Anonops #11: Stop ACTA

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Hacked e-mails reveal Mexico manipulating climate change facts, destroying Indian sacred lands

The hacked e-mails of Mexico’s mining industry of Camimex exposed by Anonymous reveal that the government of Mexico is manipulating climate change facts in order to protect coal mining and other dirty industries from taxation.

The e-mails expose the government of Mexico is engaged in the corporate rape of the environment, with total disregard for the air, water and land of Mexico. The e-mails reveal there is no consideration or protection, by Mexico or mining corporations, for Indigenous sacred lands and ceremonial places.

In the Camimex member e-mails, First Majestic Silver Mining of Canada is exposed in the state of Durango, Mexico. The company is now targeting the sacred lands of the Wixarika, Huicholes, with silver mining. The Wixarika's sacred place is where Wixarika pray for all mankind to keep the world in order and balance.

The hacked e-mails reveal the destruction to lands in Sonora, Mexico.

O’odham, who live on both sides of the Arizona/Mexico border, are fighting Silver Scott Mines, based in South Carolina in the US, which has targeted their ceremonial community of Quitovac, a place of annual pilgrimage, with gold mining. The mining of Quitovac, about 30 miles south of the Arizona/Mexico border in O’odham territory, would destroy the land and poison the water.

Further, the emails reveal that the University of Guanajuato is assisting mining corporations that are now destroying Mexico and Indigenous sacred lands. The university offers courses which promote and secure mining by professor Juan Jose Cervantes Silva. The university's promotion of mining also reveals the role of US universities in the exploitation and destruction of Indigenous lands, since Cervantes was trained at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The University of Arizona has taken a lead in the militarization of Indigenous border lands, by designing drones and offering courses that target people of color on the border. Further the University of Arizona has taken the lead in the destruction of Native sacred lands in Arizona, including placing telescopes on sacred Mount Graham over the objection of Apaches and other Native Americans. Further the university has engaged in global spying of activists in its global cyber spy program and partnered with both Homeland Security and the US Border Patrol in its programs.

Anonymous hacked Mexico’s mining industry in defense of Indigenous Peoples struggling to protect their sacred lands, and their fellow campesinos who are victims of Mexico’s mining industry. Anonymous sent a clear message to the global mining industry targeting Indigenous Peoples and their lands with abuse, violence and exploitation, that their private communications will no longer be private.

Anonymous hactivists said they were robbing the e-mails because the mining industry is robbing the miners.

“You only took out our minerals, exploiting our miner brothers,” said the statement of Anonymous posted online. So far, 730 MB of e-mail accounts and the data base of Camimex were exposed.

Anonymous said the mining companies in Mexico and the mining syndicates are together “only to steal our minerals.” Anonymous said the value is $200,000,000 and miners are forced to work in extremely dangerous conditions. Anonymous said the leader Napoleon Gomez Urrutia “stole more than 55 million of dollars,” which was for mine security. It resulted in the tragedy of “Pasta de Conchos,” where 65 miners died due to the insufficient security measures, Anonymous said.

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Op donderdag 16 februari 2012 11:38 schreef sinterklaaskapoentje het volgende:

[..]

A challenger appears

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UPDATE 16/02/2012 10:53am: The owner of the exotz@hushmail.com email address has contacted the IBTimes UK clarifying Team Matrix AnonyOps claim is false: "I am mad about how 'TeamMatricHacking' [sic] claimed that they defaced the anonyops. They DID NOT. Exotz and 'ONE MAN ARMY' has been written there for reason," read the email.

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The Internet strikes back against Tory surveillance bill

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper began backing off on his own online surveillance bill Wednesday, one of his ministers is learning a lesson that should be common adage by now -- don't anger the Internet.

After a vicious online backlash, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews indicated the government will consider amendments to Bill C-30 -- the proposed legislation that would give authorities greater access to citizen's private data without needing a warrant.

The proposed bill has gone over so poorly with Canadians that even some Tories suggested they couldn't vote for it.

New Brunswick Conservative MP John Williamson said he had concerns about the bill as it is now.

"It's too intrusive as it currently stands and does need to be looked at. There's a lot of concern, I think, across the country," he told reporters Wednesday. "It'll go to committee and we haven't had a frank discussion on it yet in caucus, so that will come."

There's little doubt the Conservatives are noting the bill's unpopularity with Canadians, many of whom have gone online to air their grievances.

Toews' aggressive defence of the bill has led to the debate getting personal as details of his messy divorce went online and went viral.

An anonymous Twitter account has been publishing excerpts of what are purportedly affidavits from his 2008 divorce. In less than 24 hours, it gathered about 5,000 followers.

"Vic wants to know about you," says the description for the account. "Let's get to know about Vic."

Toews has neither confirmed nor denied that the Twitter feed is accurate.

"I won't get involved in this kind of gutter politics," he said on his own Twitter account.

Details of Toews' divorce have been available online for years and are displayed prominently on his Wikipedia page.

Earlier this week, Toews said in the House of Commons that those who oppose the bill -- which would give authorities greater access to citizen's private data -- "can either stand with us or with the child pornographers."

The next day when CTV Power Play host Don Martin paraphrased Toews' statement back to him, the minister responded "I didn't say exactly that . . . in fact it was a far cry from that."

Part of the bill would allow authorities access to Internet subscriber information, such as names and addresses, before even getting a warrant.

NDP MP Charlie Angus has been a vocal critic of Toews throughout the week, but refused to address the Twitter account.

"I have absolutely no interest in Vic Toews' private life," Angus told reporters Wednesday. "I've got enough on this guy's public statements to say this man has some explaining to do to Canadians."

However, Liberal MP Justin Trudeau was hardly so kind.

He sent out at least two tweets to his 100,000-plus followers in mock support of Toews, linking to the Toews divorce Twitter account several times.

Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews(...)20215/#ixzz1mYjoEfyX

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EU-hof: geen gedwongen filter op sociale netwerken

Sociale media en webhosters kunnen niet worden gedwongen om bestanden te filteren die gebruikers uploaden en met elkaar delen. Dat heeft het Europese Hof van Justitie vandaag bepaald.

De Belgische auteursrechtenorganisatie SABAM, die de rechtszaak had aangespannen, wilde het gebruikersmateriaal van de socialenetwerksite Netlog kunnen filteren om zo de verspreiding van illegale bestanden tegen te gaan.

Persoonsgegevens
Maar het hof oordeelde dat dit de vrijheid van ondernemerschap van Netlog ernstig aantast, want verplicht filteren zou het bedrijf op heel veel extra kosten jagen. Bovendien wordt het recht van bescherming van persoonsgegevens voor de gebruikers aangetast, alsmede de vrijheid om kennis van informatie te nemen en te geven, aldus het hof. Netlog heeft ongeveer 95 miljoen gebruikers in Europa.

Het Europees Hof had in november al een soortgelijke uitspraak gedaan in een zaak die SABAM had aangespannen tegen de Belgische provider Scarlet/Tiscali. De uitspraak van vandaag is echter veel breder, en geldt dus ook voor hosters en de bedrijven achter de sociale media.

Pirate Bay
Voor uitspraken over bijvoorbeeld het blokkeren van downloadsite The Pirate Bay heeft de uitspraak niet direct gevolgen. Het hof oordeelde vandaag namelijk over een breed algemeen filter met een preventieve werking en voor onbepaalde tijd, en die door de hoster wordt bepaald. Bij andere omstandigheden kan de afweging anders zijn, zo schrijft Webwereld.

De rechtbank in Den Haag oordeelde onlangs dat de blokkade van The Pirate Bay door providers Ziggo en XS4ALL niet in strijd is met richtlijnen van Europees Hof. In dat geval gaat het namelijk over specifieke site die al eerder door de rechter is veroordeeld.

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‘We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation.’

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RIAA: The Pirate Bay is The Worst of The Worst

The RIAA has responded to The Pirate Bay’s decision to change its domain name from .org to .se. The torrent site made the switch to prevent a seizure by US authorities, and according to the music industry group this is a clear indication that tougher laws are needed to deal with “rogue websites.”

riaaTwo weeks ago The Pirate Bay redirected the site to a Swedish .se domain, safely outside the reach of US authorities.

This change hasn’t gone unnoticed by the RIAA, as Vice President Mitch Glazier just published a scathing reply. Describing The Pirate Bay as one of the worst offenders, the RIAA boss argues that the industry needs better tools to topple such ‘rogue’ websites.

“Talk about Exhibit A for addressing rogue websites in a meaningful manner,” he writes.

“A blatantly illegal file-sharing site, proud that it’s an online bazaar of every conceivable U.S. copyrighted work, found criminally responsible by its own country’s legal system and who has been ordered by courts in at least seven European countries to be blocked by ISPs, has publicly acknowledged changing its domain name to escape U.S. laws.”

“It is motivated by its brazen philosophy of thumbing its nose at the basic rights of America’s creators. It is, in a phrase, one of the worst of the worst.”

The RIAA boss then seizes the opportunity to call on lawmakers to pull sites like The Pirate Bay offline before it does more damage to the entertainment industries.

“It is one of the most clear and obvious examples of why meaningful tools are needed to target foreign rogue sites that steal American jobs. Responsible leaders in the tech community should come to the table with constructive ideas and work with us and others to address this blatant theft before more damage is done to our economy and the creative community.”

Although the punchline above is expected from the music industry group, the response does raise an interesting point. Apparently the RIAA also realizes that domain seizures are completely useless as websites can simply switch to foreign domains. If that is the case, then why risk breaking the Internet by baking it into law?

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, is seriously offended by Glazier’s writing. They decided to respond with a rebuttal, describing the RIAA as a delusional outfit that has to be stopped.

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Pirate Bay: The RIAA Is Delusional and Must Be Stopped

The Pirate Bay is not happy with a recent article published by the RIAA, where the torrent site is portrayed as the prime example of why tougher anti-piracy laws are necessary. In a rebuttal, The Pirate Bay argues that the RIAA is delusional, behaving like a spoiled kid that has lost touch with reality.

The Senior Executive Vice President of the RIAA (wow, what a long title), Mitch Glazier, has published a blog post on why TPB is one of the worst of the worst. The piece gives us ample information on just how delusional the recording industry really is, and shows why they must be stopped.

In the very first sentence Glazier uses the phrase copyright theft. Its an interesting concept if anyone in history ever stole copyright, it must be the record industry. At least they tried, as in the Swedish TPB case where they sued over a record they did not have the copyright to.

A small lesson to Mr Glazier: If someone steals something, you dont have it anymore. If you copy it, both have it. This means: If someone steals your copyright (aka copyright theft) you dont have the copyright anymore. Im having a hard time to see that happening though, since copyright isnt really physical.

The jobs that you say are being stolen in the US are somewhat physical though. And if someone steals them where do they go? Maybe they just arent needed anymore! Thats what technology does! Sorry, its 2012 not 1912 do you want to forbid robots as well, since they steal jobs?

Let me quote the title of Peter Sundes latest piece in Wired: Its evolution, . If you search for it, youll find the rest of the title for that piece. It might be illegal for me to put that in print since a new censorship law was passed in Syria. Since you apparently think that US law should control people around the world, shouldnt we follow laws in Syria as well?

Yes, Glazier is upset that TPB moved away from a US-controlled domain name. He doesnt seem to understand that there is a worldwide problem when one single country tries to take control over a global infrastructure. TPB has no connections to the US so why should the US be able to control it?

Its a very undemocratic procedure which obviously the RIAA is supportive of. Apparently escaping US laws means not being born in the US, not living there, not working there or not wanting to kiss your ass.

And Mr. Glazier, talking about the countries in the EU that you have forced ISPs to block TPB (and other sites) is interesting, as the European Court has just decided that these types of censorship are just that censorship, and should be treated as illegal. Could we see your view on the matter, as the RIAA is clearly supporting illegal censorship?

The RIAA wants the tech industry to sit down and talk to them. Fuck that. Youre not in charge. If you want the help of the tech industry, ask for it. Youll probably get it since most tech people are nice. Youre not in charge anymore and thats probably why youre pissed off.

Plz stop calling yourself the creative community. Youre not a community, youre a coalition of some of the richest companies in the world. And the only thing you seem to be creative with is your accounting procedures.

The recording industry is like a kid screaming for candy. The problem is that the kid has diabetes.

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US Returns Jotform.com Domain; Still Refuses To Say What Happened

There's been a lot of interest in the story of the Secret Service completely shutting down Jotform.com through a request to GoDaddy. It appears that the suspension is now ending, though it hasn't fully propagated. What's amazing is that no one in the US government (or at GoDaddy) seems to be willing to explain what happened. When GoDaddy completely shut down JotForm.com with no notice, the folks at JotForm had to inquire as to what the hell happened to their entire website. They were merely told to contact a Secret Service agent. That agent then told JotForm she was too busy to respond to them and would get back to them within a week.

Think about that for a second. The US government completely takes down a small business' website and then is too busy to explain why.

JotForm noted that it was willing to cooperate fully if there were specific users that were a problem, but the Secret Service did not seem to care that it had almost destroyed an entire startup's business:

. When I contacted the Secret Service, the agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week. I told them we are a web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me. At this point, we are waiting for them to look into our case.

So far, the Secret Service still isn't talking, returning a bland and meaningless statement to press requests:

. "We are aware of the incident and we're reviewing it internally to make sure all the proper procedures and protocols were followed."

GoDaddy, similarly, appears to be staying almost entirely silent.

All of this is completely unacceptable. Almost everything about this sets off alarm bells about over aggressive (and potentially illegal) censorship by the US government of protected free speech. We've been seeing a much more aggressive and overreaching effort by US officials against websites over the past 18 months or so, and at some point, they're going to get smacked down by a court who will explain to them the nature of the First Amendment and the fact that you can't unilaterally take down entire websites without recognizing the collateral damage on legitimate web businesses.

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Chris-Mouse (profile), Feb 17th, 2012 @ 6:26am

The government may get smacked down by a court, but only if it ever gets to a court. The government seems to be doing a very good job of delaying things until their victims either give up or run out of money.

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The seizure came two weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had seized 307 domains allegedly engaged in unauthorized live sports streaming and for selling fake professional sports merchandise.

Tank speculated in a Hacker News forum that the investigation surrounds an e-mail phishing program being run by a customer using a hosted JotForm form.

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Even if the forms were being used for some illegal purpose, Masnick said, I still cant fathom a reason why it should lead to everyone else getting censored and an internet startup facing a massive hardship wherein tons of users have had their service disrupted with millions of useful forms being suddenly disappeared.

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SOCA speaks out about music web site takedown

THE UK Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has spoken out about its takedown of the Rnbxclusive web site yesterday, saying the arrested individual is suspected of alleged "fraud".

SOCA's revelation comes after SOCA put a splash page on the web site after taking it down, warning users that they faced 10 years in prison for visiting the web site. The splash page has now been removed and replaced with something less alarming, and SOCA is claiming that the takedown and arrest was a 32 hour operation.

A SOCA spokesman told The INQUIRER that the individual arrested in conjunction with the music blog is suspected of fraud, rather than copyright infringement. He confirmed that the operation has a name designation but would not reveal the name or elaborate on the details.

He claimed that the web site had music that had been obtained "by data breach" and in some cases had been "stolen directly from the artist" before it was released.

When asked to explain the somewhat dramatic threat of 10 years in prison for those who visited the web site, the spokesman said, "If you download music that has been illegally obtained, you can be accused of fraud, if you are deemed to be part of the conspiracy to defraud."

We put it to him that most users would have unknowingly downloaded the allegedly illegal content anyway, and he admitted that the web site splash page was aimed at "warning people about how they use the internet".

A statement on SOCA's web site yesterday said, "A warning has been directed at users frequenting a music download site which was taken offline on 14 February by the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The action has prompted wide-ranging responses from website users, the general public, and other sites.

"The targeted SOCA activity, which lasted 32 hours, was part of an operational programme aimed at protecting UK businesses and the wider economy.

"The website in question specialised in RnB and enabled access to music obtained by hacking, including some which had not yet been released.

"SOCA has monitored responses since 08.30 on 14 February when rnbxclusive.com was taken offline following the arrest of a man for suspicion of conspiracy to defraud. He has now been released on bail pending further enquiries.

"Responses to the takedown have included action by three more music sites. One has taken itself offline voluntarily, one claims to be considering taking itself offline, and another has posted a claim on its home page to now only be dealing in legal music files following the activity. A number of site users have deleted their download histories. Commentary on Twitter and other social media has been global.

"SOCA's holding message to users who had been frequenting the website was taken offline at the conclusion of the first phase of the operation on 15 February."

Pirate Party leader Loz kaye told The INQUIRER, "The SOCA press release raises more questions than it answers. What was the purpose of the 32 hour operation? Was it really to monitor people visiting the site? In which case, they will have an excellent set of journalist contacts now.

"It should simply not be the job of a serious crime agency to 'warn' us about how we use the Internet. I'm sure if you ask voters whether they are more worried about gun crime or music blogs, it won't be RnB that is seen as the major threat.

He added, "In a broader sense, this whole episode is a chilling warning of what the post-ACTA Internet could look like." µ

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/15Iv0)

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Facebook hacker jailed for eight months

Glenn Mangham claimed he was an 'ethical hacker' who wanted to show how Facebook could improve its security

A student who hacked into Facebook in the "most extensive and grave" case of social media hacking to come before a British court was jailed for eight months on Friday.

Glenn Mangham, 26, admitted infiltrating the website from his bedroom in his parents' house between April and May last year.

His actions were said to have risked destroying "the whole enterprise" and sparked fears among American authorities of industrial espionage.

Mangham, a software development student from Cornlands Road, York, had previously shown the search engine Yahoo how it could improve its security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook.

But prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected his claims, saying: "He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating."

Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham's crime, which triggered a "concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation" by the FBI and British law enforcement.

"He said he wanted a mini project and chose Facebook because of its high-profile internet presence," Patel said.

"The prosecution does not accept that the defendant's actions were anything other than malicious."

He told Southwark Crown Court in London how Mangham had "unlawfully accessed and hacked into Facebook and had stolen "invaluable" intellectual property, downloaded on to an external hard drive.

"This represents the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts," Patel said.

Passing sentence, Judge Alistair McCreath told Mangham his actions were not harmless and had "real and very serious potential consequences," which could have been "utterly disastrous" for Facebook.

"You and others who are tempted to act as you did really must understand how serious this is," he said.

"The creation of that risk, the extent of that risk and the cost of putting it right mean at the end of it all I'm afraid a prison sentence is inevitable."

Mangham, a Sherlock Holmes fan described by his lawyer as a "computer nerd", targeted multiple servers, bypassing Facebook's security.

As part of his ruse, he hacked into the account of a Facebook employee and through it obtained restricted internal data while the staff member was away on holiday. He later tried to delete the electronic footprints to cover the hacking. The breach was discovered in a routine security review by the website. On 2 June FBI knocked on Mangham's door. His home was raided and he was arrested.

Mangham insisted financial gain was not his motive and vowed he was willing to explain to Facebook how he had compromised their servers, the court heard.

Tony Ventham, defending Mangham, said he was an "ethical hacker" who had described himself as a security consultant.

"He saw this as a challenge," he told the court. "This is someone who in previous times would have thrown everything aside to seek the source of the Nile.

"It was common currency within the community of computer nerds or geeks, if I may refer to him as that, where there was this interesting relationship between companies and people who ethically point out vulnerabilities."

He had not tried to sell any of the information he obtained or pass it on to anyone else, Ventham said.

He added: "He was in his own world, his own bedroom, his own mind, his own project and certainly his intention throughout was to contact Facebook in due course when he had rectified their problems."

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MI6 attacks al-Qaeda in 'Operation Cupcake'

British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaeda online magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.

The cyber-warfare operation was launched by MI6 and GCHQ in an attempt to disrupt efforts by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular to recruit “lone-wolf” terrorists with a new English-language magazine, the Daily Telegraph understands.

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

Written by Dulcy Israel and produced by Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio, it said “the little cupcake is big again” adding: “Self-contained and satisfying, it summons memories of childhood even as it's updated for today’s sweet-toothed hipsters.”

It included a recipe for the Mojito Cupcake – “made of white rum cake and draped in vanilla buttercream”- and the Rocky Road Cupcake – “warning: sugar rush ahead!”

By contrast, the original magazine featured a recipe showing how to make a lethal pipe bomb using sugar, match heads and a miniature lightbulb, attached to a timer.

The cyber attack also removed articles by Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and a piece called “What to expect in Jihad.”

British and US intelligence planned separate attacks after learning that the magazine was about to be issued in June last year.

They have both developed a variety of cyber-weapons such as computer viruses, to use against both enemy states and terrorists.

A Pentagon operation, backed by Gen Keith Alexander, the head of US Cyber Command, was blocked by the CIA which argued that it would expose sources and methods and disrupt an important source of intelligence, according to a report in America.

However the Daily Telegraph understands an operation was launched from Britain instead.

Al-Qaeda was able to reissue the magazine two weeks later and has gone on to produce four further editions but one source said British intelligence was continuing to target online outlets publishing the magazine because it is viewed as such a powerful propaganda tool.

The magazine is produced by the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the leaders of AQAP who has lived in Britain and the US, and his associate Samir Khan from North Carolina.

Both men who are thought to be in Yemen, have associated with radicals connected to Rajib Karim, a British resident jailed for 30 years in March for plotting to smuggle a bomb onto a trans-Atlantic aircraft.

At the time Inspire was launched, US government officials said “the packaging of this magazine may be slick, but the contents are as vile as the authors.”

Bruce Reidel, a former CIA analyst said it was “clearly intended for the aspiring jihadist in the US or UK who may be the next Fort Hood murderer or Times Square bomber.”

In recent days AQAP fighters have capitalised on chaos in Yemen, as the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Tribal forces marching towards the capital, Sana'a, clashed with troops loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh for a third day running yesterday.

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Piotr Czerski
We, the Web Kids.
(translated by Marta Szreder)


There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.

We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.

1.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.

2.
Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.

One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.

3.
We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)

There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government?

We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.

What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.

Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.



___
"My, dzieci sieci" by Piotr Czerski is licensed under a Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

quote:

Syrian government blocks live video streaming site Bambuser

Bambuser chief executive says Syrian activists are working around attempted blackout to continue to post videos

The Syrian government has blocked a premiere live stream website a day after one of its users broadcast images of a bombing believed to have been carried out by President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Bambuser – a mobile live stream service based in Sweden – has been in close contact with activists on the ground in Syria for over eight months. The dissidents use the service to broadcast streaming video of conditions in their country in real time. With foreign media blocked, online citizen journalism has become a crucial medium for telling stories from within Syria's borders. Bambuser's executive chairman, Hans Eriksson, says approximately 90-95% of the live video coming out of Syria is streamed through Bambuser.

"The prime purpose of it is to get pictures out of the country, and show the world what's going on, both in terms of the violence but also of the determination of the citizens," Eriksson told the Guardian.

On Thursday, a number of those citizens informed Eriksson and his colleagues that Bambuser was no longer accessible. While the site has been blocked by the Assad regime before in a limited capacity, Eriksson says this time the government has attempted to eliminate access nationwide.

"From yesterday morning we heard that you couldn't access Bambuser.com and you couldn't use the Bambuser mobile application to stream live video," Eriksson said. Syrian activists have managed to work around the attempted blackout and videos are still emerging, Eriksson noted.

The blackout came after a Syrian citizen using Bambuser streamed video of the aftermath of a pipeline bombing in the besieged city of Homs. Archived footage from the scene shows a massive cloud of smoke billowing over the neighborhood of Baba Amr while gun shots and shelling can be heard in the background. Activists claimed the government was responsible for the bombing. The live stream was picked up by several international news organizations including al-Jazeera, CNN, the BBC and Sky News, who referred back to Bambuser.com.

"We can only assume that some people from the Syrian government were watching those pictures as well," Eriksson said. He believes the blackout was a concerted effort on the part of the regime to stifle any similar broadcasts. "We're just assuming that's the rationale behind it and we would be very much surprised if someone else had taken an action and blocked Bambuser."

It's not the first time an authoritarian regime has imposed a nationwide blackout on the site. Shortly before his ouster last year, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak blocked Bambuser. Bahrain, meanwhile, has been preventing access to the site for at least seven months.

According to Eriksson, "between 50 and 200" Syrian activists use Bambuser on a given day. He says the individuals Bambuser works with in Syria are highly organized and well aware of the potential risks they face. Last week a Syrian broadcaster filming from a rooftop was shot at. While he escaped unharmed, his partner was hit in the leg, Eriksson said.

"They're taking risks, but they know what risks they are taking," he said. "When it gets on every TV channel in the world, it means a lot to these guys down there being shot at, being arrested, being tortured, being killed."

Eriksson stresses that Bambuser is not in the live streaming business to make a profit, but are operating in the interest of free speech. "We've been watching live video now for 11 days in a row from Homs. Pretty much 10, 12 hours a day and it's basically constant gunfire and shelling," he said. "As a human being you understand that this is a situation that is not acceptable."

quote:

News and info about Anonymous Hackers from #antisec and other groups.

quote:

Ever wonder who has been DDOSing you? chances are they are bragging about it somewhere on some forum. this could be on IRC, facebook, twitter, or blasted all over PasteBin.

I'm not sure how Pastebin is still allowed to operate. They welcome the hacking community (mainly anonymous with antisec and lulzsec) with open arms and encourage the posting of confidential information.

If you're wanting to see if anyone is talking about you, try using the search option on www.pastebin.com for your name, business name, or government agency.

chances are very good that something will come up where some group is either planning to attack your servers, or they have already been there and released your private data.

Congress needs to act now on shutting these websites down, and stop allowing such a easy free flow of illegal information. make it harder on them, force them to host their own leak data, and increase the risk of getting caught.

quote:

Both businesses and Government underestimate what hackers are willing to do so they can get what they want. There are some people who are willing to get a job as a business so they can spy on the company or government facility next door.

In the picture above, you have a simple parking lot. notice the red car in the front row facing the business. the parking lot behind is a nuclear research lab. because the driver of this red car works for the business they are parked at, they have a reason to be parked there. the placement of the car is not random. they parked so their antennas are aimed at the lab behind them.

quote:

The House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Intelligence was not pleased. (Insert "angry" emoticon here.)

At a Congressional hearing this morning that veered into contentious arguments and cringe-worthy moments, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spilled the beans on their social media monitoring project.

DHS Chief Privacy Office Mary Ellen Callahan and Director of Operations Coordination and Planning Richard Chavez appeared to be deliberately stonewalling Congress on the depth, ubiquity, goals, and technical capabilities of the agency's social media surveillance. At other times, they appeared to be themselves unsure about their own project's ultimate goals and uses. But one thing is for sure: If you're the first person to tweet about a news story, or if you're a community activist who makes public Facebook posts--DHS will have your personal information.

The hearing, which was held by the Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Intelligence headed by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), was highly unusual. Hacktivist collective Anonymous (or at least the @AnonyOps Twitter feed) sent a sympathizer to the visitor gallery to liveblog the proceedings under the #spyback hashtag.

Interactions between the DHS officials and representatives were often strained--both Chavez and Callahan were scolded and chastised by Representatives from both parties. Reps. Billy Long (R-MO), Meehan, Jackie Speier (D-CA), and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) all pointed out issues relating to what they variously saw as potential First Amendment violations, surveillance of citizens engaged in protected political speech, the fact that an outside contractor handles DHS' social media monitoring, DHS' seeming inability to separate news monitoring from disaster preparedness, and a massively unclear social media monitoring mandate on the DHS' part.

Meehan Asks Additional Questions of Witnesses at Hearing on DHS Social Media Monitoring

quote:

Dutch businesses were blindsided by ACTA

Treaty negotiated in secret is rejected

THE DRACONIAN Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is suffering from the fact that it was negotiated in secret.

Business in Holland have expressed dissatisfaction with the trade agreement, and half admitted that they had never heard of it before, suggesting that negotiation of the treaty that is supposed to protect 'intellectual property' involved insufficient opportunities for industry discussion.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce has published the results of its study of business perceptions about the agreement. Where there are opinions, they are not in favour of it.

A 55 per cent majority of Dutch entrepreneurs said that they did not know what had "prompted ACTA", and only 40 per cent said that they had heard of it. Just five per cent of the small businesses that ACTA was supposedly written to protect know what it is.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce is pondering whether to approve the agreement, a decision that other countries have wrestled with.

Of the entrepreneurs surveyed, 22 per cent said they thought that the Netherlands should not approve ACTA and should instead consider other methods such as technology for protecting their intellectual property.

Only 14 per cent of businesses in Holland surveyed support the agreement as it stands. µ

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/15Jq3)

quote:

Anonymous Promises Regularly Scheduled Friday Attacks

Anonymous, a group not known for discipline, is giving itself a weekly deadline, a new attack every Friday.

Following the Tuesday compromise of the website of tear gas maker Combined Systems, Inc., the Antisec wing of Anonymous struck a Federal Trade Commission webserver which hosts three FTC websites, business.ftc.gov, consumer.gov and ncpw.gov, the National Consumer Protection Week partnership website.

Claiming this hack in opposition of the controversial international copyright treaty known as ACTA, which had been widely protested around the world for its potential to curtail freedom of expression on the internet, Anonymous continued the political messaging that has marked much of its recent high-profile actions.

Anons claiming responsibility for the attack spoke to Wired.com in an online chat just as it happened, freely admitting that there was nothing technically remarkable in this hack. As one remarked, “own & rm and move on.” (rm being a unix command to delete data.)

But this week’s attacks came with a promise, first articulated in the defacement of CSI, and restated on the FTC websites: Every Friday will bring a new attack against government and corporate sites under the theme of #FFF, or Fuck the FBI Friday.

“We are already sitting on dozens of unreleased targets,” said an Antisec anon, who went on to describe an inventory of already compromised servers that could fill five months or more of #FFF releases.

“Yes, each and every Friday we will be launching attacks… with the specific purpose of wiping as many corrupt corporate and government systems off our internet,” the anon continued.

The choice of the FTC is an odd one, given the independent agency has no role in ACTA negotiations. Instead, it’s tasked with fighting unfair business practices, sanctioning companies like Google and Facebook for privacy violations, and running the Do-Not-Call list – hardly the stuff of Big Brother stomping on online rights forever.

While many attacks are likely to be simple defacements like the FTC website, Antisec claims to also be going through mail spools, SQL databases and password files on dozens of corporate and government servers which are unaware of their presence.

The anon speaking to Wired described the string of hacking as having “no foreseeable end in sight,” going on to say “the more we own, the more we steal credentials to even more targets.”

They’ve decided try to balance between protest defacements like the two this week, and sifting through the data for material that can damage firms and agencies. “It’s more than just delivering a message or speaking truth to power… we are trying to disrupt their ability to operate and do business or exist at all on the internet,” the same anon said.

Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force told the New York Times last week that attacks would become more frequent, describing the amorphous collective as “unstoppable,” because of the poor state of security online.

In an environment of heightened political tensions around protest movements like the Arab Spring and moves to restrict the internet like ACTA, those vulnerabilities are likely to play more of a role in Anonymous’ political dialogue.

“We’ve been saying it for the longest (time),” the Antisec anon explained, “this is war.”

Agent Smith - Me too

twitter:

Furbybrain twitterde op vrijdag 17-02-2012 om 21:27:54 #OpAbandonShip !!! It's time to leave Twitter and Facebook and have a look at Diaspora... https://t.co/dXiwBygJ reageer retweet

quote:

Why Anonymous is interested to the Great Firewall of China?

The Chinese government is fomous for the high level of monitoring implemented on internet and in the specific on all the new social media, that is the moder form of censorship, a model that several countries all over the worls are taking for example. Nothing is changed, government plans to continue censoring social networking sites according the declarations of the Communist Party and State Council regarding China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) on cultural reform and development.

The outlook is very bad, they are violating human rights in this way being censorship used also for the purpose to persecute opponents of the government. The “Violated Freedom” is the new cyber threat as I wrote in an article some months ago.

What is worrying is that also in those countries where the level of monitoring / censorship is high we observe an high perception of corruption. Corruption and censorship, two sisters who walk hand in hand regardless of human rights.

Chinese government will increase regulation of domestic social networks and of other social media platforms including blogging, but it is only the beginning because it will also be implemented more restrictive measures to protect private information online and improving the country’s system assess to online security.

Obviously that a so oppressive policy is to the center of a heated debate, inevitable that groups like Anonymous hacktivist may be interested in planning their intervention because the Chinese government, this is the genesis of OpChina campaign. Anonymous hackers, a group named RevolutionSec, have attacked Chinese government websites on Wednesday 15th, posting the stolen data online.
The group has announced to have successfully breached a Chinese government trade site. Following the fashion of the moment the information was published on Pastebin and via the tweetter platform with the message “ ”Bring down the great firewall of China”.

More over 8,000 accounts have been compromised exposing the usernames and encrypted passwords.Are we assisting to a true call to arms of the several group linked to Anonymous?

According to experts, the group is determined to hack the “Great Firewall”, a term that indicates the project of Internet monitoring by the Beijing government called The Golden Shield. Thanks to this systems the chinese authorities are able to block the access to a number of websites accused of being opponents of the regime or to be outlaw.
The Chinese government on more than one occasion has been accused of having sponsored attacks made by hacking groups against foreign industries and governments with the dual intention of offending the cyber adversaries and steal sensitive information of varying utility.

While I understand the choice to attack what is the symbol par excellence of censorship, The Great Firewall, I am surprised that this happens at this historical moment. Why has not happened before? Why Anonymous has noticed the Great Firewall right now?

I illustrate some cases hoping that you can give me your point of view on the subject.

The escalation of Anonymus operations has somehow increased awareness of their skills and it has given the proof that the group wants to compare with more challenging objectives.
To this we add that the targets hit and the followed time line of the attacks has certainly provided great visibility to the group, visibility and consensus used to encourage the involvement of a critical mass to involve attacks.

Another hypothesis is that for some reason the group was directed against the cyber as part of a cyber strategy defined by Western governments. Hypothesis possible if one accepts that the structure may have been infiltrated in some way.

Third hypothesis is very plausible, Let’s think that someone is using the name Anonymous to conduct undercover operations and to be able to attack hostile governments like that of Beijing. Professing itself as members of Anonymous today means having huge acclaim and can count on a critical mass to recruit in cyber attacks. These operations may be used as diversions for further operations of western intelligence in the cyber space.

The mystery is dense but I believe that in the coming months we will have a clearer picture of the situation.

Pierluigi Paganini

quote:

Computer spyware is newest weapon in Syrian conflict

(CNN) -- In Syria's cyberwar, the regime's supporters have deployed a new weapon against opposition activists -- computer viruses that spy on them, according to an IT specialist from a Syrian opposition group and a former international aid worker whose computer was infected.

A U.S.-based antivirus software maker, which analyzed one of the viruses at CNN's request, said that it was recently written for a specific cyberespionage campaign and that it passes information it robs from computers to a server at a government-owned telecommunications company in Syria.

Supporters of dictator Bashar al-Assad first steal the identities of opposition activists, then impersonate them in online chats, said software engineer Dlshad Othman. They gain the trust of other users, pass out Trojan horse viruses and encourage people to open them.

Once on the victim's computer, the malware sends information out to third parties.

Othman is an IT security "go-to-guy" for opposition activists. He resides outside of Syria for his own safety.

Since December, he has heard from dozens of opposition members who say their computers were infected. Two of them recently passed actual viruses to Othman and a colleague with whom he works. They checked them out.

"We have two malwares -- first one is really complex," Othman said via Skype chat. "It can hide itself more."

The U.S. analysis of one of the viruses -- the simpler one -- would appear to corroborate the time of its launch around the start of the year.

The virus has two parts, said Vikram Thakur, principal security response manager at Symantec Corporation, known to consumers for its Norton antivirus software. He said one of them points to December 6 and the other to January 16.

Thakur has dubbed the simpler virus "backdoor.breut."

It was the more complex virus that the former aid worker unwittingly downloaded during a chat. Since she travels to Syria, she has requested that CNN not name her for security reasons and instead refer to her as "Susan."

In one Syrian town, full-throated cries of defiance

To get a picture of the humanitarian needs on the ground in Syria, "Susan" contacted opposition members via the Internet. In January, she received a call via Skype from someone she believed was a regime opponent.

It was an imposter and a regime supporter, she claims.

"They called me actually and pretended that it's him -- this activist that I didn't know, because I'd been talking to him only two times and only in writing."

Days later, other opposition members told Susan and Othman that the activist she thought she had spoken with was in detention. Activists accuse government forces of coercing him to reveal his user name and identity and of then going online to impersonate him.

Othman says additional activists, who say they were detained and released, tell of being forced to turn over their passwords to Syrian authorities.

CNN cannot independently confirm the accusations, because the Syrian government strictly limits international media coverage within its borders.

Calls for Syrian government comment to a spokeswoman for al-Assad on Friday were not answered or did not go through. Friday is the weekly special day of prayer in the Muslim world.

The man chatting with Susan via Skype passed her a file. She recalled what he said to her to coax her to open it: "This makes sure that when you're talking to me, it's really me talking to you and not somebody else."

She clicked on the file. "It actually didn't do anything," she said in a baffled tone. "I didn't notice any change at all."

No graphics launched; no pop-up opened to announce to the user that the virus was being downloaded. The link appeared to be dead or defected, said Othman.

The second virus, backdoor.breut, which was e-mailed to him by an activist inside Syria for analysis, launched the same way. "Download, open, then nothing," Othman said.

It contains a fake Facebook logo and was passed off in a chat room as a Facebook security update, he said.

At CNN's request, Othman forwarded that virus to an IT security expert in California for an independent analysis.

Othman removed the more complex malware on Susan's computer but made an image of the infected hard drive beforehand. At more than 250 GB, it would have to be sent on an external hard drive by regular post -- snail mail -- for any independent scrutiny.

The U.S. expert confirmed the invisible nature of the backdoor.breut Trojan horse download.

"Nothing would actually show up," said Thakur. "The only thing that the Trojan actually does -- it copies itself into one of the temporary locations, but that would not be visible to the regular user."

The malware launches when the user reboots the computer.

The Syrian cyberactivist and the California IT security manager pointed out that the lack of fanfare during download helps to conceal the viruses from their victims.

"Most of them will say 'it's a damaged file,' and they will forget about it," Othman said.

Susan did just that.

She was not aware she had been hacked until she lost her Facebook and e-mail accounts a few days after clicking on the file.

"I didn't click on any kind of new link or something, so they must have known about the password," she said, referring to the loss of her Facebook account.

She handed over her laptop to Othman and his colleague, who told her that the Trojan horse had logged her key strokes, taken screen shots, rummaged through her folders. It hid the IP address it sent its information to, Othman said.

Othman found a screen shot the Trojan horse took of Susan's online banking home page. He told her to change all her passwords, Susan said.

"You don't want your money to be stolen by some of the Syrian security guys," she quipped.

The other virus -- backdoor.breut -- sends the information it pillages from infected computers to the IP address: 216.6.0.28 and does not hide this.

"We checked the IP address that our engineer referenced and can confirm that it belongs to the STE (Syrian Telecommunications Establishment)," a Symantec representative wrote to CNN. The STE is the government telecommunications company.

This does not necessarily mean that someone at STE is doing the hacking, Thakur stresses.

"Whether it's a home user behind that or it's actually a company or an organization, which has been allocated that IP address, we just have no insight from where we sit."

But the Syrian government has access to all activity through that server "absolutely without any doubt," Thakur said. Anyone not wanting the government to see what they are up to would not use that server.

Skilled Syrian opposition activists avoid government telecom servers when online.

The simple virus, backdoor.breut, acts like a bull in a china shop, Symantec's Thakur said.

"It did not look like it was written by any sophisticated hacker," he said after examining it. "It was just kind of put together -- slapstick functionality."

Simple malware is readily available for download on underground forums in the Internet. Hackers can repurpose it and hand it out. Othman believed the second software to be such an off-the-shelf product because of its amateurish construction, but the California expert disagrees.

"It's not something that somebody just went out there, copied code from an Internet website and just pasted it in. It was definitely coded for its current purpose."

The name "backdoor.breut" derives from the virus' behavior.

"We sort of took the word 'brute' just because of what it was actually doing and kind of changed a couple of characters to b-r-e-u-t," Thakur said.

"Brute -- meaning that it is using brute force -- it's just going in smash-and-grab -- I'm going to try to get anything that I can and get the hell out of there."

Backdoor.breut attempts to give the hacker remote control of the victim's computer, according to the analysis. It steals passwords and system information, downloads new programs, guides internal processes, logs keystrokes and takes shots with the webcam.

It also turns off antivirus notification, but that does not completely conceal it from detection. "Some of the good software can detect it in the same day," Thakur said.

The nature of its use may make backdoor.breut and other new Syrian malware hard to defend against. Antivirus makers need to know the virus to be able to assign it a signature and make the file detectible to block the download, according to Thakur.

The more widely a new virus spreads around the world, the more likely it is to land on an antivirus maker's radar. The smaller the region the virus is located in, the less likely virus vigilantes are to notice and combat it.

"Looking at this Trojan and the telemetry that we've gathered the last five or six days since we did the analysis, this is not targeting people across the complete globe. So, it could be days before some antiviruses actually create signatures for the file," Thakur said.

More complex antivirus software can detect malware that does not yet have a signature, because of how it behaves after infecting the computer, Thakur said. If the antivirus does not have this 'behavior' component, it may not defend against a new virus "for a substantial amount of time."

On a Facebook page named "Cyber Arabs," Othman warns activists of the danger of downloading the virus and reminds users to keep their antivirus software updated.

Download.com, CNET's software download website, offers antivirus software, some of which includes a "behavior" component and is free of charge.

But that is still no guarantee for not contracting a new Syrian cyberbug, "Susan" reminds.

"It was up-to-date," she said. "The problem is that they sent me a ... file, and I was totally stupid -- like, it's an EXE file -- and I opened it."

quote:

Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web

Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever. Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be blocked, filtered or shut down

quote:

Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.

quote:

The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack.
Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears.
An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors.
Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.

twitter:

A3nigmus twitterde op zaterdag 18-02-2012 om 23:40:35 http://www.meldpuntoosteuropeanen.nl/ is TangoDown!!! #anonymous #pvv #wildershttp://t.co/Qjg8ecZ7 reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 19 februari 2012 02:28 schreef Nemephis het volgende:

[..]



Hopelijk niet alleen een Paulus de dDos-kabouter-actie maar die hele server plunderen.

twitter:

YourAnonNews twitterde op zondag 19-02-2012 om 02:03:48 Follow the hashtag #AnonMeans on Twitter and find out what #Anonymous means to different people. It's amazing to read the responses. reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 19 februari 2012 09:42 schreef gogosweden het volgende:
interessant topic!

(verkapte TVP )

Anonymous Thinking Together - Awakening of Planetary Consciousness

quote:

Op zondag 19 februari 2012 02:22 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

twitter:

A3nigmus twitterde op zaterdag 18-02-2012 om 23:40:35 http://www.meldpuntoosteuropeanen.nl/ is TangoDown!!! #anonymous #pvv #wildershttp://t.co/Qjg8ecZ7 reageer retweet

quote:

http://pastebin.com/qvB5zjvH

Dit weekeinde, heeft Anonymous een succesvolle aanval uitgevoerd op het Meldpunt Midden en Oost Europeanen. De eerste van velen.

Wij veroordelen Wilders en zijn xenofobe vriendenclubje, en we zullen er alles aan doen om vanaf nu elke vorm van vreemdelingenhaat tentoongespreid door de PVV te bestrijden.

Gelukkig staan we niet alleen, getuige de internationale ophef over deze verraderswebsite.

Een dringende oproep aan Geert Wilders:

Stop met deze haatzaaierij!

Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst.

Ons kleine landje is groot geworden door zijn betrekkingen met het buitenland. Al vele eeuwen zijn wij een handelaarsvolk, geroemd door onze (zaken)partners om onze vrije denken en onze open houding naar andersdenkenden.

Wat wij in eeuwenlang hard werken hebben opgebouwd, wordt nu door jouw populistisch gekrakeel in sneltreinvaart afgebroken.

Je verandert ons land in een bang, kortzichtig, Polen-verradend kippenhok met jou, als opper-kip-zonder-kop, voorop.

Wij, Anonymous, zeggen nu:

Het Is Genoeg!

Nu is het Carnaval, maar vanaf woensdag begint de Vastentijd; een tijd voor reflectie en bezinning. Tijd om orde op zaken te stellen. Tijd om te beseffen dat, als je beweert een Partij voor de Vrijheid te zijn, je ook voor Vrijheid moet staan! En niet alleen de vrijheid om je eigen haat de wereld in te kotsen.

Denk hier maar eens goed over na, als je deze dagen bij een Polonaise aansluit. Of klinkt "Polonaise" je ook al te Oost Europees in je oren?

Wij, Anonymous, waarschuwen ook Mark Rutte:

Als premier van Nederland dien je ten allen tijde in het belang van ons land en al haar inwoners te handelen.

Jij bent onze premier, Mark. Dus doe je mond open; spreek je uit tegen deze nieuwe, door Wilders veroorzaakte zweer op het aangezicht van Nederland. En laat zondebok Leers niet jouw vuile zaakjes oplossen, maar toon dat er ergens nog iets van een ruggegraat in je lijf zit.

Juist als VVD-er zou jij respect en bewondering moeten hebben voor het arbeidsethos van de honderdduizenden Oost-europeanen in ons land.

En mocht je alleen aan de centjes willen denken: deze groep mensen (MENSEN, ja!) levert een jaarlijkse bijdrage van 3 miljard euro aan onze economie. En nu er een internationale oproep is om Nederlandse goederen en bedrijven te boycotten, komt onze toch al wankele economie nog verder in gevaar.

Dus, Mark: laat zien dat je een vertegenwoordiger bent van het héle Nederlandse volk!

Wij, Anonymous, zullen de ontwikkelingen de komende tijd scherp in de gaten houden. dit Carnavalsoffensief is slechts het begin.

Zoals de Havenzangers al zongen:

"Het feest kan beginnen, want wij zijn binnen. We gaan er tegenaan.."

#VerwachtOns!

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 20:41 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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Statement van "anonymous", althans zo noemen/noemt ze/hij/zij zichzelf, is toch wel behoorlijk raar te noemen. Quotes als: Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst. kunnen gewoon niet. Anonymous heeft zich nooit, zover ik het weet, bezig gehouden met politiek.

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Natuurlijk zijn ze bezig met ACTA en heel de zooi, en dat is natuurlijk ook politiek beladen, maar ik heb ze nog nooit zo zien uitspreken over 1 bepaalde partij.

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Wat nog het meest rare van de gehele (anti Wilders) statement is dat het in gaat tegen waar anonymous eigenlijk voor staat, en dat zijn gewoon de basisrechten van de mens (recht van privacy, recht van leven etc etc etc). Het is mijn recht om een mening te hebben over een bepaalde politieke partij, en het is mijn recht om voor een politieke partij te kiezen. Door te stellen dat de partij van Wilders niet langer gewenst is in de Nederlandse politiek gaan ze, in mijn opinie, in tegen al de rechten waar ze vroeger voor stonden.

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Maar zoals in mijn eerste zin al te lezen viel, dit heeft niks met anonymous te maken, dit is gewoon 1 persoon die zich anonymous noemt om zo aan aandacht te komen.

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 20:58 schreef YazooW het volgende:
Ja ik snap wat je bedoelt te zeggen, het is voor mij ook lastig uit te leggen wat ik eigenlijk bedoel. Maar wat ik eigenlijk probeer te zeggen is dat de partij van Wilders, of je het er nou mee eens bent of niet, gewoon democratisch gekozen is door het volk. Ga je nu als "groepering" quotes erin gooien als: Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst. dan ga je in tegen alles waar anonymous voor staat, en dat is gewoon de vrijheid van de mens met alle rechten die daarbij horen, het is mijn recht om op de PVV te stemmen, wie is anonymous dan om te zeggen dat een partij als de PVV niet gewenst is de politiek? Daarmee zeggen ze toch eigenlijk dat ze scheit aan hebben aan alles en iedereen die op de PVV gestemd hebben?

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- Politieke partij zegt/doet iets
- Anonymous is het er niet mee eens en voert een aanval uit
- Brengt statement naar buiten waarin partij niet gewenst wordt genoemd.

Dit is nou gewoon het democratische systeem waarmee wij leven, soms zijn er politieke partijen die wel eens wat doen wat jij niet goedkeurt, tsja, pech gehad dan. Als je dan vervolgens zo'n partij gaat aanvallen en niet gewenst gaat noemen dan breng je het democratische systeem alleen maar in gevaar lijkt mij.

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 21:30 schreef YazooW het volgende:
Maar ben jij dan van mening dat de PVV, net zoals de Tunesische regering ten val gebracht moet worden?

Anonymous Thinking Together - Awakening of Planetary Consciousness

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RCMP investigating threats to Vic Toews from Anonymous hacker group

OTTAWA - The RCMP is investigating "serious threats" against Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and his family, as popular blowback to the government's Internet surveillance bill continues to escalate.

Toews' spokesman Mike Patton said that the RCMP has been asked to investigate the threats. He described the threats as "serious."

"Threatening communications have been directed at the minister," he said. "These incidents have been reported to the proper authorities."

In a letter distributed to his Manitoba constituents this weekend, Toews says he has been the target of numerous threats since the firestorm over Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act erupted this week.

The bill would give police much broader powers to snoop on the online communications of Canadians. It has been met with fierce opposition from Internet privacy and civil rights groups, who say the bill would build a state surveillance system into Canada's Internet.

In his letter, Toews said he has already been attacked.

"These attacks, which have included criminal acts and threats of criminal acts against me and my family, have been referred to the police for investigation," Toews wrote.

Toews angered many observers when he said opponents of Bill C-30 were friends of child pornographers. Opposition to the bill became the most Tweeted about subject in Canada Thursday, and among some of the top trending subjects around the world.

While some Twitter users suggested the public "Tweet him to death," the social media response to Bill C-30 has been mostly peaceful, and does not include direct threats of violent action toward Toews or his family.

The hacker group Anonymous, however, has posted a video to YouTube in which threats are levelled against Toews. The video talks about an "Operation White North," which appears to be the name for Anonymous' campaign against Bill C-30.

"All this legislation does is give your corrupted government more power to control its citizens," the video says through a robotic voice. "Anonymous will not stand for this."

"We demand that you scrap the bill in its entirety and step down as safety minister," the video says. "We know all about you, Minister Toews."

"We told you to expect us," it continues. "We are legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget, we are here."

Read more: http://www.canada.com/new(...)y.html#ixzz1msCntQBp

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V for Vendetta: Comic vs. Film
^{US, March 18, 2006}

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The Wachowskis took the premise and general theme and adapted the story (and added some digging dialogue) to fit the modern world and point a finger at the Bush administration. This is not an admonition of war, but a clear condemnation of the Patriot Act. Liberals will cheer (and call this movie patriotic) and Bill O'Reilly will implode.

Both Moore and the Wachowskis avoid laying the blame on corrupt and over-reaching governments. For both the movie and the book, the guilt is laid on the public, for "knowing something is wrong with this country" and sitting on the couch doing nothing. The film alters the plot and involves the public, inspiring a nation towards possible revolution. Moore's V never goes so far. It, instead, focuses on V's attempts to inspire one person to carry on his legacy, with the implication that if he can inspire one, his ideals can inspire a nation.

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Op maandag 20 februari 2012 00:26 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
"Threats"

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VIDEO: Anonymous threatens Toews over Bill C-30

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“We know all about you, Mr. Toews, and during Operation White North we will release what we have unless you scrap this bill.”

Another individual that appears to be unaffiliated with Anonymous already published alleged details of the minister’s divorce on a Twitter account (@Vikileaks30).

Toews called for an investigation into the matter after the Ottawa Citizen reported that the posts were coming from an IP address linked to the House of Commons.

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Opinion: How Dangerous Does the Government Want the Internet to Be?

With the rising tide of internet surveillance and tough copyright laws, Drew Wilson comments on an infrequently discussed topic that really could be the elephant in the room in all of this. He then concludes that threatening the internet is a bad idea.

In the last several months, we’ve seen seemingly countless stories about broad internet surveillance and overreaching copyright laws. We’ve seen the relatively under-reported H.R. 1981 which is the latest US surveillance legislation. We’ve seen the spectacular rise and fall of SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act which was also a piece of US legislation aimed at bringing forth an unprecedented internet censorship regime under the guise of protecting the artists and protecting copyright. I, for one, am all too familiar with what it’s like, as an artist, to be censored by copyright. These actions are by far not an isolated case with what is going on in the world today.

In Canada, there is copyright reform bill known as Bill C-11 which contains the flawed digital locks provision. There’s even surveillance legislation known as Bill C-30 which has been heavily protested in Canada. In Europe, there’s also the disintegrating Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which is being dropped by a number of countries already. In addition, there’s new surveillance legislation which would log all communication and store it all for a year. There’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which has been known as the trade agreement that contains all the provisions that even the record labels failed to keep in ACTA (including the push for a global three strikes law). Really, the list keeps going on and on and on with examples of government and corporate attempts to reign in on personal freedoms that exist on the internet to this day.

But, with all of these attempts to control how people use the internet today, there’s been a well-documented push back to retain these freedoms over the years. There’s been countless protests in Canada over the copyright laws, there’s been the massive protests in Europe over ACTA (as we just mentioned), there’s been the rise of the global political party known as the Pirate Party, and there’s been numerous DDOS attacks and more made by the nebulous group known as Anonymous (just how many tango-downs have there been so far in the last few years anyway?). When one looks at all of these threats to the internet and free speech, it can be easy to understand why there has been such a push back in the first place. Is all of this the result of a completely ignorant corporate world? Possibly. Is the government completely ignorant about all of this? Depends on what part of the government you talk about.

I would argue that even the government, specifically, the NSA (National Security Agency), saw a glimmer of the elephant in the room. In 2010, there was a very heated debate over France’s HADOPI law which is essentially the infamous French Three Strikes Law. The idea is that you get accused of copyright infringement three times, you get disconnected from the internet. The law was morphed and changed numerous times, but that was the core original idea of it. As the debate raged, it turns out, the NSA was very nervous about it. A report surfaced that the NSA “yelled” at the French government saying that such a law could encourage more people to use better security that would, in turn, make their jobs of maintaining national security more difficult. Now, say what you will about congress critters going back in forth saying that they are not a “nerd”, but they need to pass SOPA, but with respect to the NSA on the HADOPI law, the US government really hit the nail on the head in all of this.

The only other glimmer I can recall seeing in regards to the elephant on the room was also in 2010 when the British record labels insisted on ramming through the Digital Economy Bill. In that case, British spies expressed concerns that their jobs would be made more difficult because of a potential encryption arms race thanks to such a piece of legislation. If you think that these are just empty words, take a look at one of the more recent TOR project blog posts where there’s been discussion of the development of Obfsproxy which is said to defeat Deep-Packet-Inspection employed by ISPs just to name one example.

So, what does all of this mean? I’ll just go back to what I’ve been referring to as the elephant in the room. Before any government wants to employ surveillance of any kind or copyright reforms that would stifle free speech, the government really needs to ask itself, “How dangerous do we want the internet to be?” If the government, regardless of country, wants the internet to be the most dangerous threat to its existence ever, then it should push through legislation that would heavily crack down on free speech and privacy as seen in the previous examples I mentioned above. Go ahead and put 8 year olds in prison for life for downloading the latest bad album through an unauthorized channel. Threaten everyone with unimaginable fines for downloading a bad quality cam film. Make sure every man, woman or child is being monitored for every single key stroke they make, every offhanded comment they make in their own personal podcast or every drunken rant they put on a YouTube video. Believe me, at this stage, the powers that be have made the internet angry and it’s already causing major headaches for them. Just imagine what will happen when the internet generally feels threatened. People merely got a very small taste with the blackout protests that protested SOPA. We’re talking encrypted communications that would take spooks centuries to decipher, alternate networks not controlled by traditional ISPs, hidden services that would likely never be traced to its original servers (let alone having the ability to track down those who started up such services in the first place), untraceable e-mail messages and things we today didn’t even think of.

Bottom line, you mess with the internet, the internet will mess back. Go ahead and brag you got the best in the business to take down the leaders and facilitators of defiance today, but you have an untold number of coders willing to piece together solutions that will constantly frustrate the best and brightest who are paid to stop any form of dissent against efforts to control the internet. This is the kind of war that is entirely possible if the governments around the world insist on trying to curtail any freedoms that even smells like a threat to deprecated business models or the political status quo.

If, however, the governments around the world want to simply stop all that is bad, rather than trample on personal freedoms in the process, they need to put the breaks on everything that even kind of looks like copyright and internet surveillance. Take a breather if need be. They are, after all, probably trying to deal with a crowd who is already angry at them anyway. If consultations have already occurred recently (say, within the last two years), look back on the expert opinions made by those who really know the internet well. If not, call for a consultation and involve everyone. I mean everyone. Not just the big lobbyists who have a stake in destroying the internet – everyone including people who want to preserve the internet and the general public. After a period of time and study, return with legislation that is surgical and precise. Clearly state that, for example, this surveillance legislation will only go after those who are dealing with, say, child pornography and that this surveillance is conducted under the explicit approval of the courts. If you have no intentional relationship with said content, your activities will go unmonitored and should anything about you be monitored accidentally, then it’ll be both in-admissible in court and destroyed quickly.

Can such an idea be improved on? Probably. I only say this as an example in part because going out in public and borderline saying that you have no idea what is in the very legislation you are pushing through or simply hanging up the phone in an interview when asked general questions about copyright legislation you are pushing for after giving a few confused sounding questions or even mumbling about not being a nerd during congress markups about SOPA makes it sound like legal precision and careful thought was never even considered. Heck, at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, it’s just downright embarrassing.

Bottom line, if a government does eventually get a grasp on this internet techno mumbo jumbo, that government, in this day and age, has a very simple choice: either it can have an internet it can live with or an internet that will be a continual threat. If it chooses to make the internet dangerous, attack it with sledge-hammer legislation we’ve already mentioned. If it chooses to not upset the internet, work with it. Crowd-sourcing can be workable. I think that reasonable and incremental solutions can be found in all of this.

When a given government is at the drawing board to draft such legislation, the ball is really in their court. In this day and age, threatening the internet is a bad idea.