explain it to him or her. Yes, like some septuagenarians elsewhere, many 70-year-olds in Congress don’t get technology. But techies don’t get Congress very well, either.

Johnson writes about this challenge in his new book The Information Diet. The most dangerous special interest in Washington, he argues, is the electorate that’s completely disconnected from the levers of power in the capital. Activists and voters tend to write off their representatives as cloistered sell-outs who only listen to lobbyists with the largest checkbooks. But in their cynicism, they decline to engage representatives themselves — and this of course only leaves more empty scheduling time and attention bandwidth for lobbyists to fill.

“To date,” Johnson said, “I’ve never heard a congressional scheduler say, ‘Oh gosh, my congressman is so busy meeting with constituents here in Washington, D.C.’”

People who care about tech issues and Internet regulation need to become essentially special interests themselves (by which Johnson doesn’t mean caricatures of shady back-room lobbyists, but rather active constituents lobbying their cases on issues like SOPA).

The tech community’s libertarian roots have generally kept the industry far from Washington, as has the long-held belief that good technology can always innovate its way around government regulation. But that time is over. There’s just too much commerce taking place on the Internet now. The Internet has become too important to escape Washington’s intervention.

“This is the point where it’s time for the tech community to understand that they have to participate,” Johnson said. “And by participate, I mean meeting with a member of Congress, calling a member of Congress on the phone. It means wearing a suit and tie and looking like a professional, not showing up in a hoodie, and blue jeans and flip-flops in the halls of Congress. And it means running for office, too.”

It also means recognizing that automated form letters aren’t an effective means of advocacy in Washington.

All of this is terribly important, Johnson believes, because the disconnect between technology and government is becoming one of the most important problems the country faces (right up there, he says, with health care and climate change). The definition of literacy is evolving. Eventually, people who say, “I’m not a computer person” will be as disconnected from society as someone who says today, “I don’t know how to read.” And we can’t afford for those people to be elected officials and government employees charged with regulating technology.

Techies often talk about a concept called Moore’s law, a rule-of-thumb about computer chips that in essence says that technology becomes half as expensive and twice as fast, every 18 months. In applying this idea, Johnson makes his own prediction that you could walk into any government office and see two computers on every desk: one, about a decade old, that’s assigned to the government employee, and another one, much newer, that the employee brings in from home to actually do her job.

“Those two computers are an example of government being disconnected from Moore’s law, while the rest of society is connected to Moore’s law,” Johnson said. “As technology advances, you’ll see that gap between those two computers get further and further apart. And if government can’t acquire and use technology to the fullest extent, how is government going to regulate and understand technology? We’re looking at a future where we may all be in flying cars, but our government employees are driving around in Buicks.”

quote:

SOPA Avalanche: Gaming Giants Nitendo, EA Sports & Sony Electronics Drop Support for Bill

Under increasing pressure from activists and heavy internet hitters such as Google, some of the largest gaming companies in the world have joined GoDaddy in reversing their support for a bill many view as a threat to a free and uncensored internet.

As reported by Business Insider, the updated list of supporters released by the House Judiciary Committee no longer lists former supporters Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics.

This reversal comes on the heels of Reddit's successful boycott of GoDaddy, which has seen countless domains moved from the hosting site – including Wikipedia's – and which caused the company to reverse its position on SOPA.

With these gaming giants now similarly switching their support, and as more pressure builds on those who are currently supporting SOPA, the question is whether or not these moves will precipitate further corporate defections.

The bill, which gives content-producing corporations the right to order the blacklisting or take down of sites which merely link to other sites where actual copyright infringement is taking place, has been opposed by activists and internet giants alike.

That opposition is creating an uncommon scenario in which the mobilization and launching of internet activism coupled with the potential for concurrent corporate activism is sending some of the world's largest companies careening.

And not a moment too soon.

quote:

Hacktivist Group: We Hacked New York Times Servers and Sent 8 Million E-mails

_{By Connor Adams Sheets | December 28, 2011 7:44 PM EST}

A hacktivist group claimed responsibility Wednesday for an e-mail snafu at the New York Times earlier that day in which the company sent an e-mail meant for 300 people to more than 8 million.

DestructiveSecurity (aka DestructiveSec), a hacktivist group that has worked with the Anonymous collective in the past, Tweeted the following on Wednesday evening: "New York Times Hacked - We gained access 'shortly' to there [sic] email server."

The claim could not be verified, but the Times has gone back on its initial claim that the company had fallen victim to spamming, putting the Gray Lady's account of what took place at odds with that of DestructiveSec.

DestructiveSec went on to explain via Twitter that "We hacked their email server & they're the Corporate media, spreading lies & hate" in response to Anonymous-affiliated Twitter users who were concerned that the group was attempting to censor free speech, adding in a later Tweet that " we're taking down any media that is related to a Corp."

The group asserted further in another Tweet that "I had the email server which runs the newsletter, that's how I was spamming lol."

The claim of responsibility went out from the group's Twitter account several hours after the New York Times stated that an internal error caused an e-mail to go out to millions of NYT.com users asking them to renew subscriptions the vast majority of them either never had or never canceled.

After initially stating that the e-mails were sent because the Times had fallen victim to hackers or a spam attack, the paper changed its tune later in the day and stated that the e-mail was sent out in error:

"The email was sent by the NYT," Times Co. spokeswoman Eileen Murphy stated. "We regret that the error was made, but no one's security has been compromised."

If DestructiveSec is actually behind the erroneous e-mails, then it looks like the Times itself may be the party whose security really was compromised. And it looks like more may be on the way as part of #OPFireSail, a hacktivist operation aimed at corporate-backed mainstream media outlets.

And DestructiveSec Tweeted out Wednesday morning that "we're...HiJacking Twitter accounts #ExpectUs in 12 hours."

Looks like there may be much more to come from the group.

quote:

Zut Alors! French Government Deny BitTorrent Piracy Allegations

Mid-December, data from YouHaveDownloaded was used to show that several illegal downloads had taken place in the palace of French President Sarkozy. These, however, were just the tip of the iceberg. More than 250 further IP addresses belonging to the French Ministry of Culture have now been linked to illegal downloads but the government, unsurprisingly, say they are completely innocent. OK, so prove it.

Last month, Nicolas Perrier of Nikopik told TorrentFreak that he had found infringing downloads at the Élysée Palace – the official residence of President Sarkozy.

Using the tools at YouHaveDownloaded, Perrier found six illegal downloads including a cam copy of the movie Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.

But while six downloads are easily ignored, bigger things were around the corner for the French government. The country’s Ministry of Culture has quite an online presence and are allocated more than 65,000 IP addresses. Perrier and friends scanned them all and found 250 government IP addresses that were used to share the latest movies, music, video games and even adult titles during the last two months.

Instead of keeping their collective heads down, the government has now issued a press release refuting the allegations.

“The Management Information Systems Department ensures strict use of computers in its fleet,” the Ministry of Culture said in a statement quoted by Numerama.

“The configuration of the network prevents connections to peer-to-peer networks, which excludes any possibility of using such networks for illegal downloading,” the Ministry added, while offering assurances that “internal audits” are now underway.

The statements here appear somewhat conflicting. On the one hand illegal downloads are apparently impossible, but on the other the Ministry has seen fit to commission an audit. They don’t sound confident, that’s for sure.

Interestingly, thanks to YouHaveDownloaded the debate on the accuracy and usefulness of IP addresses evidence has been stimulated. Unsurprisingly, though, the French government doesn’t dismiss the usefulness of IP address evidence completely. When they’re the ones collecting it, it can be relied on. When others harvest it, the data loses its value.

“The processes used by the site youhavedownloaded.com can in no way be compared with the methodology employed by TMG,” says the Ministry. Trident Media Guard is the company that collects evidence for France’s 3-strikes ‘HADOPI’ law. In common with all similar companies, their systems are secret and not open for scrutiny.

“The findings of this process can not therefore call into question the process established by the HADOPI, particularly in regard to the reliability of the findings derived from an IP address. As a result, all of these allegations appear unfounded,” the Ministry concludes.

One of the main problems with IP address-based evidence is what happens when someone is wrongfully accused. There is no simple way of refuting the claims and it’s down to the defendant to prove their innocence.

It’s all well and good for the Ministry of Culture to say “it’s impossible to share files from our IP addresses” but will that standard of rebuttal be acceptable coming from the man in the street faced with an accusation from HADOPI? Hardly.

So, if the Ministry of Culture is completely innocent let’s see them held to their own standards. Let them show their citizens how proving a negative, that something didn’t happen, is done. They’re not going to find that easy, even with their limitless resources.

quote:

Op zondag 1 januari 2012 22:37 schreef Bakakame het volgende:

[..]

Wat is dit?

quote:

'PrivateX' hackers target more gov't websites

MANILA, Philippines - Hackers who defaced the website of Vice President Jejomar Binay and at least 5 other sites have warned that they will attack more government websites.

Posts made in the past few days on the Facebook page of the PrivateX hackers' group mentioned several other government agencies.

"Expect us," said a December 29 message, with an attached article from the Department of of Social Welfare and Development.

The hacker group's founder, in an email to abs-cbnNEWS.com, said one of their members identified as "Blackrain" will answer questions about the hacking incidents soon.

The group's latest post on Monday made fun of the Department of Health by creating a page with an ASCII art showing a large nuclear explosion.

"Anonymous #OccupyPhilippines ProjectX PrivateX Philker," the message below the image said. "We are Anonymous, We are legion, We don't forgive, We don't forget."

Other government websites mentioned by the group in the page are those belonging to the Optical Media Board, the Philippine National Radiation Institute, the Senate Electoral Tribunal, the Commission on Appointments, the Philippine Racing Commission, and sites owned by the local governments of Libon, Camiguin, and Manaoag.

Some of the websites remained defaced Monday afternoon.

OVP admits website hacked

Meanwhile, the Office of the Vice President's (OVP) website has been fixed.

Joselito Salgado, head of the OVP's media affairs division, said the website has hacked by the PrivateX group around 4 p.m. on Sunday and was down for more than 15 hours.

He said the OVP's website is being hosted by the Advanced Science and Techology Institute (ASTI), an agency under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).

"We have been informed that ASTI is looking into the incident and will put in place the needed safeguards," Salgado said.

"The OVP website provides information on the programs, projects and services of the Office of the Vice President. It also provides the public the opportunity to bring their concerns to the attention of VP Binay. Unfortunately, the hacking incident has deprived the public, particularly our Overseas Filipino Workers with a channel to communicate with the Vice President," he said.

PrivateX, in a statement, said it does not seek to taunt the OVP website's administrator "but to point out that transferring to a paid hosting doesn't mean that you are secured."

"We did not delete any file on the server but we created an index.html and redirected the index.php to index.html (Deface page)," they added.

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 januari 2012 01:27 schreef robin007bond het volgende:
Papierversnipperaar, vind je deze acties niet een beetje te veel eigenrichting?

quote:

Leuk hoor die acties, maar ik vraag me af of er ook daadwerkelijk wat mee bereikt wordt.

quote:

http://pastebay.com/148920

Hi

It's 0xOmar from group-xp, largest Wahhabi hacker group of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Arabia hackers of Anonymous hacking movement.

We have posted this message in pastebin, but it seems they have deleted the file. So I try to use this page.

We decided to relase first part of our data about Israel.

We have hacked a lot of Israeli servers and extracted a lot of information about Israeli people, their name, address, city, zipcode, Social Security Numbers (Israeli ID

numbers), mobile phone number, home phone number, credit card number (including exp year, month and CVV) and...

We daily use these cards to solve our problems, purchasing VPNs, VPSes, softwares, renting GPU clusters, renting cloud servers and much more!

We decided to give the world a new year gift, about 400,000+ Israeli people information!!!

Here is list of data I leak:

** 4000.htm, it includes 4000+ credit cards and all needed information. All is Israeli.
** 27000.htm, it includes 27000+ credit cards and all needed information. All is Israeli.
** Cards1.mdb, it includes 260272 credit cards and all needed information. It includes address, emails and passwords of 260272 Israeli people.
** Cards2.mdb, it includes 120745 credit cards and all needed information. It includes address, emails and passwords of 120745 Israeli people.
** IsraCards1.txt, it includes 184 working fresh Israeli credit cards and all needed information.
** Business.mdb, it includes 22604 Israeli business people details, including, names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, etc.
** Judaism.txt, it includes 65 Zionist people who purchased stuff from Judaism web site
** TblDonate.htm, it includes 500+ people who donated to Israeli Zionist Rabbis.

If you need to purchase something, you have to use Google Translate to convert hebrew letters to engish.

It's first part of our release, my goal is reacing 1 million non-duplicate people, which is 1/6 of Israel's population.

We have it already, including 1M Israeli social security numbers (ID numbers) and all of their details, we want to see reactions to first part, later we'll release rest!

Enjoy purchasing stuff for yourself in internet, like VPN, VPS, Software licenses, commercial emails, domains, etc.
We even purchased security scanners like Acunetix to hack more servers using these cards!

What's fun for us?
- Watching 400,000 people gathered in front of Israeli credit card companies and banks, complaining about cards and that they are stolen
- Watching Israeli banks shredding 400,000 credit cards and re-generate new cards (so costly, huh?)
- Watching people purchasing stuff for theirself using the cards and making Israeli credit cards untrustable in the world, like Nigerian credit cards
- and much more...

Enjoy our work and feel free to contact us.

Web Contact Form: http://www.alm3refh.com/v(...)84895a4b62321bb6a4ae

Our website: http://www.alm3refh.com/vb/

Saudi Arabian hacker rules!!!

Israeli Data Leak File:
http://www.multiupload.com/OM1S9YLZKV
(30 MB compressed, 210 MB uncompressed)

We are anonymous, we are legion, we do not forget, we do not forgive...
Enjoy and share it!

quote:

Anonymous imposters: hiding behind the AntiSec identity

Anyone can say they're part of Anonymous.

It's the perfect cover for hackers with motives more sinister than fun and propaganda.

Could that be why private intelligence firm Stratfor was just hacked?

The Operation AntiSec collaborators Anonymous and LulzSec dominated media coverage of online security through 2011, taking credit for hacks of Sony, AT&T, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency and News International newspapers - even though the more serious cybercriminals continued working on the money-spinners.

The Stratfor hack looks like all the others. It was announced via Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous. Samples of the pilfered data were posted online as evidence. The hackers taunted the victim about its pathetic defences. And the data vandalism was dressed up as political action.

The victim - Stratfor - is based in Austin, Texas, and provides analysis of global security matters using open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques - that is, they analyse publicly-available material. Anyone can subscribe to their newsletters, but their main business is providing secret, bespoke analysis to undisclosed corporate and government clients.

Over the Christmas weekend, AntiSec hackers posted data lifted from Stratfor's servers, including what they claimed to be the company's private client list, plus lists of passwords and credit card numbers.

The hackers told Wired that they'd penetrated Stratfor "several weeks ago" and obtained 200 gigabytes of data, including 2.7 million emails and various internal documents - the real target, according to Barrett Brown - more of which they intend to release soon.

There was also a surprise bonus: around 75,000 credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. They've already been published.

They also claim to have wiped four of Stratfor's servers as well as the backups, and to have used some of the credit card numbers to donate between $500,000 and $1 million to charity.

A data breach on that scale would be embarrassing for any organisation. It's doubly so for Stratfor. More embarrassing still is the hackers' claim that credit card details were stored in plain text rather than being encrypted - a clear breach of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

quote:

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

Up until relatively recently, it's been easy to dismiss Richard Stallman as a paranoid fanatic, someone who lost touch with reality long ago. A sort of perpetual computer hippie, the perfect personification of the archetype of the unworldly basement-dwelling computer nerd. His beard, his hair, his outfits - in our visual world, it's simply too easy to dismiss him.

His views have always been extreme. His only computer is a Lemote Yeelong netbook, because it's the only computer which uses only Free software - no firmware blobs, no proprietary BIOS; it's all Free. He also refuses to own a mobile phone, because they're too easy to track; until there's a mobile phone equivalent of the Yeelong, Stallman doesn't want one. Generally, all software should be Free. Or, as the Free Software Foundation puts it:

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 januari 2012 10:47 schreef robin007bond het volgende:

[..]

Ja ach, het eist even wat aandacht op, maar dat valt mee. DDOS wordt over het algemeen beschouwd als een simpele ingreep en krijgt buiten dit topic ook niet zo heel veel publiciteit, met uitzondering van dat Mastercard gedoe.

quote:

Eigen rechter spelen gebeurt als je het recht in eigen hand neemt. Daar is hier bijna spraken van, want het zijn gewoon strafbare feiten die gepleegd worden, onder het mom van dat iets je niet aanstaat.

quote:

‘Wij, burgers van cyberspace, eisen onze broncodes’
^{zaterdag 24 december 2011 door Folkert Jensma}
Ik probeer altijd sceptisch te blijven over ICT-denkers die claimen dat de samenleving revolutionair verandert door de digitalisering van Alles. Zeker, zo is het, maar de krant wordt nog steeds bezorgd. En zolang ik op tijd alle updates installeer, ook in m’n eigen hoofd, hou ik de veranderingen wel bij.

Maar na de oratie van Mireille Hildebrandt donderdag in Nijmegen ben ik uit mijn comfort zone. Zij schetst hoe rechtsrelaties in cyberspace structureel veranderen. Vrijwel alles wat we zien, wat we weten en wat er beslist wordt, is de uitkomst van geheime algoritmes op de computer. Daarbij raken rechtsbeginselen als privacy, discriminatieverbod en gegevensbescherming uit het zicht. De beginvraag ‘mag dat wel’ wordt ingehaald door ‘het kan, het gebeurt, dus het is wel best zo’. En àls de burger al een akkoordje moet aanvinken op zijn scherm, gebeurt ook dat automatisch. Zij heeft het over de ‘computationele wending’ in de rechtsorde. Haar conclusie: in de nieuwe techniek moet rechtsbescherming standaard worden ingebouwd. Aan meer papieren wetten is hier geen behoefte.

Vorige maand zat ik op een studiemiddag over de ‘cookiewet’, die het automatisch verzamelen van informatie over surfgedrag aan banden moet leggen. Cookies zijn kleine peilbakens die worden geplaatst door websites die je bezoekt. Ze houden bij hoeveel en welke pagina’s je bezocht (zodat je terug kunt bladeren), ze personaliseren websites en houden je ingelogd.

Reuze handig, maar ze passen ook de advertenties aan op jouw zoekgedrag. Ze vertellen door waar je was en wie je bent. Dat ‘track and trace’ is een voorbeeld. Wie vandaag online een vliegticket zoekt, wordt nog dagen automatisch getrakteerd op hotel- en huurauto opties in de plaats van bestemming. Websurfen doe je tegenwoordig wadend door een veld vol luistervinken, geplaatst door advertentienetwerken, die zien hoe vaak u ‘like’ op Facebook aanklikt en wat u zocht en kocht.

Hildebrandt, nieuw hoogleraar ‘ICT en rechtsstaat’, beschrijft de ‘cognitieve economie’, de handel in informatie die met elkaar in verband is gebracht. Alles draait nu om ‘patroonherkenning’ – het voorspellen van gedrag op basis van digitale sporen. Die informatie is veel geld waard. In cyberspace staat behalve wat je er deed inmiddels ook vrijwel vast wat je straks gaat doen. Je gedrag wordt voortdurend opgeslagen en met gelijksoortige anderen vergeleken: „Om je preferenties te achterhalen, risicovol gedrag te voorzien, prijzen aan te passen, of problemen te voorspellen. En hoe meer cyberspace de toekomst weet te voorspellen, hoe meer het die toekomst ook lijkt te maken”, zegt zij.

Dankzij deze patroonkennis wordt de vrije handelingsruimte van de burger ongemerkt kleiner. Internet, ooit de gedroomde vrije anonieme ruimte waarin je een second life kon beginnen, desnoods als hond, is nu een gouden kooi waarin de gebruiker exact die prikkels krijgt die statistisch zijn afgeleid uit zijn voorkeuren. Ieder leeft in zijn eigen dorp met zichzelf als ijkpunt, met aanbiedingen op smaak, voorgesorteerde informatie en toezicht op maat.

Het recht moet de digitale burger volgens Hillebrandt weer greep geven op de juistheid, betrouwbaarheid en relevantie van de informatie die over hem wordt verzameld. Vooral de rechten op privacy, gegevensbescherming, gelijke behandeling en op tegenspraak worden geraakt door wat zij de nieuwe ‘IT-inkijkstructuur’ noemt. De burger moet weten welke risicoprofielen over hem bestaan en moet kunnen zien hoe die worden beïnvloed.

Er zou daarom een grondrecht op de betrouwbaarheid en doorzichtigheid van cyberspace moeten komen. De burger moet zicht krijgen op de manier waarop hij wordt ‘gelezen’ op internet. „De burger, consument, gebruiker kan dan veel beter inschatten welke machinaal leesbare gedragingen zij unplugged (onbespied) wil verrichten”. Zij stelt zich programmaatjes voor waarmee de burger op ieder moment ‘onder water kan kijken’ om te zien „wie er vanuit welke locatie meekijkt, wat voor profielen de ‘content’ bepalen die we te zien krijgen en hoe data-analyse de beslissingen beïnvloedt waarmee we worden geconfronteerd”. Zodat je kunt begrijpen waarom jouw zorgtoeslag wordt geweigerd, je aanbetaling zo hoog uitvalt en waarom je al dagen alleen maar advertenties voor damespumps te zien krijgt. (‘En wie is er weer via mijn pc online wezen shoppen?’) ‘Wij, burgers van cyberspace’ moeten dus toegang tot de broncodes bedingen, zegt zij. Argumenten als bedrijfsgeheimen, nationale veiligheid of auteursrecht waar bedrijven of overheden mee zullen komen, moeten daar voor wijken. Wie hecht aan een scheiding tussen de publieke en private versie van zijn leven moet dat verdedigen.

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'Anonymous' declares 'Blitzkrieg' on neo-Nazis

“Anonymous” hackers have declared “Blitzkrieg” on neo-Nazis for the New Year, disabling a number of their websites and publishing lists of extreme-right supporters.

A Nazi-Leaks portal has appeared on the internet listing hundreds of names of people subscribed to various shops selling far-right clothing, as well as writers for the Junge Freiheit newspaper which carries contributions from far-right commentators.

The hackers say they have managed to close down 15 websites associated with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), the Frankfurter Rundschau reported on Monday. They have reportedly called their campaign "Operation Blitzkrieg".

The paper said that the German version of the neo-Nazi internet platform Altermedia was at times offline. A Twitter message addressed to those trying to get into the site wished all Nazis and in particular Altermedia a good start to the New Year.

This was greeted by a message reported by left-wing websites as coming from Altermedia calling for information about the hackers, and offering to reward useful tips with the hackers' amputated fingers. The Frankfurter Rundschau said it could not check whether the comment was really from Altermedia as the site was offline.

Long lists of names, some with addresses, purporting to be customer registers of firms such as the infamous Thor Steinar clothing firm were posted on the Nazi-Leaks portal.

People listed on the portal as having written for the Junge Freiheit newspaper included Peter Scholl-Latour, according to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He is a respected journalist and Afghanistan expert who has written for, among other publications, the Stern magazines.

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Sony and Nintendo drop SOPA support amid Anonymous threats

Sony and Nintendo have dropped support for the controversial SOPA bill, backtracking on what has been accused as a pro-censorship push by legislators amid threats of internet attack from groups like Anonymous. Both companies are now absent from the official list of supporters [pdf link] of the Stop Online Piracy Act, along with games publisher Electronic Arts, though it’s unclear how much of the decision – by Sony Computer Entertainment, at least – was swayed by Anonymous’ threats to target first the PlayStation Network and then individual executives at the firm.

Originally, threats against the PSN were made by Anonymous members as part of #OpSony, with the warning that Sonys support of the act is a signed death warrant and that yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. That was later amended to single out Sony executives, PlayStationLifestyle reports, rather than the PSN itself, with Anonymous declaring open season on the credit card details and other personal information.

Sony is yet to comment on the Anonymous issue, but its worth noting that, while SCE has withdrawn its SOPA support, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Music Nashville are all still listed as in favor of the act. Meanwhile both SCE and Nintendo are members of the Entertainment Software Association, which also remains a supporter.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Google, eBay, PayPal and others were considering an attention-grabbing blackout of their respective sites in the hope of prompting a mass uprising of public complaint about SOPA. The move would follow a similar call to arms by microblogging platform Tumblr, which motivated almost 90,000 users to contact their Representatives to discuss the act.

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New York Police Circulating Mysterious Government Guide to Criminal Tactics of “Protest Extremists”

An email contained in the latest AntiSec release indicates that law enforcement agencies in New York have been circulating an out-of-date manual that was previously criticized by the ACLU to instruct officers about issues related to Occupy protests. The brief email from December 5, 2011 was circulated to a number of law enforcement agencies affiliated with the Mid Hudson Chiefs of Police Association and contains several document attachments that describe tactics used by protesters, including basic guides on how to conduct your own “Occupy” protest. One of the documents is a police manual titled “Civil Disturbance and Criminal Tactics of Protest Extremists” that describes “illegal” tactics used by protesters and so-called “protest extremists”. The document, which was last revised in 2003, does not list its originating agency or author and is marked with a number of unusual protective markings indicating that it is not intended for public release.

The existence of the document was first discussed in a 2003 article from the Colorado Springs Independent which quoted a representative of the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force discussing the manual:

. In a written statement recently obtained by the Colorado ACLU, an agent of the Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force describes how he has used the manual to instruct local law-enforcement officers.”Beginning in 2001, I began using a training manual created by the U.S. government, which identifies civil disturbance and criminal protest tactics and instructs on how to respond to those tactics,” states the agent, Tom Fisher. The manual, he states, is “part of a program offered by the United States government on criminal protest tactics.”

. According to the statement, the training manual is “law-enforcement sensitive” and not to be released to the public.

. Fisher also states that he has been teaching the Denver Police Department about “terrorist issues,” including “criminal tactics of protest extremists.”

The manual contained in the latest AntiSec release is further confirmed to be this document by a spokesman for the Colorado Springs Police Department who quotes from the document and refers to it by name:

. A spokesman for the Colorado Springs Police Department said he’s not sure whether the department received the Oct. 15 FBI memo. “We have no record of receiving that intelligence bulletin, although that’s not to say we didn’t,” said the spokesman, Lt. Skip Arms.Springs police have not received training from Fisher, though they do use a manual titled Civil Disturbance and Criminal Tactics of Protest Extremists, Arms said.

. “It’s something that our tactical people would look at and compare to their tactics,” he said.

Arms said he doesn’t know where the department obtained the manual or who authored it. The introduction states that it is “the result of an extensive interagency collaboration to address a surge of protest activity worldwide,” but nothing in it indicates specifically that it was developed by the U.S. government, he said.

Lt. Arms quotes from the introduction which states “‘Civil Disturbance and Criminal Tactics of Protest Extremists’, was prepared in response to the increase of protest activity worldwide and the escalation of violence and property destruction that has occurred in the past several years. Information regarding the unlawful operational and tactical activities was collected and interpreted by multiple agencies. The information presented is for law enforcement and public safety officials to assist in effectively managing civil disturbances and large-scale protests”.

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Scientologist rallies followers against leader in leaked email

Debbie Cook says emphasis on fundraising under David Miscavige is betrayal of founder L Ron Hubbard's beliefs

A rare expression of internal dissent has broken out in the world of Scientology, with one of its most senior figures sending a mass email to 12,000 fellow members complaining that the self-styled church has become obsessed with fundraising and has amassed unused reserves of over $1bn (£640m).

Debbie Cook says she remains committed to the group, set up in the 1950s by the former science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard. She is critical, however, of David Miscavige, who has led the Church of Scientology since Hubbard's death, 26 years ago.

Miscavige, who has faced and vehemently denied accusations of a despotic leadership style and physical assaults on colleagues, has presided over a "new age of continuous fundraising", Cook claims.

In what appears to be a direct attempt to undermine Miscavige's leadership, Cook, who spent three decades inside the church's equivalent of a clergy, the so-called Sea Org, , urged people receiving the email to reject orders not directly backed up by Hubbard's teachings, and to encourage other members to do the same.

One recipient passed the email to New York's Village Voice, which posted it in a blog. While the email was later removed at the request of Cook – who has verified its authenticity – it has been republished elsewhere.

Under Miscavige's leadership, Scientology has expanded hugely, not least thanks to celebrity endorsements from the likes of Tom Cruise and John Travolta. However, the church has faced criticism for alleged pressure on members to donate regular and sometimes significant sums of money.

An obsession with money, said Cook, was both contrary to Hubbard's teachings and a distraction from efforts to disseminate the late writer's beliefs. These involve psychoanalysis-based self-help and counselling, and the supposed malign influence of alien spirits brought to Earth 76m years ago by a galactic emperor called Xenu.

In an email full of church jargon and Hubbard references, Cook quoted the church's founder as decreeing that the maximum sum people should pay to be a Scientologist was a lifetime membership of $75. Instead, under Miscavige, Scientology had acquired a vast and largely unused wealth, she said.

"Currently, membership monies are held as Int reserves and have grown to well in excess of a billion dollars. Only a tiny fraction has ever been spent, in violation of the policy above. Only the interest earned from the holdings have been used very sparingly to fund projects through grants."

Miscavige had also been dismantling the church's original management structures, Cook said, writing that she had spent time working at an otherwise empty headquarters building: "empty because everyone had been removed from post. When I first went up lines I was briefed extensively by David Miscavige about how bad all of them were and how they had done many things that were all very discreditable. This seemed to 'explain' the fact that the entirety of the Watchdog Committee no longer existed."

Miscavige had dismantled the "complete and brilliant organisational structure" put in place by Hubbard, she added. "There never was supposed to be a 'leader' other than LRH himself as the goal maker for our group."

Cook urged fellow members to refuse to make new donations unless church authorities could produce a Hubbard teaching to say they were required, adding: "No one will be able to produce any references because there aren't any." She went on: "The other thing you can do is to send this email to as many others as you can, even if you do it anonymously. Please keep this email among us, the Scientologists. The media have no place in this."

This is a deeply awkward moment for the Scientology organisation, which has been attempting to regain the initiative after a period that has seen the public defection of another Hollywood adherent, the Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis, as well as the allegations against Miscavige and judicial investigations in France and Australia.

In a statement sent to the Times, which followed up the Village Voice blog, the Church of Scientology dismissed the email, saying: "Ms Cook's opinions reflect a small, ignorant and unenlightened view of the world today. They are not shared by the thousands of Scientologists who are overjoyed by our 27 new churches and what they mean to the communities they serve."

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Denmark, Germany and Italy Targeted by Anonymous in Op Europe

Since the Lulzmax operation was a “complete success,” hackers working under the Anonymous name revealed their new objectives purposed to unmask the corruption that takes place in European institutions.

Schools, universities and government institutions from European countries such as Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and Italy are about to become targets of the latest operation called Op Europe.

The hacktivist collective already released a teaser to show the world that they’re serious and promise that the first results “are coming in few hours.” An FTP backup and emails from an Austrian school were already obtained and posted online for the everyone to see.

Operation Europe will take place over the course of several months, period during which the institutions that feel they may be targeted should buff up their security measures to avoid any unfortunate incidents.

Anonymous - #opeurope - Expect us!

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Something Rotten in Iowa? The “Hacktivist Threat” Timeline

As reported by The End Run yesterday, it turns out that Clarke Davidson, one of the protesters arrested for blocking the door to Ron Paul’s campaign office in Ankeny, Iowa, is the same guy responsible for uploading a video to YouTube calling on activists to “peacefully shut down” the Iowa caucuses this Tuesday, January 3.

The video, supposedly created by “Anonymous” and anonymously delivered to Davidson, is now being used in conjunction with these on-going “Occupy” protests (which have also targeted candidates like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama) as a pretext to move the vote counting for the Jan 3 primary to a secret location.

Given these facts, it behooves us to look more closely at Davidson, the origins of the “Anonymous” video that he uploaded, how it has being utilized by the media and GOP establishment, and how it may be used moving forward. We are going to do just that, right now. Let’s look at this chronologically:

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America rejects anti-piracy rules

And disagrees with censoring the web

The Copy Culture Survey has finally been released and it is bad news for politicians hoping to pick up a few reactionary votes from pushing through anti-piracy rules.

Apparently the great unwashed think that piracy is okay and socially acceptable. If you announce at a party that you have just spent the entire evening ripping your Beatles collection your friends will not shun you.

You will not have a problem asking for the hand of the miller's daughter just because you downloaded a copy of "Sherlock" the night before and her dad found out. In short, piracy is as much a part of the fabric of modern society as that nasty stain is a part of your cream sofa.

The Copy Culture survey was sponsored by The American Assembly, with support from a research award from Google.

The results are based on interviews on landline and mobiles onducted in English with 2,303 adults aged 18 or older living in the continental United States from August 1-31, 2011. For results based on the entire sample, the margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points.

According to the survey; copyright infringement among family and friends is common. The survey reveals that 46 percent of adults and 75 percent of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material. More than 70 percent of those surveyed think it is reasonable to share music files with friends and family.

Solid majorities of American internet users oppose copyright enforcement when it is perceived to intrude on personal rights and freedoms. Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16 percent.

The survey will probably be taken one way by Big Content: that the plebians don't know what's good for them and a censorship project like SOPA is what the country really needs, if the studios are still going to churn out classics like 2011's Gnomeo and Juliet.

But it seems that rather than winning votes, SOPA could cost the politicians that support it. This could do more damage than votes generated by the bribe money, er, campaign contributions, from the music and film industry can buy you.

Nearly half of pirates claim that they pirate less since the emergence of streaming services.

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/s(...)-rules#ixzz1iVdCamCC

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Peace Officers Union pushes for legislative probe into Anonymous hack

SACRAMENTO, CA - Members of a Peace Officers Union are demanding a legislative probe after Anonymous hackers accessed the information of more than 2,500 members of the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association.

On New Year's Day, hackers exposed the private home addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases, the credit card information of many CSLEA members.

On Tuesday, the Peace Officers of California, a rival subset of the CSLEA, sent a letter to lawmakers. They want a full investigation into the security breach.

"We want to know why we weren't notified if this was going on since April," said Victor Sanchez, a CSLEA member and president of the Peace Officers of California.

On Tuesday CSLEA's president Alan Barcelona did not answer phone calls made by News10.

A letter sent to members Tuesday from the CSLEA explains why its board didn't notify all members of a previous hack in November.

"It was decided no generalized publication of the hack would be made in order to prevent any anxiety on the part of the those who had not had their personal information compromised," the letter stated.

CSLEA also stated it doesn't appear that any additional breach of information has occurred.

Read the whole letter from the CSLEA below:

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Vlak voor Kerstmis nam Kammarkollegiet beslissing om de missionaire Kopimistsamfundet als een religieuze gemeenschap te registreren. Dit betekent dat Zweden het eerste land ter wereld dat kopimismen herkent als een religie.

De zendeling Kopimistamfundet hebben geprobeerd om te worden erkend door de staat door de Administratieve Services Agency voor meer dan een jaar.

- We moesten er drie verzoeken aan de Administratieve Services Agency is voorzichtig geweest met de formaliteiten, zei vandaag een gelukkige Gustav Nipe, voorzitter van de gemeenschap. Ik denk dat het zou kunnen zijn omdat het in het openbaar bestuur geïnfiltreerd een sterke copyright extremisme, met een scheve uitzicht op het kopiëren, Gustav verder.

Informatie is heilig voor de missionaris Kopimistsamfundet, en kopieer het avondmaal. Informatie heeft waarde, zowel op zichzelf en in de inhoud ervan, en deze waarde stijgt met het kopiëren. Zo, het kopiëren van de kern van alles in de gemeenschap.

- Er is een grote stap voor kopimismen dat ons geloof is erkend door de Zweedse staat. Hopelijk betekent dit dat we eindelijk kunnen beginnen met ons geloof te oefenen, zonder dreiging van represailles, zei Gerson Isaac missie manager en chief spiritueel leider van de gemeenschap.

De zendeling Kopimistsamfundet is een kerkgenootschap opgericht in de 2010e Kopimistsamfundet formaliseert een gemeenschap die vandaag de dag goed is verspreid in de gemeenschap. De kopimistiska Gemeenschap vereist geen lidmaatschap. Het is voldoende dat men een roeping om de heiligste van alle aanbidding voelt: informatie. Voor dit doel, op voorwaarde dat religieuze diensten geregeld binnen de gemeenschap kader, waarin de gelovigen te delen informatie met elkaar en ook verfijnt deze informatie.

Gekopieerd en gedistribueerd.

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File-Sharing Recognized as Official Religion in Sweden

Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have tried to get their beliefs recognized as an official religion in Sweden. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities, and the situation in Sweden is no different. While copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.

Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.

After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.

“I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones,” Isak tells TorrentFreak. “There’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

Although the formal status of the Church doesn’t mean that copyright infringement is now permitted, the Church’s founder hopes that their beliefs will be considered in future lawmaking.

During the last half year the Missionary Church of Kopimism tripled its members from 1,000 to 3,000 and it’s expected that the recent news will cause another surge in followers. Official member or not, Gerson encourages everyone with an Internet connection to keep on sharing.

“We confessional Kopimists have not only depended on each other in this struggle, but on everyone who is copying information. To everyone with an internet connection: Keep copying. Maintain hardline Kopimi,” Gerson concludes.

Prospective followers who embrace the same calling are of course welcome to join the movement, free of charge.

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Iran clamps down on internet use

Restrictions on cybercafes and plans to launch national internet prompt fears users could be cut off from world wide web

Iran is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national internet.

Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran's ministry of information and communication technology, according to a newspaper report. The move has prompted fears among its online community that Iran intends to withdraw from the global internet.

The police this week imposed tighter regulations on internet cafes. Cafe owners have been given a two-week ultimatum to adopt rules requiring them to check the identity cards of their customers before providing services.

"Internet cafes are required to write down the forename, surname, name of the father, national identification number, postcode and telephone number of each customer," said an Iranian police statement, according to the news website Tabnak.

"Besides the personal information, they must maintain other information of the customer such as the date and the time of using the internet and the IP address, and the addresses of the websites visited. They should keep these informations for each individuals for at least six months."

In recent weeks, users in Iran have complained of a significant reduction in internet speed, reported the reformist newspaper, Roozegar, which has recently resumed publication after months of closure. The newspaper said it appeared to be the result of testing the national internet.

"According to some of the people in charge of the communication industry, attempts to launch a national internet network are the cause of disruption in internet and its speed reduction in recent weeks," Roozegar reported.

Some government websites, however, cited other reasons for the drop in speed.

"If the national internet comes into effect, the internet in the country will act like an internal network and therefore visiting the websites needs permission from the people in charge. Users outside Iran also need permission to visit websites running from inside the country," Roozegar's report said.

Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, an Iranian IT expert with close knowledge of the national internet project, which he described as a corporate-style intranet, said: "Despite what others think, intranet is not primarily aimed at curbing the global internet but Iran is creating it to secure its own military, banking and sensitive data from the outside world.

"Iran has fears of an outside cyber-attack like that of the Stuxnet, and is trying to protect its sensitive data from being accessible on the world wide web."

Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to sabotage Iran's uranium enrichment project, hit the country's nuclear facilities in 2010. Iranian authorities initially played down the impact of the Stuxnet but eventually admitted the nuclear programme had been damaged by the malware.

"At the same time, Iran is working on software robots to analyse exchanging emails and chats, attempting to find more effective ways of controlling user's online activities," said the expert.

A blogger in Tehran said recent news was of significant concern to the country's online community. "I'm addicted to the internet and can't imagine a day without the global internet," said the blogger. "But Iranians have always found ways to bypass the regime's censorship, for example by using illegal satellite dishes to watch banned television channels, and I'm sure in the 21st century we should be able to find alternatives should they opt to pull out of the world wide web."

The authorities have said for some years that Iran should have a parallel network which would conform to Islamic values and provide "appropriate" services. In April, a senior official, Ali Agha-Mohammadi announced government plans to launch "halal internet".

For Iranian officials, the need for such a network became more evident after the disputed presidential elections in 2009, when many protesters used social networks.

Less than two months before the parliamentary elections,- Iran's first national election since 2009, the regime warned against any online efforts to organise a boycott of the vote and said they would be considered a crime. Iran's bloggers have been prohibited from publishing any satirical materials about the elections or encouraging others to participate in a boycott.

In June, the US was reported to be funding plans to facilitate internet access and mobile phone communications in countries with tight controls on freedom of speech, such as Iran, through a project called "shadow internet" or "internet in a suitcase". Iran responded to the move by stepping up its online censorship by upgrading its filtering system.

Iran is suspected to have sought the support of China for its online censorship campaign but Huawei, a leading Chinese telecoms company, which has been accused of supplying Iran with equipment to enable censorship, denied any wrongdoing. More than 5m websites are filtered in Iran, but many Iranians access blocked addresses with help from proxy websites or virtual private network services. An Iranian official said last year that more than 17 million Iranians have Facebook accounts, although the site remains blocked in Iran.

twitter:

Anarchymous twitterde op donderdag 05-01-2012 om 20:25:40 Theres a trust fund established for the daughter of a fallen #anonymous comrade. Please consider donating #anonFamily https://t.co/4pyvufHY reageer retweet

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Symantec Confirms Norton AV Source Code Exposed

Infosec Island was provided with a file by an unidentified hacker going by the handle YamaTough which after preliminary analysis appeared to contain source code for the 2006 version of Symantec's Norton antivirus product.

Infosec Island provided Symantec with the file for analysis, which has now been completed.

Cris Paden, Sr. Manager for Corporate Communications at Symantec emailed Infosec Island editors with the following statement concerning the exposure of source code for the company's Norton antivirus product:

"Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code has been accessed. Symantec’s own network was not breached, but rather that of a third party entity."

"We are still gathering information on the details and are not in a position to provide specifics on the third party involved."

"Presently, we have no indication that the code disclosure impacts the functionality or security of Symantec’s solutions. Furthermore, there are no indications that customer information has been impacted or exposed at this time."

"However, Symantec is working to develop remediation process to ensure long-term protection for our customers’ information. We will communicate that process once the steps have been finalized."

"Given the early stages of the investigation, we have no further details to disclose at this time but will provide updates as we confirm additional facts."

Though the code is for an older version of the Norton antivirus product, the impact of the exposure is still as of yet undetermined, and several questions remain:

. As the file provided to Infosec Island and passed on to Symantec was merely a sample of the material YamTough claimed to be in possession of, does that mean that code for more recent editions have not been compromised as well?
. What was the "third party" - presumably some entity related to the Indian government - doing in possession of the source code for the Symantec product?
. How much information would source code from 2006 provide to malware authors assuming that the entire product has not been reinvented from scratch since the time this code was produced?

Symantec officials have indicated they will be providing more information as they continue their investigation, and certainly more will be known if the entirety of the compromised data YamaTough claims to be in possession of is finally released to the public as has been threatened.

Stay tuned for more as this story develops into what could be one of the biggest data loss events of 2012, and just less than one week into the new year.

Previous coverage:

https://www.infosecisland(...)AV-Code-Exposed.html
https://www.infosecisland(...)rus-Source-Code.html

quote:

Twitter, Facebook, Google endorse alternate online piracy bill

^{By Gautham Nagesh - 01/05/12 03:50 PM ET}

Eight of the largest Web companies have endorsed an online piracy bill offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as an alternative to the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP.

The OPEN Act would direct online patent infringement claims against foreign websites to the International Trade Commission (ITC), which would be authorized to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties with the rogue foreign sites.

That approach drew praise from the Web firms, many of which oppose the provisions in SOPA that would require search engines and other sites to delete links to sites deemed to be "dedicated" to copyright infringement. The online community argues such a requirement would result in censorship online.

"[The OPEN Act's] approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," wrote AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga in a letter to Issa and Wyden last month.

The OPEN Act has attracted strong support from Silicon Valley, but criticism from the entertainment industry, which claims it wouldn't effectively prevent piracy. The content industries have argued the ITC moves too slowly and its rulings often favor tech companies over content providers.

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Sony hacked again by Anonymous

Sony has once again fallen victim to hacker collective Anonymous, which has this time targeted Sony Pictures. The move comes just months after Sony recovered from a devastating series of attacks that shut down much of its online network for months in 2011.

The attack is believed to be in retaliation against Sony's support for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act.

A hacker by the name of s3verver.exe claimed responsibility for the attack.

Videos showing how the attack was accomplished appeared briefly on YouTube and Facebook but have been removed.

It is understood the hacker boasted that while the hack wasn't big, the servers were vulnerable and they were able to access server admin.

The biggest coup for hackers in 2011 was the devastating attack on Sony's PlayStation Network and its Online Entertainment network, which saw the online services shut down for weeks and hackers compromise the accounts of millions of gamers.

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Anonymous Spoofs Stratfor Head George Friedman, Sends Blast Email To All Clients

Looks like the Anonymous hackers continue having fun at the expense of Stratfor's George Friedman... and its clients. In an mass email sent out earlier spoofing the account of Friedman and blasted to all the Stratfor clients, the hacked account stated that going forward all Stratfor premium content would be free, and further, would "like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds." Unfortunately, now that the email addresses of thousands of highly placed individuals are out in the open, we believe this is merely the start of comparable spoofing, which will likely end up with disturbing results. In the meantime, Stratfor's website continues to be down.

Full email below:

Anonymous Warns Dutch TV: NOS, RTL & SBS ( + Dutch Subs )

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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BlackBerry, Nokia and Apple have provided the Indian Military with backdoor access to cellular surveillance

On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said:

. As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI

Ignoring the typing error, gaining access to Indian Military’s Intelligence servers is pretty damning for the agency. The hack got covered since the hackers claimed to have acces to Norton’s source code. Earlier today I came across scans of a set of documents that are internal communications between the Indian Military. The documents claim the existence of a system known as RINOA SUR. While I did not find what SUR stands for but RINOA is RIM, NOkia and Apple. And this is where things start to get very interesting, according to the set of documents, the RINOA SUR platform was used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Let’s take a moment for that to digest. Here’s an image from the documents underlining the relevant part:

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Internet - Israel: Israel droht internationalen Hackern mit Vergeltung

Tel Aviv (dpa) - Israel hat internationalen Hackern wegen der Veröffentlichung geheimer Informationen von Kreditkarten mit einem Gegenschlag gedroht.

«Wer Israel im Cyberspace Schaden zufügt, ist nicht immun gegen Vergeltungsmaßnahmen», sagte der stellvertretende Außenminister Danny Ajalon am Samstag in Beerscheva. Ein Mitarbeiter Ajalons bezeichnete Angriffe von Hackern als Terrorismus.

Internationale Hacker hatten im Netz geheime Informationen zu tausenden israelischer Kreditkarten veröffentlicht. Nach Medienberichten wurden Namen, Adressen, Telefonnummern sowie Identitätsnummern von 26 000 Israelis preisgegeben.

Die Identität der Hacker ist bislang noch nicht gelüftet. Zuerst hieß es, die Spuren wiesen nach Saudi-Arabien. Dann erklärte eine Person mit dem Namen OxOmar, er sei Mitglied der internationalen Hackerorganisation «Anonymous».

Ein israelischer Student behauptete dann am Freitag, er wisse, wer hinter OxOmar stecke. Der Hacker stamme nicht aus Saudi-Arabien, sondern sei in den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten (VAE) geboren worden. Er lebe jetzt in Mexiko. Die israelische Nachrichtenseite «ynet.com» berichtete daraufhin, in der Redaktion habe sich ein Mann gemeldet, der behauptet habe, er sei OxOmar und seine Identität sei noch nicht gelüftet worden.

Erst im November war es in Israel zu einer schweren Computerpanne gekommen. Die Websites mehrerer Regierungs- und Sicherheitsorganisationen waren nach einem Totalabsturz stundenlang lahmgelegt. «Anonymous» hatte der israelischen Regierung vorher mit einem Angriff gedroht. Die israelischen Behörden dementierten jedoch damals Berichte über eine Hacker-Attacke und erklärten den Vorfall mit einem technischen Fehler.

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Hackers expose defence and intelligence officials in US and UK

Security breach by Anonymous 'hacktivists' reveals email addresses of 221 British military staff and 242 Nato officials

Thousands of British email addresses and encrypted passwords, including those of defence, intelligence and police officials as well as politicians and Nato advisers, have been revealed on the internet following a security breach by hackers.

Among the huge database of private information exposed by self-styled "hacktivists" are the details of 221 British military officials and 242 Nato staff. Civil servants working at the heart of the UK government – including several in the Cabinet Office as well as advisers to the Joint Intelligence Organisation that acts as the prime minister's eyes and ears on sensitive information – have also been exposed.

The exposure of the database came after hackers – who are believed to be part of the Anonymous group – gained unauthorised access over Christmas to the account information of Stratfor, a consultancy based in Texas that specialises in foreign affairs and security issues. The database had recorded in spreadsheets the user IDs – usually email addresses – and encrypted passwords of about 850,000 individuals who had subscribed to Stratfor's website.

Some 75,000 paying subscribers also had their credit card numbers and addresses exposed, including 462 British accounts.

John Bumgarner, an expert in cyber-security at US Cyber Consequences Unit, a research body in Washington, has carried out an analysis of the Stratfor breach on behalf of the Guardian. He has identified within the data posted by the hackers the details of hundreds of UK government officials, some of whom work in highly sensitive areas. Many of the email addresses listed are not routinely made public, and the passwords are all encrypted in code that can quickly and easily be cracked using off-the-shelf software.

Among the leaked email addresses are 221 Ministry of Defence officials identified by Bumgarner, including army and air force personnel. The breach echoes a much larger group of military personnel contained in the database from the US armed forces, where some 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain for the US military were posted.

In the US case, Bumgarner has found, 173 individuals deployed in Afghanistan and 170 in Iraq can be identified. Personal data from the former vice-president Dan Quayle and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, were also released.

Other UK government departments have been affected: seven officials in the Cabinet Office have had their details exposed, 45 Foreign Office officials, 14 from the Home Office , 67 Scotland Yard and other police officials, and two employees with the royal household.

There are also 23 people listed who work in the houses of parliament, including Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, Lady Nicholson and Lord Roper. Corbyn said that he had been unaware of the breach, adding that, although his email address was very public, he was disturbed by the idea that his password could be cracked and used to delete or write emails in a way that "could be very damaging".

Nicholson, speaking on a phone from Irbil in Iraq, said that she too had no idea that her personal information had been hacked. As a politician, she said, she was used to her privacy being sacrificed and she "rolled with the punches".

But she was very unhappy that private individuals had had their fundamental right to privacy violated. "To expose civil servants is monstrously unfair," she said. "Officials in sensitive areas like defence and the military could even be exposed to threats. Guarding data like this is extremely difficult, but it's not impossible, and we should do a great deal more."

The hacking into Stratfor has had a big impact because the consultancy offers expert analysis of international affairs, including security issues, and attracts subscribers from sensitive government departments. The British victims include officials with the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) responsible for assessing intelligence from all sources, including MI6 secret agents.

A former deputy head of Whitehall's strategic horizons unit is listed. The unit is part of the JIO based in the Cabinet Office and was set up four years ago to give early warning of potential serious problems that might have an impact on the country's security or environment.

Other email addresses point to employees of the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre, a UK agency responsible for training all military personnel in intelligence, security and information support. Among the civil servants listed are a political adviser in the British embassy in Azerbaijan, an adviser to the House of Commons defence committee and an official serving the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

The extent of the security risk posed by the breach is not known. Bumgarner said that officials who did not take extra precautions in securing passwords through dual authentication or other protection systems could find email and other databases they used being compromised. "Any foreign intelligence service targeting Britain could find these emails useful in identifying individuals connected to sensitive government activities," he said.

British officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were aware of the hacking, but that it did not pose a risk to national security. Passwords for their communications within Whitehall would be different from any of those used to access the Stratfor sites. Whitehall communications would also be protected by extra security walls, officials said.

However, they added that their personal communications could be at risk if individuals used the same password as they used to access Stratfor for their bank accounts and other personal communications.

Unusually, Whitehall spokesmen declined to comment at all on the record about the hacking and any impact it had on the British government. This suggests that the issue is particularly sensitive and that UK security and intelligence agencies are as yet unsure about its full significance.

Stratfor has removed its website from the internet while it investigates the security breach. The company says it is "working diligently to prevent it from ever happening again".

This is just the latest action to hit the headlines by hackers associated with Anonymous. The group, whose loose collection of members are scattered around the world and linked through internet chatrooms, has previously targeted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal in protest at the companies' refusal to accept donations for the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

Suspected members of the collective have been arrested in the UK, US and several other countries.

twitter:

AnonOpsSweden twitterde op maandag 09-01-2012 om 15:17:12 @anon_finland is not alone, you have #anonymous by your side, and we are just getting started. Expect Us! #antisec #antipiracyfi #elisagate reageer retweet

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Elisagate: Anonymous Hackers Launch Finland Cyber War

Hackers synonymous with the Anonymous collective have begun a campaign of cyber attacks against the Finnish government to protest against its decision to block access to the PirateBay website.

Elisa, one of Finland's largest internet providers, has been ordered to block access to the PirateBay website. According to the service provider's press release, it had been ordered to instigate the ban by the local district court in Helsinki. Elisa said it would attempt to overturn the decision in supreme court.

Numerous Twitter accounts linked with the Anonymous collective erupted with messages of discontent and - at times - threats of action against the Finnish government.

"Do you not find it f**king ridiculous that FINLAND of all places is going hard with censorship? bit.ly/yqdrpr," read a tweet from Sabu, one of the most prominent members of Anonymous. "We will not sit idle and allow our governments to censor us. F**k that! Next they will tell us what to eat and think. Cliche? Reality."

Later adding, "To the Finnish government: Stop censorship or deal with the consequences."

The sentiment was later mirrored on the collective's main AnonymousIRC Twitter feed, when it reiterated Sabu's sentiment tweeting, "sexually deviant #Antisec terrorist hackers readying The Flying Dutchman, set to sail to #Finland. #ExpectUs #Anonymous #TPB."

Since the call to arms, a tweet went up from Twitter user Killmwithlazers publicising a distributed denial of service attack on the ifpi.fi website. The message was subsequently re-tweeted by Sabu with a follow-up tweet following from AnonymousIRC.

"TANGO DOWN the mind behind the block of thepiratebay in finland! #finland #elisa" read the original tweet. "Let's help our fellow Finns against censorship! Target: ifpi.fi #Anonymous @Anon_Finland" AnonymousIRC soon followed up.

Anonymous' anger towards the block comes as a part of the collective's ongoing insistence in absolute online freedom. One of the few common aspects recorded between every cell of the collective, Anonymous has consistently threatened and enacted attacks on governments or organisations seeking to censor the internet.

As well as its activities in Finland, Anonymous is also actively combating the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act. Designed to combat online piracy, since being announced the SOPA bill has come under wide-spread criticism, with numerous groups voicing concerns about the new powers the act could grant U.S. law enforcement. A common concern is the suggestion that the act will allow police to arrest, fine and potentially jail individuals for seemingly minor offences, such as uploading a copyrighted video onto YouTube.

Anonymous initially issued threats of possible "retribution" against companies supporting the bill in December when it announced "OpBlackOut" - a website defacement campaign that would see it target law enforcement agencies and companies vocally supporting SOPA. The collective has since continued to issue threats to any group or company actively supporting the bill.

At the time of writing the ifpi.fi site was still down.

To report problems or to leave feedback about this article, e-mail: a.stevenson@ibtimes.co.uk

To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.co.uk

quote:

Blitzkrieg tegen Duitse neo-nazi’s

Onder de titel “Operation Blitzkrieg’ hebben Duitse hackers van Anonymous de aanval geopend op een aantal extreem-rechtse sites. Op een speciale website, nazi-leaks, hebben ze een hele reeks gegevens gepubliceerd die afkomstig zijn van gehackte sites en op de een of andere manier te maken hebben met (voornamelijk Duits) extreem-rechts. Dat kunnen de e-mails van mensen zijn die bij Thor Steinar kleren hebben gekocht die populair zijn bij neonazistische groepen, contactinformatie van het rechtse weekblad Junge Freiheit, of e-mails van de site van de Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland.

Net als bij WikiLeaks, duidelijk een bron van inspiratie, is het resultaat een enorme hoeveelheid gegevens, met rijp en groen door elkaar heen. Soms zijn naam, adres en telefoonnummer van mensen op het web gezet. Ook medestanders in de strijd tegen neo-nazi’s hebben daar kritiek op, constateert de Deutsche Welle, de Duitse BBC:

. Simone Rafael from the anti-Nazi Web forum, netz-gegen-nazis.de, said it was good “to remove the (Nazi) filth from the Net for few days.” But he criticized the move to publish personal data on the Internet without permission. “If some extreme right-winger were do to this, we’d be furious, too”.

Sommige rechtse sites hebben meteen gereageerd. Zoals het rechtse forum Altermedia. De site was de afgelopen dagen regelmatig offline, maar volgens de Frankfurter Rundschau heeft de site de jacht geopend op de hackers. Beloning voor tips: een paar afgehakte vingers.

. Wie linke Websites berichten, befindet sich auf Altermedia ein Kommentar, “daß Hinweise auf die Identität der Pseudo-Anonymus-Zecken dankend entgegen genommen werden und gerne mit Prämien wie z.B. abgeschnittenen Fingern belohnt werden”. Ob der Kommentar authentisch ist, ließ sich nicht nachprüfen, da Altermedia zum Zeitpunkt der Recherche offline war.

De actie was deze zomer al aangekondigd – zie bijvoorbeeld deze video in het Engels, waarin hard wordt uitgehaald naar neonazi”s.

. You intimidate people that go on the streets protest for their ideals, and attack your political opponents, thus you deny them the right of free speech. Yet you hypocriticaly demand this exact same right of free speech for yourself, and throw the dirt in the form of agitations and “art around you “. You attack journalists and the media in general, you attack members of the opposing parties and equally you attack refugees and immigrants, who live and work in your “home country”. This people simply had to leave their native countries because of suppression and misery. This behaviour can no longer be tolerated.

Anonymous - Operation Blitzkrieg

Al eerder heeft een Finse Anonymous groep een vergelijkbare actie uitgevoerd. Op 31 oktober werd de website gehackt van Suomen Kansallinen Vastarinta (SKV, de extreem-rechtse Beweging van Nationaal Verzet). De namen van alle sympathisanten die van de site konden worden gehaald, werden op het internet gezet. In een verklaring schreef Anonymous Finland:

. We have seen a massive increase of racism among large layers of the population and national politics, as well as of violent verbal and physical actions towards foreigners. We have seen the birth of groups and political movements and apparition of political figures who support racist ideologies and foster and encourage racial hatred through flamboyant rhetoric, people and movements who – and We are absolutely sure of it – would switch from words to extreme violent action towards foreigners if they had the means to do so and a massive support at their back. As history has showed too many times, the step from words to horrible crimes is very easy and can happen any time and anywhere.

De actie had een bescheiden succes. Een paar dagen later moest een medewerker van een parlementslid van de Ware Finnen aftreden omdat haar naam op de lijst van sympathisanten stond.

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Elisagate: Anonymous Sabu in Flame War with Finnish Security Expert Mikko Hypponen

Following the Anonymous collective's declaration of war against Finnish online censorship, prominent Anon Sabu has entered into a flame war with F-Secure's Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.

The flamewar began on Twitter after Sabu directly tweeted Mikko asking him what he was doing to combat a recent court ruling blocking access to the PirateBay website in Finland. Initially reasoned, the twos' interactions took a turn for the worse after Mikko declined a request by Sabu to work with him to combat the country's online censorship.

"@mikko Message me on IRC. Perhaps we can help each other with this situation in .fi. #elisagate #f[**]kcensorship #anonymous" read Sabu's tweet. Mikko soon replied; "@anonymouSabu I'll pass thanks."

Following the comments the conversation turned hostile with Sabu tweeting back attacking Mikko's alleged disinterest in "serving the people." Specifically Sabu charged Mikko of caring more about selling his company's products than stopping online censorship.

"@Mikko has in interest in feeding his pockets, not serving the people. His connections to the government of Finland come before his people" read one of Sabu's tweets. "@TPB_Stun @mikko Same s[**]t with every other whitehat. They are cowards. And have to watch every word they say as it affects their contracts," added another.

Sabu later called for a boycott of F-Secure claiming the company supported online censorship. "Anyone using F-Secure products should boycott immediately. They are in accordance with the Finnish government to censor their web. @mikko."

Mikko subsequently challenged Sabu's accusations reporting that he and F-Secure in no way supported the Finnish block clarifying: "Despite what Mr. @anonymouSabu tries to tell people, F-Secure does NOT support online censorship. Quite the contrary."

Since tweeting his response at 4.40pm Mikko's account has gone silent, though Sabu has continued tweeting against Mikko and as a result several other Twitter users have also weighed-into the debate.

F-Secure is a Finnish online security company with 18 offices and a presence in more than 100 countries. Mikko Hyppönen has worked with F-Secure since 1991 and is currently the company's Chief Research Officer. He has a track record of assisting law enforcement across the world deal with cyber-criminality and has advised several governments on cyber-policy.

Living up to the collective's namesake, little is known about Sabu past that he is a prominent member of Anonymous. In the past, despite there being several groups claiming to have discovered his identity, there is next to no official data on Sabu. His recent flame war with Mikko is not the first he has publicly had on Twitter. Earlier in 2011 Sabu had a similarly heated exchange with the UK Guardian's Technology Editor Charles Arther after he requested the Anon explain certain details regarding data he was claiming to possess.

At the time of writing the debate between Mikko and Sabu supporters was ongoing.

AMENDMENT: This article was changed 8:04am 10/01/2012 After Guardian Technology Editor Charles Arthur contacted the International Business Times UK clarifying he had not requested an interview from Sabu.

To report problems or to leave feedback about this article, e-mail: a.stevenson@ibtimes.co.uk

quote:

HACKER GROUP ANONYMOUS TAKES DOWN OVER 40 CHILD PORN SITES

(NATIONAL) -- The group of computer hackers known as Anonymous has turned its attention from corporations long enough to attack and take down over 40 child porn websites run by pedophiles.

Included in the takedowns was one of the largest known such sites, "with account details of its 1589 users being posted online as evidence,” said Time.com and another report in artstechnica.com.

The attacks on the websites were reportedly an operation the group is calling “Operation Darknet,” a move by the hackers to eliminate child pornography on the Tor network.

Tor, which was originally developed as a way of protecting government communications by the U.S. Navy, now describes itself as “a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.”

But according to Anonymous, the privacy and anonymity it offers has been abused by child pornographers.

In its statement about the attacks and takedowns of the porn sites, Anonymous says that the group “identified [hosting service] Freedom Hosting as the host of the largest collection of child pornography on the internet…(and) by taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites, among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100GB of child pornography. We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting’s server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography.”

The group’s statement also demands of web hosting services that they “Remove all child pornography content from your servers. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target.”

Tor is based on a secure networking technology originally developed by the US Navy. It routes traffic through a collection of volunteer servers scattered across the Internet, making monitoring of what is being viewed or where communications are coming from very difficult.

Because of its anonymity, Tor is widely used by individuals and groups seeking to communicate without being surveilled by authorities, employers, or “eavesdroppers watching packets on public WiFi networks,” as well as those wishing to visit websites anonymously without having their IP address recorded.

quote:

Bewaarplicht dreigt ook voor sociale media

Sociale netwerken krijgen mogelijk een bewaarplicht, zodat opsporingsdiensten toegang kunnen krijgen tot data die in het verleden via die netwerken is uitgewisseld.

De Europese Commissie maakt op dit moment plannen om het Data Retention Directive te herzien, de Europese richtlijn voor de bewaarplicht. Providers zijn verplicht gegevens van hun klanten, zoals ip-adressen en andere metadata, voor een bepaalde tijd op te slaan. Die data is bedoeld voor opsporingsdiensten. En diezelfde opsporingsdiensten blijken nog veel meer wensen te hebben.

In het kader van de herziening van de bewaarplicht heeft de Europese Commissie de meningen gevraagd van lidstaten en opsporingsdiensten over de tot nu toe geldende richtlijnen. Dat leverde onder meer het verwijt op dat de bewaarplicht zo moeilijk is te verklaren en te rechtvaardigen door lokale politici en opsporingsdiensten. Aan de Europese Commissie is gevraagd met betere argumentatie te komen om de bewaarplicht beter te beargumenteren.

Intern stuk gelekt

Dat wil de EC wel, zo blijkt uit een intern stuk dat gelekt is en in handen is van de Oostenrijkse tegenhanger van Bits of Freedom: q/uintessenz. Daarnaast leverde de respons van de opsporingsdiensten op dat zij zich belemmerd voelen doordat zij geen wettelijke basis hebben om toegang te krijgen tot historische en metadata van sociale netwerken. De Europese Commissie lijkt in het interne document begrip te tonen voor de behoefte van de opsporingsdiensten en gaat onderzoeken of zij die wens kan faciliteren.

De opsporingsdiensten zeggen "technologische neutraliteit" te willen hebben om te weten te komen wie met wie, wanneer, waar en hoe communiceert. Die term betekent dat het niet moet uitmaken of dat via e-mail, videoconferencing (skype), telefoon, WhatsApp, Twitter, sms of Facebook gebeurt.

Ook voor illegaal downloaden

Niet alleen willen de opsporingsdiensten dat de bewaarplicht voor meer communicatievormen wordt gebruikt, ook zou het voor meer soorten van criminaliteit moeten gelden. Nu mag het grazen in de historische data alleen in geval van zwaardere criminaliteit en terrorismebestrijding. Maar er is grote druk vanuit sommige lidstaten om dat uit te breiden naar opsporing van mensen die zich bezig houden met piraterij en illegale downloads, en in de speurotcht naar cybercrime, bijvoorbeeld naar hackers.

Bits of Freedom heeft de gelekte memo onder de loep genomen en zegt dat de Europese Commissie zonder enige vraagtekens de mening van de opsporingsdiensten lijkt te volgen. "Als het aan de opsporingsdiensten ligt wordt de bewaarplicht zelfs uitgebreid. Die vragen om het bizarre concept "technological neutrality", zo blijkt uit het document. "

Politie neust in krabbels

"Dat zou betekenen dat niet alleen je telefoongesprekken, maar ook al je Facebook updates, je Gmail e-mails, je Hyves krabbels en je up- en downloads een half jaar of langer bewaard moeten worden", schrijft Rejo Zenger namens BoF. Om over de uitbreiding naar copyrightschendingen op te merken: "Function creep to the max!"

Zenger vervolgt: "De Europese Commissie kan nog altijd niet bewijzen dat de bewaarplicht écht nodig is. Laat staan dat het deze enorme inbreuk op onze privacy rechtvaardigt. Hoogste tijd dat de Commissie stopt met het grootschalig bespieden van onverdachte Europese burgers."

Het onderzoek naar de voorstellen van de opsporingsdiensten moet in mei zijn afgerond. Waarna ze in juli besproken worden door de Europese Commissie.

quote:

SOPA becoming election liability for backers

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government — and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.

Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.

Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).

It’s a stretch to think SOPA will cost any of the longtime incumbents backing the bill their seats. The legislation would give government new powers to shutter websites that peddle counterfeit products and pirated copies of movies and music.

But there are signs the issue, long the domain of think tanks and intellectual property lawyers, could become a real factor in some races.

Prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson, for one, has promised to make life miserable for any GOP lawmaker who gets behind the bill. His first target: Blackburn.

“I love Marsha Blackburn. She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress,” Erickson wrote on his widely read blog, Red State. But “I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid.”

Erickson went on to implore the left and right to “unite and pledge to defeat in primaries every person named as a sponsor” of SOPA and suggested that both sides create a fund dedicated to supporting challengers running against SOPA supporters.

“Killing SOPA is that important,” Erickson wrote.

In Ryan’s case, critics pounced after the powerful congressman issued a vague statement that they interpreted as supportive of the bill. Using the social news site Reddit, they launched an online campaign— dubbed “Operation Pull Ryan” — to unseat him.

Ryan’s Democratic opponent, Rob Zerban, seized on the uproar. After lambasting the bill during an interview on Reddit, Zerban raked in about $15,000 in campaign donations, according to campaign manager Lisa Tanner.

The uproar wasn’t lost on Ryan. On Monday, he issued a statement opposing SOPA in no uncertain terms. While the bill “attempts to address a legitimate problem,” Ryan said, it would open the door to “undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse.”

SOPA is making waves in other House races, too.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/n(...)4.html#ixzz1j5hRDo9Z

quote:

Anon threatens to bomb anti-piracy group

The anti-piracy group CIAPC (Copyright, Information and Anti-Piracy Centre) on Tuesday asked police to investigate a bomb threat it received via email signed by the hacker group Anonymous. The threat follows a recent court-ordered ban on access to The Pirate Bay torrent site by Elisa and Saunalahti internet customers.

The email detailed how a bomb attack would be made on CIAPC’s office this week.

Antti Kotilainen, who heads up the association, said he takes the threat seriously.

CIAPC and the Finnish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, IFPI Finland, have also asked police to investigate denial-of-service attacks on their websites.

On Monday, Helsinki District Court ordered internet service providers Elisa and Saunalahti to block access to The Pirate Bay, where users exchange computer files, including copyrighted films and music.

The music industry is now seeking similar Pirate Bay blocks for Sonera and DNA internet customers.

"If IFPI gets to block access for TeliaSonera & DNA, We'll tear it down. We'll make it crumble," tweeted AnonFinland, Finnish activists of the group Anonymous early Wednesday.

quote:

Hackers 'Anonymous' nemen Brein op de korrel: 'Te wapen!'

De internetgroep Anonymous roept op om de auteursrechtenorganisatie Brein massaal te gaan faxen, of anders van binnenuit te infiltreren. 'Ze zoeken nog een sofware-ontwikkelaar'. Volgens Anonymous is Brein verwikkeld in een 'groot auteursrechtenschandaal' in Nederland.

Anonymous doelt op het feit dat Brein vindt dat internetproviders Ziggo en XS4ALL de toegang tot de downloadsite moeten blokkeren. De stichting kreeg daarin vandaag gelijk van de rechtbank in Den Haag. 'Na censuur in België en onlangs nog in Finland, kan nu de anti-piraterijlobby in Nederland domeinen en IP-adressen van The Pirate Bay blokkeren', aldus de hackers. 'Brein kan zelfs kiezen welke IP-adressen gecensureerd moeten worden. Anonymous zal niet stilzitten terwijl Brein delen van ons internet platlegt. Te wapen!'

Brein lijkt nog niet direct te hoeven vrezen voor een fax-bombardement. Want in plaats van het faxadres van de Stichting Brein in Hoofddorp, hebben de hackers per abuis het faxnummer van het bedrijf Brein BV in Haaksbergen geplaatst.

Finland
Twee Finse auteursrechtenorganisaties werden gisteren al het slachtoffer van hackers van Anonymous, nadat een rechter op hun verzoek The Pirate Bay liet blokkeren bij de providers Elisa en Saunalahti. Die hebben naar schatting gezamelijk 2,2 miljoen klanten.

In een reactie op het vonnis had Anonymous een zogenoemde distributed denial-of-service (ddos)-aanval gelanceerd, waarbij het netwerk wordt platgelegd doordat er met veel computers tegelijk informatie naartoe wordt gestuurd.

Serieus
Hoe serieus het dreigement aan Brein moet worden genomen, is echter moeilijk te zeggen. Achter anonymous schuilt namelijk geen vaste hackersgroep, maar doorgaans juist losstaande groepen van internetactivisten.

Het is overigens niet de eerste keer dat Anonymous Brein op de korrel neemt. In mei vorig jaar claimden leden van Anonymous de verantwoordelijkheid voor een ddos-aanval op de website van de stichting Brein.

quote:

Stratfor back online after cyberhack

LONDON (AP) — Global intelligence analysis firm Stratfor has relaunched its website after hackers brought down its servers and stole thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to its customers.

Chief Executive George Friedman acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the company had not encrypted customer information and said this decision had embarrassed the company.

Loose-knit hacking collective Anonymous, which claimed responsibility for the attack over the Christmas holidays, had said it was able to get the details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them.

"It was a truly unforgivable failure and I feel awful about it," Friedman told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "Sometimes in rapid growth, you make a mistake. That's not an excuse, that's not a justification ... It's an explanation."

Stratfor had previously declined to say if the information was left unencrypted. Members of Anonymous have said it was targeting companies "that play fast and loose with their customers' private and sensitive information."

The company said Wednesday that it was moving its entire e-commerce process to a third-party system, which will eliminate the need to store credit information.

Friedman also revealed that the company was targeted more than once by hackers and had known for some time about a data breach.

He said he was first alerted to a website hack in early December — weeks before Anonymous took to Twitter to boast of bringing down the website and stealing a stash of credit card numbers, emails and other data from the company.

The hackers said then that their goal was to use the stolen credit information to donate to charities at Christmas, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions were made from their credit accounts.

Austin, Texas-based Stratfor is a subscription-based publisher providing political, economic and military analysis to help customers reduce risk. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the web, emails and videos.

On Tuesday, Friedman said he had met with an FBI agent in early December after being informed by the company's vice president of intelligence that customers' credit card numbers had been stolen.

He said he had felt torn over the need to protect and personally inform customers at the time, but that the FBI was setting the rules and wanted to conduct its investigation without tipping the hackers off.

"It was very important to them that the criminals not know the extent to which we had knowledge of the damage," Friedman explained, saying the FBI had assured him that it had informed credit card companies about compromised cards.

"We were caught between a very difficult situation where the FBI had control of the investigation and expected certain care in that investigation — and the need to protect our customers," said Friedman. "What little we could do, we did."

Still, he said he was under "no illusion" that the breach would be exposed.

"We knew our reputation would be damaged by the revelation, all the more so because we had not encrypted the credit card files," Friedman said in a note to subscribers announcing the website's relaunch.

But he told the AP that subscribers have stood by the company and subscriptions have held up in light of the attack.

"Our customers are primarily focused on the criminals," he said. "Some customers have been critical, but the primary theme isn't that 'you didn't know how to lock the door,' but 'locked or not, what are these people doing coming in?'"

While dismayed over stolen emails in the previous breach, Friedman said he was "stunned" to learn that the company's servers were "effectively destroyed" in another hack on Dec. 24.

"I was absolutely unprepared for their attempt to destroy us," Friedman said, describing how hackers took full control of the servers, overrode the systems and made recovery "just about impossible."

"Our systems were shredded," he explained. "The destruction of our servers and our backups... was clearly intended to take us offline and silence us."

Stratfor said it was continuing to cooperate with an FBI investigation into the attack.

Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at: http://twitter.com/CassVinograd

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

quote:

Mohamed Bouazizi was a produce vendor in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. He was always meant to be a little person in the world, whose life and death could never matter. You were never meant to hear of him. But for no explicable reason, that changed on Dec. 17, 2010. His produce cart was seized by police, and he was beaten. Less than an hour later, he stood on the street doused in paint thinner, screamed “How do you expect me to make a living?” and let a lit match drop.

Bouazizi was at the end of his ability to endure, silently, the pain and abuse that had been the way life worked. But it turned out so was Tunisia, and the whole Middle East.

Within hours protests against the systemic corruption that had driven Bouazizi to self-immolation filled the streets of Sidi Bouzid, and over the next two weeks spread like fire over Tunisia.

It was Jan. 2, 2011. Ben Ali would leave power in 12 days, but no one knew that.

“There were two different posts in channel #operationpayback. First one about some law about to pass in Hungary, second one about a Tunisia problem. For some reason I paid attention to the Tunisian one, and it seems other people did too,” said an anon who participated in OpTunisia. It was a claim that Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was censoring Wikileaks cables related to Tunisia. Rumors emerged about Bouazizi as well, that he was a computer science student (he wasn’t), that he had immolated himself to protest police corruption (he had), and so on.

A few people formed #optunisia on IRC and started talking about what to do. The OpTunisia anon who spoke with Wired.com didn’t think either the op or the revolution had a chance.

“I saw nobody cared about those people, because it wasn’t a big country. It was like, ‘Fuck this is impossible…. Let’s fucking do it!’” the anon wrote in an online chat.

Over the next couple of weeks the small group DDoSed and defaced Tunisian government websites and passed media and news reports about the Tunisian uprising in and out of the country.

“We also distributed a care package containing stuff to workaround privacy (restrictions in Tunisia), including a Greasemonkey script to avoid proxy interception by the Tunisian government on Facebook users,” said the anon. (Greasemonkey scripts are powerful browser plug-ins).

Within that digital care package was a message to the people of Tunisia from Anonymous: “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or [sic] IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose [sic] the fight. Always stay safe, once you got [sic] arrested you cannot do anything for yourself or your people. Your government *is* watching you.”

quote:

Nederland maakt zich klaar voor totale Internet Censuur

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

SOPA protest re-ignited with Reddit blackout, Wikipedia may join

(CBS) - The popular link-sharing community Reddit plans a site black out on Jan. 18 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian has been one of the most outspoken leaders of the movement against SOPA and PIPA.

"Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action," the site admin's wrote in a blog post.

Along with the protest message, the site will stream Ohanian testifying at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Shutting down the Reddit for 12-hours will no doubt send users into withdrawals. The site has a reputation for being highly engaging and addictive. Users have lamented over spending hours a day on the site. Not that we would know.

While Reddit hasn't hit the mainstream, like Facebook or Twitter, its influence is nothing to scoff at. The site recently reported hitting over 2 billion page views and more than 34 million unique visitors at the close of 2011.

Ohanian and his Reddit army aren't the only ones fighting SOPA and PIPA. Tech heavyweights, like Google, Facebook and Twitter have banned together and put out a joint statement in opposition of SOPA.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says he's behind Reddit's efforts and would like to coordinate with them.

"I'm all in favor of it, and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit," Wales posted in a discussion today on his personal Wikipedia page. "I'd like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that's a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea."

This isn't the first time Wales has made moves against SOPA. After a Reddit thread pointed out that domain registrar GoDaddy was not only for the bill, but exempt from it, Wales announced that all Wikipedia sites would be switching registrars in protest.

Forbes is claiming that Facebook and Google must join the protest for greater impact.

"Facebook and Google going offline would undoubtedly be the biggest tech story of the day, week, month, or possibly the year," claims Forbes contributor Paul Tassi.

He's right. It would be a jaw-dropping day in tech if all of the sites we rely on went dark in solidarity against these bills.

SOPA is intended to curb the illegal download of copyrighted materials from foreign "rogue" sites, like The Pirate Bay. There is already legislation that provides some protection for copyrighted material, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires companies to remove copyrighted content "in good faith."

Worst-case scenarios are being debated. The Electronic Frontier Foundation speculates, "Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply."

quote:

Hackers willen lekken anoniem kunnen melden

Nederlandse hackers werken aan de oprichting van een eigen platform dat hun de mogelijkheid moet bieden anoniem lekken te melden aan bedrijven en overheden. Het platform, met de werktitel Hacker-leaks, is volgens hen nodig omdat hackers die te goeder trouw lekken opsporen en melden nu nog vaak vervolgd worden voor computervredebreuk.

Dat zegt Koen Martens, woordvoerder van een een groot aantal hackers in Nederland. Om beveiligingslekken te kunnen aantonen, moeten hackers vaak inbreken op computers en daarmee overtreden ze de wet. Onlangs nog deed het Utrechtse poppodium Tivoli aangifte tegen de hacker die zich meldde nadat hij een lek in de website van Tivoli had blootgelegd. 'Zolang dat zo is, moeten wij een andere manier verzinnen om anoniem te kunnen werken', aldus Martens.

Vorig jaar deed de PvdA al een voorstel om een klokkenluidersregeling in het leven te roepen voor zogenaamde white hat-hackers. Dat zijn hackers die te goeder trouw lekken aantonen.

Hoewel het erop leek dat er een Kamermeerderheid voor zo'n regeling was, is er sindsdien op dat vlak niets meer gebeurd. Volgens kenners zitten er erg veel haken en ogen aan een dergelijke regeling.

Zelf initiatief
Mede om die reden nemen de hackers nu het initiatief in eigen hand. Volgens Martens willen ze de nieuwe organisatie 'los van de overheid oprichten maar uiteindelijk wel in samenwerking met hen.'

De Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid (NCTv), Erik Akerboom, ziet wel iets in dat soort samenwerking. Akerboom, die vandaag het Nationaal Cyber Security Centrum (NCSC) opent, zegt daarover: 'We moeten hackers geen vrijbrief geven om lekker aan de slag te gaan, maar als zij op verantwoorde wijze proberen problemen aan de kaak te stellen, vind ik dat wij hen daarin moeten ondersteunen.'

Ook hoogleraar computerbeveiliging Bart Jacobs van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen denkt dat de overheid meer gebruik moet gaan maken van de kennis en kunde van hackers dan tot nu toe gebeurt.

'Hoe je het precies invult, is best lastig, maar ik denk dat het Nationaal Cyber Security Centrum een goede buffer zou kunnen vormen tussen die mensen en de overheid. Ik denk dat zij veel waardevolle informatie kunnen verschaffen.'

quote:

Politie scant sociale media op 'verdachte info'

De KLPD heeft een systeem aangeschaft om verdachte informatie van openbare bronnen te verzamelen. De regio Twente gaat er als eerste mee aan de slag.

Het systeem CY-Humint (Cyber Human Intelligence) wordt geleverd door Athena GS3 Security Implementations Ltd in Holon Industrial Zone in Israël. Athena is onderdeel van de grote leverancier van infrastructuur- en transportsystemen Mer Group, in Nederland aanwezig met Cellular Infrastructure BV. Vragen van Webwereld worden vanuit Israël per e-mail beantwoord door Omer Laviv, chief executive officer van Athena.


Openbare bronnen

Over CY-Humint zegt Laviv: "Het is bedoeld om wethandhavende instanties te voorzien van vroege waarschuwingen, die worden gebaseerd op 'deep-web' activiteiten." Het is ontwikkeld in Israëlische defensiekringen met behulp van specialisten van de geheime dienst Mossad en nu is het beschikbaar voor export. Welke landen het systeem in gebruik hebben wil Laviv niet kwijt.

De documentatie van Athena is duidelijk over de redenen van het systeem: "Gebeurtenissen als de 'Arabische Lente', de Londense rellen en de maatschappelijke onrust over de hele wereld hebben onomstotelijk aangetoond dat de cyberspace is uitgegroeid tot een favoriete plaats voor aanzetten tot en het coördineren van terrorisme en criminaliteit, maar ook in de civiele onrust."

Volgens Laviv wordt het speuren in ieder geval beperkt tot openbare bronnen, zoals blogs, microblogs, websites, forums, chatrooms en sociale netten als Facebook, Hyves en Twitter. Het systeem maakt vooral gebruik van koppeling op grond van het volgen van het gebruik van IP-nummers en het wisselen daarvan. Het is vooral krachtig vanwege analyse: "CY-Humant creëert en onderhoudt virtuele identiteiten, aangevuld met krachtige middelen voor analyse. Het systeem ondersteunt informatieanalisten online met de efficiency van het verkrijgen van informatie in de echte wereld."

Europese subsidie

Het KLPD en de Politie Twente zijn samen met diverse andere opsporingsinstanties, IT-bedrijven en onderzoeksinstellingen partner in wat nu nog een 'onderzoeksproject' heet. Ordina doet de systeemintegratie en begeleiding in Nederland. Volgens managing partner Onno Franken van Ordina moet het project officieel nog van start gaan. Er is namelijk een Europese subsidieaanvraag, maar het besluit daarover moet in de komende maanden nog vallen.

"Met een aantal Europese partijen hebben we een voorstel ingediend om dit systeem te ontwikkelen voor aan aantal politiediensten in Europa", zegt Franken. "Als je dat samen doet, dan bespaart dat onderzoekskosten en je kunt later elkaars ervaringen delen."

'Niemand hoeft bang te zijn'

Volgens hem hebben ze een 'gezamenlijke visie' opgesteld om als politie meer te gaan doen met informatie. Ze willen op grond van diepgaande analyse potentieel crimineel gedrag en de potentiële vorming van criminele organisaties eerder in beeld te krijgen. Daarmee wil de politie preventief kunnen optreden, of sneller succes boeken met opsporing na een misdaad.

"Het systeem functioneert geheel binnen de wettelijke en ethische grenzen", stelt hij op de vraag of nu iedereen op internet potentieel verdachte wordt. "Als de verkregen informatie uit openbare bronnen verder onderzoek vergt, worden de reguliere kanalen en procedures die voor elk politieonderzoek gelden gevolgd. Niemand is zomaar verdachte en niemand hoeft er bang voor te zijn."

Breder gebruikt

In het verlengde daarvan speelt de vraag of juist de kwaadwillenden voortaan het openbare internet niet gaan gebruiken in de wetenschap dat de politie daar intensief surveilleert. Maar volgens Franken tonen de ervaringen met CY-Humint elders beslist dat het effectief is in het gebruik.

Ordina is de vaste partner van Athena in de Benelux. Dat suggereert dat er al meer opdrachtgevers zijn, maar namen willen Athena en Ordina niet noemen. Wel wil Franken nog kwijt dat de Belgische politie niet deelneemt in het project.

quote:

Anonymous faction in new attack on corporate fraud

A faction within the online hacking collective Anonymous has moved into an unlikely new area – exposing corporate fraud and making money in the aftermath. A new financial research group, Anonymous Analytics, has released a report accusing Chinese firm Chaoda Modern Agriculture of “11 years of deceit and corporate fraud”. The company is one of China’s largest fruit and vegetable suppliers.

The group alleges that Chaoda’s management has funnelled more than $400 million out of the company through false accounting and payments to shell companies. Hong Kong’s government announced an investigation into the company on Monday, shortly before the release of the Anonymous report, leading its shares to fall by 26 per cent before being suspended from trading.

In a departure from illegal hacking, Anonymous Analytics claims that “all information presented in our reports is acquired through legal channels, fact-checked, and vetted thoroughly before release.” The group will however profit from Chaoda’s falling shares, stating “we have an indirect interest in these positions and stand to gain from a decline in the share price of these securities.”

The group has released the information in an encrypted insurance file and will publish the password if its members’ safety or anonymity is threatened.

quote:

Top German cop installed spyware on his daughter's computer to monitor her Internet usage, gets hacked in retaliation

Trojans—they're not just for hackers anymore. German police, for instance, love them; a scandal erupted in Parliament last year after federal investigators were found to be using custom spyware that could potentially record far more information than allowed by law. The story made headlines, but it lacked a certain sense of the bizarre.

Fortunately for connoisseurs of the weird, Der Spiegel revealed a stranger story in its magazine yesterday. According to the report, a top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter's computer to monitor her Internet usage. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing—well, at least until one of the daughter's friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad's personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany's federal police.

That was bad, but it got worse. The hackers got into the servers for the "Patras" program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.

One moral of the tale: parents, think hard before taking technical measures against your own kids. There's a better than average chance that they—or their friends—know more than you do.

quote:

Anonymous will shut down to protest SOPA

HACKTIVIST GROUP Anonymous will turn off its lights for twelve hours in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US.

The hackers are following Reddit's lead, and will join a communications blackout on 18 January that will begin at 8am and end at 8pm.

Reddit said this week that in protest against SOPA, which could shut web sites like it down, it will cease to operate as normal and will be showing only a message of protest, and this has gained the approval of its already supportive user base.

At Anonymous the news was taken equally well, and while the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account tried to recruit other organisations such as Wikipedia and Google into joining the protest it received tweets of support for its plans from its members.

The Reddit announcement has also caused Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales to have another think about whether it is right to turn off his web site in protest, a tactic that was mooted last year.

"Reddit recently announced that they will be blacking out the site from 0800-2000, Jan 18th," he said in a statement on his personal page on the web site. "Were Wikipedia to consider a similar measure, it might make sense to do so at the same time, to increase impact."

Wordpress is also joining the protest and has posted a strong call to arms on its website. "You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it," it says. "There's something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all."

That something is SOPA, and Wordpress said that if it is left unchecked and unprotested it will have a terrible impact on the internet and the web sites that depend upon it.

"We are not a small group. More than 60 million people use WordPress - it's said to power about 15 per cent of the web. We can make an impact, and you can be an agent of change," it said as it called on its users to protest.

"The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard." µ

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/15col)

quote:

Gegevens politici op straat door gehackte websites

De wachtwoorden, adresgegevens en mailadressen van ambtenaren en Kamerleden zijn gelekt nadat de websites Beauy.nl en Recreatief.nl zijn gehackt.

In de bestanden zijn vertrouwelijke gegevens te vinden van onder anderen Hero Brinkman van de PVV en van werknemers van het ministerie van Defensie en het ministerie van Economische Zaken.

In totaal zijn de privégegevens van 315.000 gebruikers gelekt zijn. Dat meldt Security.nl.

quote:

Law professors react to PIPA, SOPA legislation

Congress is expected to consider two bills when it returns from recess on Jan. 24: the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP Act or PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The legislation is of major concern to Stanford thought leaders, in addition to nationwide legal experts, online security experts, Internet activists and the founders of many of Silicon Valley’s largest companies.

“The answer is to innovate, not to pass stupid laws that are going to screw up the Internet,” said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (SCIS) at a Dec. 7 event hosted by SCIS called, “What’s wrong with SOPA?” The panel convened experts on Internet infrastructure and security, digital intellectual property and Silicon Valley business to articulate many of SOPA’s problems.

More than 150 people attended the Law School event, which was “not meant to give equal time to both sides,” according to Falzone. The audience did include two representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, supporters of SOPA and PIPA, who spoke up during a question and answer session.

“There were things about this bill that people in Silicon Valley needed to know – that is lawyers, entrepreneurs and technology people,” Falzone said. “Our goal was to put together an array of people who could speak to each one of those sets of considerations.”

Professor Mark Lemley, director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, spoke in a January interview with The Daily of the necessity of publicizing what he characterized as the incredible harm of this potential legislation.

“PIPA was introduced in the Senate in early 2011 and it went through the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously… mostly I think because people hadn’t paid attention to it,” Lemley said.

Lemley believes this unanimous action occurred because PIPA was a less extreme bill than SOPA – a conscious legislative decision to make the “lesser of two evils” look like a healthy compromise.

Both pieces of legislation are almost exclusively supported by traditional media companies like Viacom and members of Recording Industry Association of America, as well as companies heavily reliant on brands such as Nike, the NBA and Pfizer.

The founders of Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other Silicon Valley giants published an open letter warning of the dangers of SOPA and PIPA.

The letter appeared as a paid advertisement in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers. It predicted SOPA and PIPA would, “have a chilling effect on innovation” and change “the very basic structure of the Internet.”

The letter also raised the legal concern that this legislation allows the closure of websites without due process and could be used to stifle legitimate speech.

“If we just shut down the Internet there would be a lot less piracy, right?” Lemley said. “But, there is a lot of socially valuable material that we get only because of the Internet. “

In the most severe version of SOPA the Attorney General would have authority to bring action against websites accused of “committing or facilitating online piracy.”

The bill also provides for a system of notifications directly from the copyright holder to web services like Internet service providers (ISP) and search engines. These web services are then able to suspend service to specific sites and are immune from prosecution for doing so in error.

“You wouldn’t necessarily even bring anybody into court,” Lemley said. “So each individual ISP who gets this notice has now got to keep a separate black list.”

Falzone said he fears a world in which websites could be shut down, “in a completely invisible way.”

“You would have people doing these deals in the proverbial smoky backroom… picking up the phone and saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be so unpleasant if we had to go through an elaborate process and spend money on lawyers?’” Falzone said.

Of further concern is that the act of physically limiting the websites that computers can access would not only fundamentally change the way the Internet currently operates, but in so doing would negate current efforts at improved Internet security.

For Lemley, the physical blocking of websites has foreign policy ramifications as well.

“It’s awfully hard to persuade the Chinas and Irans of the world that they should open their society and Internet to things they object to when we won’t open our society to things we object to,” Lemley said.

A third bill that Congress will consider, the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN Act) may address some of the professor’s concerns with SOPA and PIPA.

This legislation would differ from SOPA because it would not allow for the physical blocking of websites; rather it would block funding for the infringing websites. It would also be enforced by the International Trade Commission and do away with the notification system of SOPA.

Falzone predicts that what Congress will ultimately pass will be similar to the OPEN Act and not SOPA. Falzone also said he foresees a more prolonged battle.

“Silicon Valley has now really thrown their weight behind [opposing SOPA & PIPA], and it is a real fight… everybody has brought their big guns.”

quote:

by Gabriella Coleman
“Our Weirdness Is Free” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York Council for the Humanities.

quote:

The question is: How and why has the anarchic hate machine been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times?

quote:

Facebook, Google, others face charges in India

Associated Press= NEW DELHI (AP) — For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.

Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

On Friday, the federal government told a New Delhi court that there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offenses of "promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration," according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The cases, which PTI said name companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, represent a new risk of doing business in the nation of more than 1 billion people, which is looking to technology to boost its economy and standard of living. The dispute highlights India's difficulty in balancing the Internet culture of freewheeling discourse with its homegrown religious and political sensitivities.

Convictions could bring fines and up to five years' imprisonment, through prosecutors have named only the companies involved rather than any executives. Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar on Friday asked India's External Affairs Ministry to serve summons to officials of foreign-based companies for court appearances March 13.

In December, Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal said he had spoken repeatedly with officials from major Internet companies over the past three months and asked them to come up with a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the Internet. He said that the companies told him there was nothing they could do.

There was no immediate comment by the networking sites after Friday's court proceedings.

However, Facebook said last month that it would remove content that "is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity."

Google said in a December statement that it removes content that violates local law and its own standards.

"But when content is legal and doesn't violate our policies, we won't remove it just because it's controversial, as we believe that people's differing views, so long as they're legal, should be respected and protected," Google said in a statement in December.

Sibal had shown reporters Web illustrations showing Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions as well as a site showing pigs running through Islam's holy city of Mecca, a clear insult to Muslims.

Sibal said the Internet companies had told him that they were applying U.S. standards to their sites, and he objected, saying that they needed to be sensitive to Indian sensibilities.

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Comcast Accidentally Admits SOPA Would Make the Net Less Secure

Comcast announced today that it has finished the rollout of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across its network. While patting itself on the back, Comcast’s blog post went on to essentially admit that a major element of the enforcement plan in SOPA and PIPA is incompatible with DNSSEC. Comcast is the owner of NBC-Universal, and a vocal supporter of SOPA.

The way Comcast outed itself is a little roundabout. The nation’s biggest ISP feels confident enough in DNSSEC that it shut down its internal domain Domain Helper redirect service. Domain Helper would try to redirect users that typed in commonly misspelled addresses to the right website. The important thing here is that Comcast ended support for Domain helper because it says DNS redirects are not supported by DNSSEC. SOPA and PIPA would use DNS redirects to block offending websites. Oops.

According to Comcast itself, DNS redirects are indistinguishable from malicious attacks like DNS poisoning. SOPA supporters have been brushing off claims that SOPA-mandated DNS redirects would mean a less secure Internet, but it appears that when not on Capitol Hill, Comcast believes quite the opposite to be true.

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Media Moguls Harassed By Opponents of Piracy Legislation

There has been a call to action online to show opposition to SOPA via phone calls and e-mail messages targeting companies that are pushing for SOPA and their executives.

Top entertainment executives are being targeted for harassment by activists because of their companies' support of the Stop Online Piracy Act that is being discussed in Congress.

Sources say that Jeffrey Bewkes, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, one of many Hollywood conglomerates that have publicly backed the proposed anti-piracy legislation, recently received menacing phone calls and e-mails from SOPA critics. (One source says voice-mails have been left swearing at executives, though that has not been confirmed). Bewkes' personal information also has been disseminated online among activists opposing SOPA. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that the activist group Anonymous has targeted Viacom-CBS mogul Sumner Redstone, posting a file online that ecourages members to call and e-mail him. It wasn't immediately clear if other industry players have been a target of hacking or harassment. Spokespeople for some entertainment giants said they were not aware of any cases of harassment or hacking at their companies, while others weren't available for comment.

What is clear, however, is that there has been a call to action online to show opposition to SOPA via phone calls and e-mail messages targeting companies and their executives that are pushing for SOPA.

In online forums, activists, including people associated with Anonymous, posted contact lists in recent weeks to rally SOPA critics — as is often the case with hotly discussed topics. But some of the calls to action were particularly harshly worded and included names of select executives' wives. "Attack supporting companies," says one playbook for SOPA critics that has been posted online. "Hack, leak and deface Web sites with the propaganda." The online initiatives have been given such names as Operation Hiroshima and Operation Blackout.

PiratePad.net and Pastebin.com are among the sites where executive information and suggestions for protest have shown up. Some posts on Pastebin, for instance, call SOPA "the first step limiting what you watch online and allowing the government to know what you watch online" and claims that "no one should be able to hide behind a corporation, impunity for no one."

One post on the site recently listed phone numbers for Redstone; NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke; Sony, Sony Music and Sony Pictures; Walt Disney Co. and CEO Robert Iger; Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman; and Time Warner and Bewkes. Sites have mostly listed general company phone numbers that can easily be found in the public domain, but some also have mentioned select executive's work e-mail addresses and -- at least in one case -- a private number.

“They should feel threatened,” Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, told the NYT. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.”

The movement indicates how hot a topic SOPA has become. The legislation would allow the Justice Department and copyright holders to seek court orders against sites seen as enabling copyright infringement. As a result, Internet service providers could be blocked from enabling access to such sites, search engines could be blocked from linking to them, and online ad networks and payment providers could be barred from doing business with them.

Hollywood and other proponents say the legislation would help protect intellectual property and industry jobs. Critics, such as Google and many tech firms, fear a negative effect on the development of the Internet and voice free-speech concerns.

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#Anonymous to America – #Occupy #J17 #JoinUs

Greetings, we are Anonymous.

To those who wish to identify us, know this.

We are teachers and doctors.
We are lawyers and judges.
We are soldiers and firemen.
We are factory workers and sanitation workers.
We are engineers and IT specialists.
We are the desperate poor you pass on the street.
We are the millionaires who have a conscience.
We are the people you look down on in the checkout lain.
We are the police who dare to disobey illegal orders.
We are the patriots who refuse to blindly obey and look away.
We are the old grey ones and the young new bloods.
We are your mothers, daughters, sons and fathers.

To all people at all levels of government agencies military and media.
You are living under the direction of a police state ruled by corporations and contractors. Your government has been overthrown from within. The scale of the corruption is beyond the ability of any presidential election to resolve.

Governments that do not exist by the consent of the governed to serve the needs of the people have no right to exist. It is your duty to dissent against the treasonous oligarchy that has usurped the rightful power of the governed on behalf of profit interests. It is up to you to dissent, silently and publicly, in words and in actions. It is your patriotic duty to oppose the tyrannical and despotic system that greed and apathy helped to create.

Their show of force is a show of their weakness, and a show of our strength. Through nonviolent resistance we can win this. But if you do not dissent your children will inherent a police state based upon social darwinism and the absolute authority of an illegitimate oligarchy in which politicians are prostitutes and functionaries of the will of corporations. If you do not dissent the next generation will know your country as a land of hopelessness in which speech and rights are determined by wealth. If you do not dissent every soldier who has died serving your country will have died to ensure the absolute profits of corrupt and treasonous contractors who abuse agencies as the private armies of banks industries and multinational corporations.

If you do not see the reality of these statements, go back to sleep. May you rest well in your slumber, lest you awake to absolute tyranny. But if you are aware of the truth of these statements, if this is not the world you wish to leave for your family, then know this. Anyone can be Anonymous.

The corrupt fear us, the honest support us, and the brave join us.
We are not the private army of any government politician religion or cult.
We are the people, the only system.

We are the DataAngels calling on every American at every level of government and media.
Leak Harvest and Archive all evidence of wrong doing, expose all corruption.

We must Dissent.

We Are Anonymous.
We Are Legion.
We Do Not Forgive.
We Do Not Forget.
Expect us. Join us.

Tags: #Anonymous, America, #Occupy, #J17, #JoinUs, #OccupyCongress, #OWS, #DataAngels, DataAngels

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Army Uses Web Tool to Track Bradley Manning Mentions

If you’ve ever sent a tweet about Pfc. Bradley Manning you can safely assume someone working for the Army’s public affairs department took notice.

Manning, who is charged with being a source for WikiLeaks in 2010, had a hearing last month.

The public affairs department for the U.S. Army enlisted the help of Vocus, a public relations web tool that allows companies to monitor news and social media chatter by using keywords.

An Army Vocus report obtained by POLITICO says that most of the coverage of Manning is “negative,” however, “the majority of the coverage about the hearing remains balanced and factual.” The report found “1,045 social media conversations about the hearing.”

The actual daily summary report is marked as “unclassified” and can be viewed by clicking here (PDF).

Manning is accused of releasing more than 700,000 classified government documents. It was recommended that Manning receive a court martial; that decision is expected to be announced early next week.

It’s no secret that public relations professionals utilize web tools to monitor what people are saying about their organizations. There are numerous services available to companies for tracking their social media programs: Vocus, Cision, Meltwater. Google launched a tool last summer for individuals who wonder what their social media profile might look like. In addition to typing your name into Google or signing-up for Google Analytics, now anyone can also sign-up for “Me on the Web” to receive alerts if their name is mentioned online.

Do you monitor your name online? How do you feel about the Army’s public affairs department monitoring social media? Tell us in the comments.

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Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA

The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it. On Thursday we covered the news that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was expressing second thoughts about SOPA's DNS provisions. He said he changed his mind after he "heard from a number of Vermonters" on the issue.

On Friday, several Republicans started backpedaling as well.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that he would be pulling the DNS-blocking provisions from his own bill. “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision," Smith said in a Friday statement.

Meanwhile, six GOP senators who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which unanimously approved the legislation last year) wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to postpone a vote on PIPA to give them more time to study the legislation.

"We strongly believe that the theft of American intellectual property is a significant problem that must be addressed," they wrote. But since the Judiciary Committee last considered the legislation, "we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights."

The current plan for the full Senate to consider the bill on January 24 "may not permit us to work through many of the concerns that have been raised," they warned.

Lest anyone doubt the signers' tough-on-piracy bona fides, they include Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who once proposed that Congress give copyright holders a special exemption allowing them to hack into the computers of those suspected of piracy. In a 2003 hearing, he suggested that damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

Another member of Congress that has been feeling the heat from voters is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). After reddit members raised $15,000 in 48 hours for his anti-SOPA challenger, Ryan came out with a clear statement of opposition to the legislation.

"It appears that lawmakers are beginning to realize how much damage their anti-'piracy' bills could cause to the Internet and to Internet-related businesses," said Public Knowledge's Sherwin Siy in a statement. "While we are pleased that some progress is being made, we are also firm in our opposition to both bills because some very bad provisions remain."

Washington insiders hold disproportionate sway on Capitol Hill. But members of Congress are ultimately chosen by American voters. When enough of them express a strong view on an issue, members of Congress do pay attention.

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Op zaterdag 14 januari 2012 18:08 schreef rsfxrs020 het volgende:

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Is het niet overzichtelijker om eens in de maand een overzicht van max. 3 regels te publiceren van wat je (in godsnaam) allemaal gepost hebt?