Anonops #14: All about control

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Op vrijdag 7 december 2012 14:32 schreef Mint_Clansell het volgende:
Die DDOS'jes niet nee, althans niet op de langere termijn.

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Dallas man linked to hacker group Anonymous faces new charges related to Stratfor attack

A Texas man who has described himself as a spokesman for the hacker-activist group Anonymous faces new charges over data stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor last Christmas.

Federal prosecutors said Friday that Barrett Brown was indicted on a dozen charges that include aggravated identity theft and device fraud. The 31-year-old Dallas man already was in federal custody after being indicted in October for allegedly making threats on the Internet to an FBI agent.

Brown's attorney, Doug Morris, had no comment on the new charges Friday.

According to the U.S. attorney's office, Brown made public an Internet link providing access to credit card information and other data stolen from Stratfor.

Brown was a de facto spokesman for Anonymous, willing to speak for a movement that prides itself on anonymity.

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Op zaterdag 8 december 2012 00:08 schreef Mint_Clansell het volgende:
Dit gaat dan wel even wat verder dan een simpele ddos-aanval...

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Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months

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"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

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http://www.twitlonger.com/show/k8vqj0

The World Conference on International Telecommunications – 12 (December 3 - 14)

Call to Activists by Civil Society participants

We, the physical and remote participants at The World Conference on International Telecommunications WCIT12 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, wish to call the attention of all human rights and technology activists that the recent outage of the ITU website has proved to be of considerable disadvantage to the efforts on the review of the International Telecommunications Regulations - ITRs.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) is a critical event that the Civil Society believes is key in shaping greater connectivity and growth in international telecommunications. The satisfactory functioning of the ITU website, is central to the success of the meeting as it serves as the document repository, primary webcast channel and orientation platform for all participants.

We therefore call on all concerned activists to refrain from any possible disruptions, hacks or attacks on the ITU website and its related domains. Such effort will be counterproductive, and will hugely disenfranchise remote participants.

The Civil Society participation in ITU deliberations is the result of a long and a hard process that requires constructive efforts for improvement.

We invite you to follow remotely on http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx

And #WCIT12 on Twitter

Dubai World Trade Center

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Friday, 7th of December 2012

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http://www.anonpaste.me/a(...)VciFy932YEfU3HM06SA=

Here are LEAKED "confidential" PDF documents from private ITU meeting. The recommendations NEVER discuss the impact of DPI.

A FEW EXAMPLES OF POTENTIAL DPI USE CITED BY THE ITU:
"I.9.2 DPI engine use case: Simple fixed string matching for BitTorrent"
"II.3.4 Example “Forwarding copy right protected audio content”"
"II.3.6 Example “Detection of a specific transferred file from a particular user”"
"II.4.2 Example “Security check – Block SIP messages (across entire SIP traffic) with specific content types”"
"II.4.5 Example “Identify particular host by evaluating all RTCP SDES packets”"
"II.4.6 Example “Measure Spanish Jabber traffic”" "II.4.7 Example “Blocking of dedicated games”" "II.4.11 Example “Identify uploading BitTorrent users”"
"II.4.13 Example “Blocking Peer-to-Peer VoIP telephony with proprietary end-to-end application control protocols”"
"II.5.1 Example “Detecting a specific Peer-to-Peer VoIP telephony with proprietary end-to-end application control protocols”"

Download: https://anonfiles.com/file/f42cd5e944e61c5152c8e34fea668606 With love, Stun https://twitter.com/57UN #Anonymous #OpWCIT #FuckITU

With love, Stun https://twitter.com/57UN #Anonymous #OpWCIT #FuckITU

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U.N. Report Reveals International Protocol for Tracking People Online

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Buried in a recent 158-page U.N. report on how terrorists use the Internet is the so-called “protocol of a systematic approach.” The protocol, which was authored by an elite Italian special operations unit called the Raggruppamento, is significant because it has been implemented by authorities across the world, according to the United Nations.

The document outlines the stages law enforcement agencies should go through when conducting electronic surveillance of suspects: first, by obtaining data and “cookies” stored by websites like Facebook, Google, eBay and Paypal; second, by obtaining location data from servers used by VoIP Internet phone services (like Skype); then, by conducting a “smart analysis” of these data before moving on to the most serious and controversial step: intercepting communications, exploiting security vulnerabilities in communications technologies for “intelligence-gathering purposes,” and even infecting a target computer with Trojan-horse spyware to mine data.

Almost without exception, law enforcement agencies around the world refuse to talk publicly about these tactics and how they use them because they say doing so could compromise security. Despite civil liberties groups pushing for more transparency, internal police surveillance manuals or guidelines are closely guarded, and on the rare occasions they are released, they will tend to be heavily redacted.

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The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State

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A member of the online activist movement Anonymous, sup_g was part of a small team of politically motivated hackers who had breached Stratfor's main defenses earlier that month – ultimately "rooting," or gaining total access to, its main web servers.

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Pirate Bay Founder Released From Solitary Confinement

After three months in solitary confinement Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be released from custody. The prosecutor suspects Gottfrid of being involved in several hacking and fraud cases but he has yet to be charged in any of these cases. The Pirate Bay founder will now be transferred to a new prison which he will leave as a free man in five months if no new charges are brought against him.

Following his arrest late August, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was deported from Cambodia to Sweden.

Initially it was assumed that Gottfrid was sent to Sweden because of the outstanding one year prison sentence in the Pirate Bay case.

However, once he touched down at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, the authorities said he was suspected of being involved in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish IT company that works with the local tax authorities.

Immediately after his arrival in Sweden, Gottfrid was put into custody awaiting the hacking related charges. Since then the Pirate Bay founder has been kept in solitary confinement, locked up 23 hours a day for weeks on end.

The prosecution kept extending custody and later implicated him in second hacking case along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four attempted frauds. Again, no official charges were filed.

Yesterday, after three months in custody, things changed for the better. Gottfrid’s mother Kristina Svartholm informed TorrentFreak that her son will no longer be kept in solitary confinement and will soon be released from custody.

“The prosecutor decided this morning that Gottfrid should be released from custody, which is great news. This means of course a much better situation for him, as he will no longer be kept in isolation,” Kristina said.

The authorities are currently looking for a prison where Gottfrid will serve the rest of his Pirate Bay sentence.

“Until then he will stay at the custody facility, but without any restrictions. This means that he can meet other people, not only his old mom,” Kristina told TorrentFreak.

The suspicions in the hacking and fraud cases haven’t been dropped but Gottfrid has not yet been charged for any of these offenses yet. If there is no change his prison term will end in May, as the time served in custody will be credited to his Pirate Bay sentence.

While Gottfrid wasn’t allowed to meet anyone except his mother during his solitary confinement, he was able to read many of the letters TorrentFreak readers and Gottfrid supporters everywhere wrote to him.

Kristina is grateful for this overwhelming support and told us previously that she is proud of what The Pirate Bay represents.

“I have learned so much about what TPB means to people. I feel so proud not only of what Gottfrid did but also of the other guys and what they created together. I am also proud of the crew that works on it today,” she said.

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Downloadverbod lijkt definitief van de baan

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Er lijkt definitief geen downloadverbod te komen en ook de blokkering van sites als The Pirate Bay wordt mogelijk voorkomen. D66 gaat daarvoor volgende week twee moties indienen tijdens het auteursrechtendebat in de Tweede Kamer, die waarschijnlijk door een meerderheid van de Kamer gesteund worden, meldt NU.nl.

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Internet remains unregulated after UN treaty blocked

Failure to sign agreement at ITU conference stops governments having greater powers to control phone calls and data

A proposed global telecoms treaty that would give national governments control of the internet has been blocked by the US and key western and African nations. They said they are "not able to sign the agreement in its current form" at the end of a International Telecoms Union (ITU) conference in Dubai.

The proposals, coming after two weeks of complex negotiation, would have given individual governments greater powers to control international phone calls and data traffic, but were opposed as the conference had seemed to be drawing to a close late on Thursday.

The move seems to safeguard the role of the internet as an unregulated, international service that runs on top of telecoms systems free of direct interference by national governments.

The US was first to declare its opposition to the draft treaty. "It is with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that I have to announce that the United States must communicate that it is unable to sign the agreement in its current form," Terry Kramer, head of the US delegation, told the conference, after what had looked like a final draft was approved.

"The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years. All without UN regulation. We candidly cannot support an ITU Treaty that is inconsistent with the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance."

The US was joined in its opposition by the UK, Canada, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Qatar and Sweden. All said they would not sign the proposed final text, meaning that although a number of other countries will sign it, the treaty cannot be effectively implemented.

"In the end, the ITU and the conference chair, having backed themselves to the edge of a cliff, dared governments to push them off," commented Kieren McCarthy, who runs the internet consultancy dot-nxt. "They duly did."

But Access Now, a lobbying group against ITU oversight of the internet, said that "despite all of the assurances of the ITU secretariat that the WCIT wouldn't discuss internet governance, the final treaty text contains a resolution that explicitly 'instructs the [ITU] secretary-general to take the necessary steps for the ITU to play and active and constructive role in... the internet.'" It urged governments not to sign it.

The ITU is a UN organisation responsible for coordinating telecoms use around the world. The conference was meant to update international treaties which have not evolved since 1988, before the introduction of the internet.

But the conference has been the source of huge controversy because the ITU has been accused of seeking to take control of the internet, and negotiating behind closed doors. Google has mounted a vociferous campaign against conference proposals that would have meant that content providers could be charged for sending data and which would have given national governments more control of how the internet works. Instead, lobbyists have said the treaties should simply not mention the internet at all because it is a service that runs atop telecoms systems.

But a bloc led by Russia, with China and the United Arab Emirates – where the conference is being held – said the internet should be part of the treaties because it travels over telecoms networks. A Russia-driven vote late on Wednesday seemed to push to include the internet in a resolution – a move the US disagreed with.

The failure to reach accord could mean that there will be regional differences in internet efficacy. "Maybe in the future we could come to a fragmented internet," Andrey Mukhanov, of Russia's Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, told the Reuters news agency. "That would be negative for all, and I hope our American and European colleagues come to a constructive position."

The US and Europe have indicated that they instead want private companies to drive internet standards.

McCarthy, who has published ITU planning documents that would otherwise have been kept out of sight on dot-nxt's website, criticised the conduct of the meeting: "attendees were stunned to find a conference style and approach stuck in the 1970s," he said.

Writing on the dot-nxt site, he said: "A constant stream of information was available only in downloadable Word documents; disagreement was dealt with by increasingly small, closed groups of key government officials; voting was carried out by delegates physically raising large yellow paddles, and counted by staff who walked around the room; meetings ran until the early hours of the morning, and "consensus by exhaustion" was the only fall-back position."

Attempts by the ITU to encourage the US to sign the proposed treaty by removing clauses – such as one that would give individual countries rights over website addresses – failed.

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Subscribe for Quick Updates BSNL telecom server hacked by Anonymous Group against Section 66A of IT Act

The Homepage of BSNL ( Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited ) http://www.bsnl.co.in/ was hacked today morning by hacking group Anonymous. BSNL is an Indian state-owned telecommunications company, the largest provider of fixed telephony and fourth largest mobile telephony provider in India, and is also a provider of broadband services.

The website's homepage was hacked saying, " Hacked by Anonymous India, support Aseem trivedi (cartoonist) and alok dixit on the hunger strike, remove IT Act 66a, databases of all 250 bsnl site has been deleted.............Do not think of BACKUP" with a images of Mr. Aseem while he was arrested by Police.

Hack was performed by Anonymous India hacking group and claiming to hack whole server, with 250 Databases. Hacker wrote on deface page, that they deleted all the databases and dump credentials of BSNL database servers in a pastebin File.



After analyzing the dump of database login information, we found that company is really unconscious about their security from several years and choosing passwords of sensitive servers like "Password123" , "p3nib2", "enquiry999" , "password" , "DelBSi666" , "vpt123". Most obvious, these passwords are easily available in any wordlist and can be bruteforced in minutes.

We can judge the lack of security from the point that, BSNL is using "Password123" as password for 9 Databases.

What is Section 66A of IT Act ?

According to Indian Laws, Section 66A of IT Act is Punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service --
1.) any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device.
2.) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character or any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device.
3.) any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such message.

shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine.

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Internet humbles UN telecoms agency

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Having turned industries and governments upside down, the Internet has claimed its first organizational scalp, subjecting the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to a humiliating failure at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai earlier today.

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The collapse will come as a severe embarrassment to the ITU. Efforts to bring its core telecom regulations into the Internet era had exposed the organization to modern realities that it was incapable of dealing with. In the end, they proved overwhelming.

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Russia first submitted, then revised, then pulled, then resubmitted an explosive contribution that effectively undermined the existing global structures that make the Internet work. The ITU's Secretary General foolishly insisted on including text on the unrelated matter of human rights in an effort to see off media criticism that some of the other proposals would allow governments to monitor people online. Old telco companies tried to rewire the Internet so they received millions of dollars in revenue from Internet companies such as Google and Facebook.

Mistake piled on mistake and yet the ITU seemed incapable of responding, relying on member states to arrive at their own solutions and ignoring civil society, the technical community and even hundreds of thousands of concerned global citizens that took to online petitions to express their disgust at decisions being made over the Internet in closed, government groups.

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North Korea: On the net in world's most secretive nation

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It's just one facet of the "internet" in North Korea, a uniquely fascinating place.

In a country where citizens are intentionally starved of any information other than government propaganda, the internet too is dictated by the needs of the state - but there is an increasing belief that this control is beginning to wane.

"The government can no longer monitor all communications in the country, which it could do before," explains Scott Thomas Bruce, an expert on North Korea who has written extensively about the country.

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China tightens 'Great Firewall' internet control with new technology

Companies and individuals affected by new system thought to 'learn, discover and block' encrypted communications

China appears to be tightening its control of internet services that are able to burrow secretly through what is known as the "Great Firewall", which prevents citizens there from reading some overseas content.

Both companies and individuals are being hit by the new technology deployed by the Chinese government to control what people read inside the country.

A number of companies providing "virtual private network" (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to "learn, discover and block" the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems.

China Unicom, one of the biggest telecoms providers in the country, is now killing connections where a VPN is detected, according to one company with a number of users in China.

VPNs encrypt internet communications between two points so that even if the data being passed is tapped, it cannot be read. A VPN connection from inside China to outside it also mean that the user's internet connection effectively starts outside the "Great Firewall" – in theory giving access to the vast range of information and sites that the Chinese government blocks. That includes many western newspaper sites as well as resources such as Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Users in China suspected in May 2011 that the government there was trying to disrupt VPN use, and now VPN providers have begun to notice the effects.

Astrill, a VPN provider for users inside and outside China, has emailed its users to warn them that the "Great Firewall" system is blocking at least four of the common protocols used by VPNs, which means that they don't function. "This GFW update makes a lot of harm to business in China," the email says. "We believe [the] China censorship minister is a smart man … and this blockage will be removed and things will go back to normal."

But the company added that trying to stay ahead of the censors is a "cat-and-mouse game" – although it is working on a new system that it hopes will let it stay ahead of the detection system.

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Anonymous takes down all Cyprus government websites

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Anonymous group takes down all the websites of Cyprus government as Cyprus nears euro bail-out deal. The group claimed responsibility for the hit via facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events.



The Denial of Service attack (DDoS) affected over 50 websites as reported via twitter, which are still offline for about 30 minutes now some of them are listed below :

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Anonymous targets Westboro Baptist Church

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Anonymous hacktivists target the Westboro Baptist Church after members announce plans to picket Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman killed 20 school children and six adults on Friday, Dec. 14.

On Saturday, Dec. 15, Shirley Phelps-Roper announced that the Westboro Baptist Church would picket Sandy Hook Elementary School located in Newtown, Connecticut, with the following tweet:

twitter:

DearShirley twitterde op zaterdag 15-12-2012 om 15:20:08 Westboro will picket Sandy Hook Elementary School to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment. reageer retweet

In response, Anonymous released the personal contact information of members of the Westboro Baptist Church, including the home address, email address and phone number of numerous church members.

Preaching a hate filled gospel so obnoxious most Christians reject their teaching, the Westboro Baptist Church is an anti-gay Christian fundamentalist church notorious for its "God Hates Fags" signs and the picketing of soldiers’ funerals.

In addition to the release of personal information belonging to the church, Anonymous is also promoting a petition at whitehouse.gov asking the Obama administration to legally recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group. The petition notes that the church “has been recognized as a hate group by organizations, such as The Southern Poverty Law Center, and has repeatedly displayed the actions typical of hate groups.”

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'Patriot' Hacker Forces School-Massacre Twitter Feed Offline

On Friday (Dec. 14), the shadowy "patriot hacker" was instrumental in taking down a Twitter account that mocked the victims of that morning's Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre.

The account, at @z0bm13d, used a news photo of a bloodied, crying child as its wallpaper, and a photo of a little boy wearing bloody zombie makeup as its icon. Its displayed name was "Sandy Hook Victim."

"I now have more holes that my daddy can [have sex with]," the account posted. "I forgive Ryan Lanza for what he did to me."

(Ryan Lanza of Hoboken, N.J., was erroneously named by several news outlets Friday as the Newtown shooter. The killer was actually his younger brother, Adam Lanza, who appeared to have been carrying identification naming him as Ryan Lanza.)

Public outcry

It's not clear how quickly the alarm was raised, but on Friday evening a Twitter account at @GonzoPhD posted, "I never do this so listen to me this one time — report this sick piece of [garbage] .@z0mb13d for parodying today's shootings."

The Jester, whose Twitter account is @th3j35t3r, and whose activities are mostly limited to attacking Islamic extremist websites, noticed and tried to alert Twitter management directly.

"@twitter @support @safety 'FIX' THIS >> @z0mb13d," he tweeted. "Retrieve any IP details logged, pass to LEA's, I'd be happy to give perp some 'bad news'."

But it seemed the Jester, who has managed to keep his own identity secret, wasn't willing to wait for Twitter to take action.

"Only hope is a very clever SE [social engineering] attack," he tweeted. "@z0mb13d I have a very particular set of skills acquired over a long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like u."

(Twitter refused to comment for this story. The Jester did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Can Mental Screening Prevent Mass Murder?]

Connecting the dots

First, the Jester said, he looked at @z0mb13d's followers and quickly correlated them to a similarly named group in the Steam online-gaming community.

"Guy behind this despicable account >@z0mb13d is part of 'zomb13' gaming crew on steam, look at his followers, then look at steam," the Jester wrote. "How long b4 one of ur 'buddies' rats u out as pressure mounts?"

Within a couple of hours, the Jester dug up and posted a partial telephone number belonging to a friend of the @z0mb13d account owner.

Around the same time one of @z0mb13d's first followers, whose account bore the same handle as a member of the gaming crew, closed his Twitter account.

An hour later, the Jester had linked the offensive account to an Indiana college student who worked at Dairy Queen and liked the horror-rap group Insane Clown Posse — and @z0mb13d had been suspended by Twitter.

Just as soon as that small victory was achieved, however, another threat to online decency presented itself.

The Westboro Baptist Church, famed for picketing military funerals with "God Hates Fags" signs, promised via Twitter to do the same at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Soon afterwards, the Jester posted another tweet: "#WBC #Westboro baptist church site .godhatesfags.com — seems to be experiencing 'technical difficulties'."

twitter:

th3j35t3r twitterde op maandag 17-12-2012 om 05:24:38 #WBC - When truckers, bikers, hackers, preachers, teachers, soldiers Anonymous & me agree you're a piece of shit...you're a piece of shit. reageer retweet

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Westboro Baptist Church Plans to Picket Sandy Hook Elementary School, Incurs Wrath of Anonymous

After prominent Westboro Baptist Church member/professional troll/mother of illegitimate son Shirley Phelps-Roper announced her group's intention to picket Sandy Hook Elementary School "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," the wrath came quickly.

An anonymous offshoot promptly launched #OpWestboro with the intention of "destroying" the church and its members.

Within hours the group began posting personal contact info and credit card numbers of WBC congregants, and hacking the church's various online properties.

A coup de grâce of sort came with the takeover of Phelps-Roper's personal twitter account. The hack is attributed to notorious teen hacker Cosmo the God who appears to have violated the terms of his newly minted parole in order to take part in the operation.

Meanwhile, others are attempting a less tech-savvy method of bringing down the church: Convincing the government to label WBC a hate group. A We the People petition to do just that has already amassed nearly 100,000 signatures in less than three days.

Anonymous - Message To The Westboro Baptist Church door @kyanonymous

twitter:

Anonchimp twitterde op maandag 17-12-2012 om 07:15:12 RT: @YourAnonNewsIt's so nice of #WBC to provide the internet with a list of their twitter handles... http://t.co/VdVwigsC #OpWestboro reageer retweet

twitter:

OpPinkPower twitterde op zondag 16-12-2012 om 13:43:34 RT @lilithlela: #OPWestboro: Westboro Church members List, or, Why are they all related? http://t.co/2j85fsKF... http://t.co/E5Fl4WX3 reageer retweet

Westboro Baptist Church Negotiating NOT Protesting Newtown Funerals, Insults Anonymous

twitter:

CitizenKBA twitterde op dinsdag 18-12-2012 om 13:27:03 Shirley Phelps of the #WBC said #Anonymous is irrelevant. She would've tweeted it, but they hacked her account. reageer retweet

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Censorship Lift for V for Vendetta Shocks China

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V for Vendetta, a thriller film produced in 2005 about a near-future dystopian society, previously censored in China, was aired on China Central Television Station (CCTV) Channel Six on December 14, 2012. Many people are surprised by the screening, in particular the mask of V, which has been used by activists all over the world as a symbol of resistance against government oppression.

V for Vendetta in China- A message to the people of China

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https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BoycottInstagram&src=hash

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

In its first big policy shift since Facebook bought the photo-sharing site, Instagram claims the right to sell users' photos without payment or notification. Oh, and there's no way to opt out. Read...

news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-5…

twitter:

AnonymousPress twitterde op dinsdag 18-12-2012 om 21:35:36 Boycott Instagram: Anonymous Joins the Backlash http://t.co/8s2MnzHH #BoycottInstagram reageer retweet

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Instagram's New Terms of Service to Sell Your Photos

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Facebook subsidiary Instagram recently revised their terms of service, adding a few controversial new terms that will allow the company to monetize your photos. They broadened the license you give to the photo-sharing service to allow Instagram to sub-license your photos, adding a broad grant of permission:

. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

On its face, this sentence is not limited to public photos, though the company does retain its privacy setting options for photos. If you do not like this possibility, the only choice is to leave the service entirely.

Instagram should reconsider this policy, because it conflicts with the three key principles we developed for social networking services: informed decision making, control and the right to leave.

First, it is very hard for you to make an informed choice, since Instagram has not explained how it will implement this monetization. In effect, they are asking you to agree to allow them to do whatever they choose to do later, whether or not there is an opt-in, opt-out or user controls over the future commercialization.

Second, it violates the principle of user control, since there is no explicit opt-in permission from the user for this change in how user content will be used. When Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, ran into trouble for its privacy practices, one of the key issues was making changes where users had to opt-out. Instagram should be cautious before heading down the same road.

Third, if users are dissatisfied with a social network’s practices, they should have the ability to leave – which means being able to remove one’s entire account so that the data is no longer under the social network’s control. Here, however, if you agree to these terms (effective January 16), and then – perhaps after the commercialization feature is activated sometime next year – decide to leave the service, Instagram retains the “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license” to all of your photos.

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Instagram rivals try to lure users away after photo rights flap

Instagram's competitors including Flickr, Blipfoto, and 23snaps are hoping to lure users by promising to do more than Facebook to respect photographers' rights.

Instagram's competitors are pouncing on the company's claim that it will be able to sell users' photos for advertising purposes without payment or notification.

They're hoping that irritation over Instagram's controversial decision -- which came three months after Facebook completed the acquisition -- will lure users away from the popular photo-sharing app, which passed the 100 million user mark in September.

"We will certainly do our best to make sure that Instagram users are aware of 23snaps as an alternative service," Meaghan Fitzgerald, head of marketing for 23snaps, a London-based company that makes an iOS and Android photo-sharing app, told CNET today.

Yahoo today pointed to its blog post titled "At Flickr, your photos are always yours." Ellen Cohn, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said: "We are seeing strong interest in our recently enhanced Flickr for iPhone app and hope our users continue to enjoy sharing photos with family, friends and the world."

Blipfoto, a daily photo journal, said today it charges a "small annual subscription" instead of trying to monetize user photos itself. "That's why Blipfoto wouldn't sell your pictures to any third parties," Blipfoto's Ryan Mullen said in e-mail.

No other major photo-sharing service appears to have language as broad as Instagram's, which claims the perpetual right to license users' photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which could effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency. A hotel in Hawaii, for instance, could write a check to Instagram to license photos taken at its resort and use them for advertising purposes.

"That effectively guts the user's control over the use and exploitation of the photo," says Daniel Schaeffer, an attorney with Neal & McDevitt, a boutique law firm in Northfield, Ill., specializing in intellectual property. "The most obvious and immediate example is the ability to allow businesses to use your photos in advertising, but the actual effects could be even farther-reaching."

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Instagram co-founder: “It is not our intention to sell your photos”

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Instagram has responded to today’s outrage over its Terms of Service updates, attempting to clarify the concerns of its users. “To be clear,” says Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, “it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

The point about selling images ended up being a major component of the outrage, as users were understandably irritated that Instagram felt it could do just that to advertisers. As I pointed out on Twitter and others did via well-written blog posts, Instagram’s TOS did not give it the ability to do this.

Systrom acknowledges that the language is confusing, and says that this is Instagram’s mistake.

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Internet security firm to donate revenue to charity after Anonymous protest of Westboro Baptist Church

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Black Lotus Communications, which "prevents malicious traffic from reaching" websites, such as a Denial-of-service attack (DDoS), has announced their decision to donate revenue made from the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) to charity. The company has confirmed their intentions in a statement to Wikinews.

"We have received overwhelming support for donations to be given to various groups supporting the Newtown community, veterans groups like the Wounded Warrior Project, and LGBT groups like The Trevor Project", said Jeffrey Lyon, Certified Information Systems Security Professional with the Black Lotus team, to Wikinews. Lyon also says The United Way may be the first charity to receive their donation. "We've not [yet] made a formal decision," Lyon noted, but the company "supports all of these groups and will give very serious consideration in ensuring that our donations have a strong impact."

The announcement comes after the internet activist group known as Anonymous called on the companies that host and protect the Church's website to discontinue providing services to them after the Church announced their decision to protest funerals of those killed in the December 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. According to Lyon the company decided to donate revenue made from WBC to charity after, "'Anonymous' supporters began a full blown Twitter campaign boycotting any company who provides services to WBC." Lyon also said the company, "reached out to Anonymous spokespersons and asked their opinions on how the matter should be handled."

The attack on WBC has been dubbed '#OpWestBor' on the social network site Twitter. As part of the operation, the Church's website was defaced and taken offline for most of the day Monday. Twitter accounts belonging to Shirley Phelps-Roper, the Church's spokeswoman, and leader Fred Phelps, were hacked and taken over by Anonymous. At the time of this report, both accounts were still under control of the group. Roper's account has been under the control of Anonymous since early Monday morning.

On Sunday, in a video posted on YouTube, Anonymous announced their intentions saying, "From the time you have received this message, our attack protocol has past been executed and your downfall is underway. Do not attempt to delude yourselves into thinking you can escape our reach, for we are everywhere, and all-seeing, in the same sense as God. ... We will render you obsolete. We will destroy you. We are coming." As a result of the breach, Anonymous claims to have gained access to and leaked alleged personal information such as names, home addresses and telephone numbers belonging to Church members. On Wednesday, following the leak, Twitter suspended one of Anonymous' most followed accounts '@YourAnonNews', claiming, according to Anonymous, that the profile posted "private and confidential information" regarding the lawyer for WBC and Roper. The account was reinstated a short time later and that is when Black Lotus contacted Anonymous.

"As a security service, we value freedom of expression ... and have mandate to guarantee passage of data across the internet, which ultimately means that companies like Black Lotus should not interrupt services based solely on public opinion. By terminating their service, we would not actually take their sites offline. Instead, they would be without DDoS protection for a short period of time until they found another service that would harbor them. This logic did not add up for us", Lyon added. He would not elaborate on how long WBC has sought the services of Black Lotus, but stated, "they did not come to us because of any one specific attack."

Lyon didn't state how much revenue is made from WBC, but he added the amount they receive "from WBC is very small." As a result, Lyon says the company will "actually make donations well in excess" of the fees WBC pays. "These donations will be in the thousands [of dollars], but we've not come to a final decision on the exact amounts", he added. According to Lyon, WBC is aware of the company's intentions.

"We made it clear that while they have a right to expression, we have a social responsibility [to] ensure our services benefit society and to aid those in need", said Lyon. Wikinews has contacted the WBC for a statement, but as of this report, no response has been received.

For now, Lyon states only revenue received from the WBC will be considered for donation, but they hope the project can be expanded to include other customers. "While we're attributing this specific decision to WBC, our long term plan is to expand our philanthropy program to substantially offset any harm that may have been caused by those serving content over our network", said Lyon. The company hopes to formally announce their decisions in a press release at the end of the week.

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As UK Pirate Party Takes Down Pirate Bay Proxy, Two Other Pirate Parties Bring New Ones Up

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The sad defeat of yesterday was that the UK Pirate Party had succumbed to legal threats and taken down its long-used proxy for The Pirate Bay, after the copyright industry shamefully had threatened to ruin the Pirate Party’s executive personally. As a result, the Luxemburgish and Argentinian Pirate Parties have both decided to put up their own proxies in solidarity and action.

The copyright industry in the UK decided to go after the UK Pirate Party members personally over the organization’s proxy to The Pirate Bay, threatening financial ruin for them and their families in a lawsuit. This is unprecedented, unethical, and cancerous to society – in essence, a special interest putting its financial resources behind trying to destroy a political party as such because they disagree with the political direction. As a result, the PPUK decided to close the proxy and come back to fight another day. This is despicably shameful behavior on part of the copyright industry, and nothing short of corporate bullying of the “might makes right” type.

As a result of the shameful bullying from the copyright industry in the UK, we now see more proxies bloom across the world, refusing to let sharing, culture, and knowledge go silenced by corporate bullies. The Pirate Parties strike back by refusing to be silenced.

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Sandy Hook, The Westboro Baptist Church, And How We Are All Anonymous

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Anonymous is not without criticism. There are people associated with Anonymous who would steal your credit card number and hack your computer without a second thought. There are people associated with Anonymous who use the word “fag” a bit much for my liking, even if they aren’t using it as a derogatory term against homosexuals. From Wikipedia:

, A statement attributed to a member of Anonymous has described Anonymous as containing every belief and lifestyle, and that the views of “the loudest” of Anonymous aren’t necessarily the views of the rest of Anonymous.

But the thing about Anonymous, is that they are us. As likely as you are to find others associated with the group you may disagree with, you are just as likely to find those you do agree with. This hit me yesterday, and I asked on Twitter how many other moms out there love Anonymous, for their promise to protect the victims of Sandy Hook, for their work putting an end to child pornography websites, for other acts of vigilantism against things that go on in the world that we can all agree are wrong.

Within moments, I was inundated with many messages, all using my hashtag #Momsloveanonymous. And from fathers, too.

One of the credos of Anonymous is “Expect Us.”

How could we expect them? How could I expect that since writing about the Westboro Church and their plans to disrupt memorials I would receive so many messages from Anonymous, asking me if they could help, asking if I needed information, asking if I needed contacts to keep me informed? How could I expect the messages I received from an Anonymous, a father of five, who told me of his own sadness and grief over the children of Sandy Hook?

How could any of us expect CosmotheGod, the 15-year-old hacker, recently charged with computer hacking crimes, to in an instant take over one of the highest ranking members of the Westboro Church twitter feed and change the tweets posted of hate and bigotry into those of love and support for the victims? We don’t expect Anonymous. In a world where things like Sandy Hook happen we don’t expect a group to be so committed to bringing peace to a community who has suffered so greatly this last week.

How could we expect something like this, that due to pressure from Anonymous the internet security firm that hosts the WBC will donate the revenue they receive from the WBC to charity?

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Downloadverbod is definitief van de baan

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De Tweede Kamer heeft donderdag een motie van PvdA en D66 tegen een downloadverbod aangenomen. Het was een keus tussen thuiskopieheffing of een downloadverbod. Een goed alternatief voor deze twee manieren om de rechthebbenden op te kopiëren of te downloaden materiaal tegemoet te komen, is er volgens staatssecretaris Fred Teeven (Veiligheid en Justitie) niet.

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Initiatiefnemer van de motie Kees Verhoeven van D66: 'De Tweede Kamer kiest er gelukkig duidelijk voor om de broodnodige modernisering van het auteursrecht te zoeken binnen de grenzen van internetvrijheid. We moeten toe naar vergroting van het legaal aanbod, door nieuwe online verdienmodellen. Een downloadverbod lost het probleem van onbetaald downloaden niet echt op en zorgt hoe dan ook voor problemen als inperking van privacy van individuele gebruikers."

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European Commission withdraws ACTA referral

The European Commission has withdrawn its referral of ACTA to the European Court of Justice. This spring, the commission had asked the court: “Is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) compatible with the European Treaties, in particular with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union?”

It did this in the midst of massive protests against ACTA, hoping the European Parliament would postpone its vote. After the parliament voted against ACTA, the commission kept the referral to the court alive. It hoped that the court would find no problems with ACTA, it could then send a cosmetically changed ACTA to the parliament.

With the withdrawal of the ACTA referral to the court this second change for ACTA is now impossible. ACTA is fully dead in the EU.

As Switzerland intended to follow the EU, ACTA may be dead in Switzerland as well. Other countries may still ratify ACTA.

The withdrawal of ACTA comes a few weeks after the FFII sent an amicus curiae brief on ACTA to the Court. The registry of the Court answered a few hours later that “only the Member States, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission may participate in the Opinion procedure and submit written statements. The Court does not accept amicus curiae briefs from third parties.”

In an open letter to the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Mr Vassilios Skouris, the FFII asked to reconsider the court’s rules on amicus curiae briefs in opinion procedures. Since the entry into force of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the court is a human rights court. A human rights court that does not want to listen to humans, but only to states and institutions, is, well, not really convincing.

In its amicus curiae brief the FFII concludes that ACTA is not compatible with international human rights instruments, the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, or the European Treaties.

The commission feared a negative court opinion on ACTA. Earlier it has always expressed full confidence that ACTA was fully compatible with the European Treaties and fundamental rights. It can never do this any more, as it now has withdrawn its referral to the Court.

It took an unprecedented mobilisation across the globe to get rid of ACTA. Millions of people now know secret legislative processes are unacceptable, know that “free trade agreements” can threaten freedom and health.

We can expect ACTA like provisions in other EU trade agreements, with Canada (CETA), EU-India and EU – US.

At other side of the planet the US negotiates the TPP, a health and freedom threatening trade agreement the provisions of which may come to Europe as well.

ACTA is dead in the EU. Thanks everyone, nice holidays and stay tuned in the new year.

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Instagram draait nieuwe gebruiksvoorwaarden terug

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Instagram heeft de nieuwe gebruiksvoorwaarden met betrekking tot advertenties die deze week werden ingevoerd teruggedraaid. Dat schrijft Kevin Systrom, mede-oprichter van het Amerikaanse bedrijf, op zijn blog.

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Anonymous versus Westboro, hactivists claim they won

In a battle of two controversial groups, Anonymous claims victory over Westboro Baptist Church as members of the Kansas-based church traveled to Connecticut to protest the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre.

Westboro members have demonstrated at funerals of U.S. service members and said they wanted to be in Newtown, Connecticut "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment."

Anonymous was in full force with a live stream broadcast Wednesday. They took over Twitter accounts, which is easy for them, but as an added touch Anonymous also took over the DVR in the home of the Westboro spokesperson and recorded gay porn to her machine.

Some of the hacking allegedly came from a 15-year-old known as Cosmo the God.

Cosmo was behind taking down websites for NASDAQ and the CIA this year. He was arrested in June, as part of a multi-state FBI sting and was recently sentenced to probation until his 21st birthday, during which time he is prohibited from using the Internet without supervision and prior consent.

Clearly, the account takeovers in the past few days violate his probation. His online presence today is, not surprisingly, gone.

For awhile, Twitter also felt Anonymous was violating their terms of service. Twitter suspended one of the primary accounts associated with @YourAnonNews as well as the account of Westboro Baptist Church spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper, which had been taken over by Anonymous.

A Twitter spokesman wouldn't comment on a specific account, but says suspensions are generally for posting an individual's private information such as a private e-mail address, physical address, telephone number, and financial documents.

The Anonymous account was later restored and emerged with over 100,000 new followers and a new message for Westboro.

"You were in our crosshairs last year, didn't you learn from your mistakes and bad judgements?"

Will this stop Westboro Baptist Church in the long run? Unknown, but on Wednesday Anonymous won.

Westboro was not able to make it to the funeral locations. Good Samaritans, who were following the Anonymous Twitterfeed, systematically prevented Westboro members from getting close to the funerals.

Westboro has reportedly left Connecticut.

By LINDA THOMAS

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Tyler live

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Dear Anonymous

Tyler will go live tonight at 9pm GMT 23 December 2012. To join and access Tyler Leaks or talk to the AnonFamily please do the following:-

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TYLER is finally operational, But STOP, not so fast with that leak

A Twitter message is spreading like wildfire that Operation Tyler is finally completed. The project also known as Project mayhem 2012 or PM2012 is out of Bata testing and ready for for the world. A little while ago The highly anticipated and

heavly prompted "Tyler" platform was scheduled for release on December 5th, 2012, but the project was not fully ready for release, thus the developers decided to postpone the release.

The tweet message read. "#TYLER is finally operational. Let the mayhem begin #pm2012 LEAK IT ALL"

But STOP, before going leak happy remember to Remove the META data also known as Exif data from all files.

Currently there is no easy to strip meta data aka Exif data from files in large quantities easily on cross platform using an Automation process.

Obviously if someone wants to create such a program that can automatically strip meta data from files in large batches that would be great. But for now it is strongly advised to not upload data unless you feel its clean from all meta information.

Digital forensics examiners are very aware of the benefits of identifying metadata in files from word processing documents to image files. The metadata in image files, referred to as Exif (Exchangeable image file format), has been a source of information in forensic examinations for some time. Many files, including video files, have metadata.
If metadata is important in other investigations, can video metadata be a similar potential treasure trove?

When entering the Tyler site in order to access the downloads feature you must sign in to the site. This is very easy. You don't need any real identifying information only an email which can easily be generated, a secure password, and your Anonymous name. any name will do fine.

Keep up the good work guys and remember "Government hates competition." Links are provided below explaining meta data and how to find Tyler.

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China's new law intensifies online clampdown

Further hardening its cyberlaws, China's measures allow the government to delete and censor posts it deems "illegal".

China has unveiled tighter Internet controls, including legalising the deletion of posts or pages which are deemed to contain "illegal" information and requiring service providers to hand over such information to the authorities for punishment.

The rules suggest that the new leadership, headed by Communist Party chief Xi Jinping, will continue muzzling the often
scathing, raucous online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for debate.

The new regulations, announced by the official Xinhua news agency on Friday, also require Internet users to register with their real names when signing up with network providers, though, in reality, this already happens.

Chinese authorities and Internet companies such as Sina Corp have long since closely monitored and censored what
people say online, but the government has now put measures such as deleting posts into law.

"Service providers are required to instantly stop the transmission of illegal information once it is spotted and take
relevant measures, including removing the information and saving records, before reporting to supervisory authorities," the rules state.

The restrictions follow a series of corruption scandals amongst lower-level officials exposed by Internet users,
something the government has said it is trying to encourage.

Extensive measures

Chinese Internet users already cope with extensive censorship measures, especially over politically sensitive
topics like human rights and elite politics, and popular foreign sites Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube
are blocked.

Earlier this year, the government began forcing users of Sina's wildly successful Weibo microblogging platform to
register their real names.

The new rules were quickly condemned by some Weibo users. "So now they are getting Weibo to help in keeping records and reporting it to authorities.

Is this the freedom of expression we are promised in the constitution?" complained one user.

"We should resolutely oppose such a covert means to interfere with Internet freedom," wrote another.

The government says tighter monitoring of the Internet is needed to prevent people making malicious and anonymous
accusations online, disseminating pornography and spreading panic with unfounded rumours, pointing out that many other countries already have such rules.

Despite periodic calls for political reform, the party has shown no sign of loosening its grip on power and brooks no
dissent to its authority.

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Celebrating Anonymous: The hackers’ big year
^{By Andrew Leonard}
“I love Anon.”

The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC’s plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order “to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment,” Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members — home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. — and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous’ direct action was the epitome of cool.

But the next morning, as WBC members and counter-protesters gathered in Newtown, Conn., and Anonymous-affiliated chat rooms buzzed with discussion of “#opWestboro” and “#opWBC,” Twitter dropped a bombshell. The social media network suspended the largest Anonymous Twitter account, @YourAnonNews.

Never mind WBC’s heinous plans! Here was another opportunity for outrage! Censorship — a sin that galvanizes Anonymous like no other. A backup Anonymous account that had been prepared for exactly this kind of dire eventuality sprung into action and solemnly intoned: “Free Speech is Dead.” The hundreds of thousands of people who followed @YourAnonNews salivated for a new showdown, anticipating an imminent clash in which the awesome might of Anonymous would hurl itself against Twitter’s infrastructure. Shit was about to get real.

Except, less than an hour later, Free Speech was Alive. Anonymous, according to Twitter, had run afoul of Twitter’s ban on posting personally identifying information about other people. But after @YourAnonNews applied for reinstatement, Twitter relented. Never mind! Nothing to see here. Back to Newtown we go.

Was the morning’s drama an instance of one of the world’s mightiest social media networks knuckling before the power of the hactivist collective? Maybe. A tempest in a teapot? More likely. Kind of hilarious in all its digital sturm und drang? Definitely. Fantastic publicity for Anonymous’ goal of shaming the Westboro Baptist Church? Absolutely, positively.

As with all of Anon’s actions, whether those be online rallies against overly harsh copyright laws or denial-of-service attacks designed to crash websites deemed the enemy for whatever reason, or straightforward gestures of organizational support for on-the-street actions like the Occupy protests, it’s always a little hard to tell exactly what, in the end, Anonymous achieved with #opWBC, just as it is always tricky to define what Anonymous actually is. Digital freedom fighters? Subversive delinquents? Run-amok pranksters?

None of the above or all of the above, depending on who you talk to. And that might be how it should be. Anonymous prides itself on its inchoate lack of definition. But underneath all the confusion, there’s still something definitely there. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything to merit that teenage declaration of love on Facebook. Particularly for the young, the generation that cut its teeth on the digital frontier and increasingly gets its news from nontraditional sources, Anonymous is the conscience of the Internet; doughty defenders of free speech and privacy in an era when the surveillance state has never been more powerful. So in that sense #opWBC, regardless of its success or failure, provided a sweet coda to a tempestuous year. The Westboro Baptist Church might be an easy target, but when Anonymous lined up against it, it reminded us why the hacker collective, even if it might be hard to define, is still easy to celebrate.

————-

Anonymous accompanied its announcement of hostilities against the Westboro Baptist Church with a slick, ominous video, featuring a computer-generated voice laying out the case for action.

Personally, I have to say, if I were a 15-year-old boy, Anonymous would be knocking my socks off with that kind of badass propaganda. But I’m not; I’m a 50-year-old guy, and while I won’t defer to anyone in my hatred of WBC, Anonymous’ response seemed overwrought and grandiose. “All-seeing, in the same sense as God”? Please. Such rhetoric is more appropriate for the villain in a Chris Nolan Batman movie than for the real world, here and now. Likewise, a comment made by one Anonymous sympathizer during the brief window in which @YourAnonNews was suspended that “Suspending News-Accounts is like killing Journalists (like in Mexico) for telling the Truth,” is just dumb. A Twitter suspension is not a murder.

But when the topic is Anonymous, it’s probably always a good idea to restrain one’s tendency to make totalizing judgments. It is in the nature of Anonymous that the video in question could just as easily have been the product of single person hopped up on Red Bull-fueled delusions of grandeur, instead of a carefully considered representation of the collective hacktivist will. In Anonymous, everyone gets the chance to write their own manifesto. The more, the merrier.

One thing’s for sure — the video was an artifact designed to be shared, hither and yon, and if you hadn’t already heard of Westboro Baptist Church, the video would be certain to pique your interest. My son doesn’t read the newspaper, and we’d never discussed Westboro at the dinner table. But he still found out. I blame Anonymous. No, wait, I salute Anonymous.

Gabriella Coleman, an expert in hacker culture, is writing a book about Anonymous. She told me that one of the most fruitful ways to think about Anonymous is simply as a vehicle for getting the word out.

“One of the things that is interesting about them,” said Coleman, “is that they have shown the world what large-scale protest politics online looks like. But in the end, I think their strength is publicity.”

In 2012 alone, Coleman said, Anonymous had played a significant role in publicizing the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the U.S., the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the government crackdown on the MegaUpload file-sharing site. The denial-of-service attacks that temporarily shut down government or corporate websites shouldn’t necessarily be seen as acts of vandalism that break things, suggested Coleman, but rather as stunts designed to get the world thinking, hey, there might be something weird and wrong, as in the case of MegaUpload, about the spectacle of a government shutting down a major website before a court has found anyone guilty of a crime.

In 2012, Coleman wrote earlier this year, Anonymous “began to be portrayed as an open-source brand of radical protest politics and not necessarily as hooligans hell-bent on unleashing extremist, chaotic acts… Anonymous is a distinct, emerging part of this diverse and burgeoning political landscape. Its real threat may lie not so much in its ability to organize cyberattacks but in the way it has become a beacon, a unified front against censorship and surveillance.

What’s not to love? Go get ‘em, Anonymous.

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Could Belgium Bring Down Scientology?

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Scientologists may be facing their most daunting court case yet, and all it took was for someone to stop calling them a cult. After a years long legal battle, federal prosecutors in Belgium now believe their investigation is complete enough to charge the Church of Scientology and its leaders as a criminal organization on charges of extortion, fraud, privacy breaches, and the illegal practice of medicine. "The decision follows years of investigation that was triggered by a complaint by the Labour Mediation Service in the Brussels Region. Labour mediators were unhappy with a number of labour contracts," reads the report from Flanders News. "The matter ended up on the desk of examining magistrate Michel Claise, who ordered raids on Church of Scientology premises in 2008. During the raids police managed to seize a wealth of evidence," they add. And (with the help of Google translate) Belgian newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo are both reporting that the Belgian federal attorney is now seeking prosecution.

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Anonymous threatens to take down California police department

Members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous are demanding that a California police department remove an officer from the force after video has surfaced of the cop in question firing at a civilian 11 times at point-blank range.

The Manteca Police Department says that Officer John Moody was in the right when he shot nearly a dozen bullets at Ernesto Duenez Jr. last year, killing the man on the spot. Others aren’t so certain, though.

Duenez, a 34-year-old parolee, led police on a car chase last year after he became wanted for questioning in a domestic violence incident earlier that day, June 8, 2011. When he pulled up to a residence and exited the vehicle, however, Moody fired 11 shots, killing him.

Officer Moody claims the suspect was welding a knife at the time of the encounter, although evidence reveals that the weapon was left in the bed of the truck during the shooting. Despite being unarmed while exiting the vehicle, Moody unleashed nearly a dozen rounds at Duenez, including several in his back as he laid on the ground dying.

Earlier this month, the San Joaquin County district attorney’s office concluded that Moody had been legally justified in killing Duenez, but that decision has been called into question since video of the incident has been published on YouTube in the days since. Rosemary Duenez, the victim’s mother, agreed to release the video after the court decided to clear Moody of the crime.

“As heartbreaking as it is, people need to see what happened,” she told the Chronicle. “They need to know what we see, and what we’re fighting for.”

Now with discussion of the case rekindled by the video, members of Anonymous say they will retaliate for Duenez’s death unless Moody’s role with the police department is terminated.

“Having a badge does not give you legal permission to murder freely,” recites a self-proclaimed member of the hacktivist collective in a video uploaded recently to the Web. “Manteca police department, we demand as a final resort that you disband your corrupted Officer John Moody and serve justice for his despicable act of violence.” Otherwise, the actor warns, Anonymous will wage a cyberattack against the Mantec Police Department, including “a complete shutdown of the official website.”

The victim’s sister, Reyna Duenez, says she was unfamiliar with Anonymous up until the video was released.

"We don't even know who they are," she tells KXTV News. “They're voicing their opinion and that's their right, but we don't condone anything that's illegal."

Members of Anonymous say they will take the website offline, though, unless action is taken against the officer.

"We appreciate everyone's voices being heard and all the support and love that we've gotten, but we don't condone anything illegal done to the police department," Ms. Duenez tells the network. "We want legal action against Officer John Moody; we're not trying to do anything illegal. We want to take the right steps all the way."

The Manteca Police Department tells the Manteca Bulletin that they view the video as a valid threat against the force, but has not identified any persons with alleged involvement.

Anonymous Message | Police Brutality | U.S

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Op zaterdag 29 december 2012 17:09 schreef Mint_Clansell het volgende:

[..]

[..]

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Op zondag 30 december 2012 21:55 schreef Mint_Clansell het volgende:
Ik denk dat een internetbeveiligingsbedrijf zoals McAfee beter op de hoogte is dan een veredelde TRU poster.

Vraag me uberhaupt af waarom je die shit hier plaatst, niemand is geinteresseerd in die flauwekul.