security, privacy, linux, books, & more! | LandoftheFree(ish)

Ron Paul Is Right Again

Of course, Ron opposed the Bush administration’s latest police-state powergrab. He said: “Mr. Speaker I rise in opposition to the extension of the Protect America Act of 2007 because the underlying legislation violates the US Constitution.

“The misnamed Protect America Act allows the US government to monitor telephone calls and other electronic communications of American citizens without a warrant. This clearly violates the Fourth Amendment, which states: ‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’”

No wonder he is called the Champion of the Constitution.

eBay: Sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers

This might be interesting. I’m eager to see the outcome of this.

Upcoming Changes to Feedback changes in 2008
eBayâ€™s Feedback system continues to evolve as community makeup and the online marketplace dynamics change.

The eBay Feedback system was originally designed to provide a simple, honest, accurate record of the buyer’s and seller’s online experience to ensure safe and satisfactory trade. It was driven by two factors: transparency and accountability. Over time, we found that the transparency of the existing Feedback system makes some members reluctant to hold others accountable. For example, buyers fear retaliatory Feedback from sellers if they leave a negative.

Therefore, we’ll be making a few significant changes to eBay’s Feedback system to continue to improve accuracy and accountability. Within six months, these changes should help to differentiate and reward sellers who provide a positive buying experience on eBay.

Source

ICANN Moves To Disable Domain Tasting

“Following Google’s crackdown on ‘domain tasters’, ICANN has voted unanimously to eliminate the free period that many domain buyers have been taking advantage of. At the same meeting they also discussed Network Solutions’ front running but took no action on it.”

Source
ICANN’s Release

Analog Spell Check

I was scribbling a note onto a piece of paper yesterday when I paused to think about the spelling of a word I was about to write.

I haphazardly wrote the word incorrectly, expecting – for just a moment – that I could use spellcheck to fix it.

Interview with Sean Moss-Pultz, CEO of OpenMoko

Sean Moss-Pultz was kind enough to answer a few questions with fsckin w/ linux. Heâ€™s got some pretty interesting answers to questions plaguing geeks and non-geeks alike, such as the eternal debate on which is better – Ninjas or Pirates? Keep reading for some candid responses from the CEO of the company behind the Dash Express GPS device and the in-development OpenMoko phone. Dash was recently named one of the top 10 startup companies to watch in 2008 by Wired Magazine.

He also discusses his AE86 restoration.

Wal*Mart Doesnâ€™t Like My ID

“I was at Wal*Mart recently with a few friends, and before we left one of my friends wanted to pick up some cigarettes. We went to the one lane where you could make such a purchase and the lady asked to see ALL of our IDs.
Annoying and pointless, sure, but I didnâ€™t mind showing her my ID. She claimed she was just following the rules, so it was no big deal.

My friends handed over their drivers licenses, and I hand over my concealed weapons permit. She looked at it for a moment and handed it back saying â€œIâ€™m sorry this isnâ€™t valid ID.â€

Oh really? So a license to drive is valid, but a license to carry a weapon is not valid? Both are government issued, and neither are required to have by law.

The lady at the checkout said she could not sell my friend cigarettes unless I could produce a â€œvalid IDâ€ according to her definition, which seemed to only include driverâ€™s licenses. I told her I donâ€™t drive and didnâ€™t have a drivers license. This is a lie, of course, but she was being a pain and I wasnâ€™t willing to give in.

Read the rest of this entry »

ZOMG!!1! Google Is Out To Get Us!

Queue the gasp! Google is out to get you!

Read the rest of this entry »

The True Cost of SMS Messages

Here’s a very good read from the Gthing science blog. Gets you thinking about the rates our mobile phone carriers charge us with.

“I just found out that AT&T (A-fee&fee?) is raising their text message pricing. When I first signed up for AT&T 6 or so years ago it cost 10 cents to send an SMS message, and it was free to receive them.

When AT&T switched to Cingular the price of sending a message dropped to 5 cents, but they started charging for incoming texts – also 5 cents. Assuming you send a message for every message you receive, this works out at about the same price as before.

AT&T came back online and phased out the CIngular brand name, and prices were again changed. This time to 15 cents each way.

More changes have taken place that I canâ€™t quite remember. At one point text messages were 10 cents either way, and at another point they even included MMS (multimedia messages) at the same price as SMS.

As of March SMS messages on AT&T will cost 20 cents and MMS will cost 30 cents – both to send a receive.

So letâ€™s do some math here, and figure out how much this simple transmission is actually costing us.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Bomb Success – Dangerous Cult

The Pirates Can’t Be Stopped

The following is a decent article about when “Ethan” hacked into the MediaDefender company, at the end of 2006…

From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m.
To: it
Subject: pm webserverThe 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised [â€¦]
As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything.

“The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family’s suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father’s Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he’d start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender’s firewall, he started poking around on the company’s servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal.

Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film’s spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony, its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.

MediaDefender’s main stalking grounds are the destinations that help people find and download movies and music for free. Sites such as the Pirate Bay and networks like Lime Wire rely on peer-to-peer, or P2P, software, which allows users to connect with one another and easily share files. (See what movies, television shows, and music are most downloaded.) MediaDefender monitors this traffic and employs a handful of tricks to sabotage it, including planting booby-trapped versions of songs and films to frustrate downloaders. When the company’s tactics work, someone trying to download a pirated copy of Spider-Man 3 might find the process interminable, or someone grabbing Knocked Up might discover it’s nothing but static. Other MediaDefender programs interfere with the process pirates use to upload authentic copies. When Ethan hacked into the company, at the end of 2006, MediaDefender was finishing an exceptional year: Its revenue had more than doubled, to $15.8 million, and profit margins were hovering at about 50 percent.”

OpenOffice 3 has PDF import, native Aqua UI

Thereâ€™s been quite a bit of buzz recently after it was announced that OpenOffice 3 was due in September. It seems, however, most people still arenâ€™t aware of whatâ€™s in store.

We love OpenOffice.org, hereby referred to as OpenOffice like normal people do. We like the fact it does pretty much everything we need for free, we like the out-of-the box PDF and Flash support, its better-than-Word ability to work with large documents, and the joys of using a standard file format thatâ€™s actually, you know, a standard.

But the Openpoffice.org website is a rather scary place. We managed to find this conference presentation lurking in the shadows before running away in fear of mid 90â€™s web design. Follow the link below for more info.

This part madeÂ me laugh:

“Support for MS Office 2007 XML. Microsoft confusingly calls this â€˜Office Open XMLâ€™. We call it Stop Naming Your Unstable Undocumented Shitty Format To Sounds Like Ours Thanks.”

Source

Guiliani thinks you should have REAL ID to get online

Below is a video clip from the FL Republican debate voicing Rudy’s position on a national ID card…

AlterNet: The End of Privacy

Honestly, I don’t know how people still believe in a right to privacy over the web. The actual arteries of the net are based on land lines that are mostly owned and maintained by {gasp} Corporations! It’s not like the wonderful feel good days when people dialed into their friendly neighborhood BBS to play LoRD. You can be traced, analyzed, and studied so the powers that be have a better idea how to control and manipulate you. Don’t like it? Two options: 1) Don’t use their internet or 2) learn to surf the web as a false identity and frequently click random crap just to flood their system with a junk profile.

Best advice? Accept the fate of having a big brother state. Don’t bother trying to fight them on this. You’ll only make them clamp down on you that much faster and that much harder. Any heres an excerpt from the article:

“Amid the controversy brewing in the Senate over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform, the Bush administration appears to have changed its strategy and is devising a bold new plan that would strip away FISA protections in favor of a system of wholesale government monitoring of every American’s Internet activities. Now the National Director of Intelligence is predicting a disastrous cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. if this scheme isn’t instituted.

It is no secret that the Bush administration has already been spying on the e-mail, voice-over-IP, and other Internet exchanges between American citizens since as early as and possibly earlier than September 11, 2001. The National Security Agency has set up shop in the hubs of major telecom corporations, notably AT&T, installing equipment that makes copies of the contents of all Internet traffic, routing it to a government database and then using natural language parsing technology to sift through and analyze the data using undisclosed search criteria. It has done this without judicial oversight and obviously without the consent of the millions of Americans under surveillance. Given any rational interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, its mass spying operation is illegal and unconstitutional.

Read the rest of this entry »

500,000 private Myspace pictures leaked and available for download

Sorry for the typical and tredy “myspace pic” above. This is an article from Wired Magazine. It might be the largest “security breach” in awhile but what on earth would anyone do with 17gb of random Myspace teenagers?

A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site.

The creator of the file says he compiled the photos earlier this month using the MySpace security hole that Wired News reported on last week. That hole, still unacknowledged by the News Corporation-owned site, allowed voyeurs to peek inside the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to “private,” despite MySpace’s assurances that such images could only be seen by people on a user’s friends’ list.

“I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done,” file creator “DMaul” says in an e-mail interview. “I made it public that I was saving these images. However, I am certain there are mischievous individuals using these hacks for nefarious purposes.”

Read the rest of this entry »

New Hampshire Primary: Sham Chain of Custody

This is how the Government secures your ballots. WOW. This is a must see.

Animated PNG in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 has support for Animated PNG:

One of many new features added to Firefox 3 is the support of a new file format, the Animated PNG! Browsers have supported animated GIFs for more than a decade, but the GIF image format has a number of limitations and is overdue for replacement. The PNG image format is now widely accepted as a superior replacement for static GIF images, but for animated GIFs there has not yet been a clear successor. The new Animated PNG format (APNG) is a simple extension to PNG, making it superior for animations too.
-Justin Dolske

Read the rest of this entry »

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 Released

The latest stable version of the Linux kernel 2.6.24 has just been released. Release notes below:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/24/407Â

Date Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:17:19 -0800 (PST)
From Linus Torvalds
Subject Linux 2.6.24

The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for
the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of)
LCA in Melbourne, so let’s hope it’s a good one.

Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI
blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show
that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the
tree.

But most of it really is one-liners, and mostly not very exciting ones at
that.

The appended shortlog is obviously just the changes from -rc8, if you want
the full ChangeLog (all 5.8MB of it) from 2.6.23 it’s available in the
usual places.

Linus

Link

Google to kill Domain Tasting

A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google. It was disclosed in court that one partner that Google had was generating as much as $3 million dollars a month from the practice and that was after Googleâ€™s revenue share. Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quickly Switch Google Accounts with the Google Account Multi-Login

This is for the Firefox browser with Greasemonkey installed. Free Greasemonkey user script Google Account Multi-Login adds a simple drop-down menu to Google pages (including Gmail) for quick switching between your different user accounts. Just install the script, reload the page, and you can start adding your Google accounts to the drop-down. It’s simple to use and it’s a huge timesaver for anyone who actively uses different Google usernames and passwords. It’s probably not the most secure place to put your passwords, but if that doesn’t bother you, this script may come in very handy. The Google Account Multi-Login script is free, just requires Firefox with Greasemonkey.

Link

Cops Can Search You… and Your Phone’s Memory

Here’s a frightening but real proposition: if you are caught breaking certain traffic laws, not only do police have the right to search youâ€”they can go through all your electronic data as wellâ€”your text messages, call histories, browsing history, downloaded emails and photos. In a recent academic paper, South Texas Assistant Professor Adam Gershowitz explains that because many traffic violations are arrestable offenses, just as a cop could search your pockets for drugs, said cop can also search your pockets for a smartphone and go through all its contents. The same is true for any standard arrest, and given the amount of data in current smartphones, it’s a scary proposition (even for law-abiding citizens like us).We’ll give you the CliffsNotes version of Gershowitz’s 30-page article in which he outlines the situation.

Read the rest of this entry »