The F.B.I. is still not certain whether the ring's actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort. The potential threat, according to the F.B.I. agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on Jan. 11, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems. Contents of the briefing were contained in a PowerPoint presentation leaked to a Web site, Above Top Secret.

One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.

In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants -- half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" -- to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.

Microsoft releases Windows XP Service Pack 3...

Google can't really be hurt by any imaginable economic protest to their new censorship tactics, but they (the Zionists) really hate it when they are made to look bad. Whenever Zionists manipulate events and people around them, they seem to be as worried about appearances as they are about results. The inner businessman's concern for image is always at war with the fascist bastard's desire to kill the opposition.

Paul J. Balles argues that, in contrast to the mainstream media where the truth is often gagged, the internet offers a medium where commentators are free to be honest and incorruptible.

Almost 500,000 people have been caught out by a booby-trapped media file, says security firm McAfee.

Stephen Colbert Causes Chaos on Wikipedia, Gets Blocked from Site...

Iran Computer Center...

GOOGLE REPLIES TO URUKNET ~~ WITH LIES...

Wikipedia, the online "free encyclopedia" written and edited by its users that contains 9 million articles in 253 languages, now includes detailed photos of nude homosexual men engaging in sex acts and a variety of other sexually explicit images and content.

In Google's continuing attempt to silence the pro-Palestinian community on the Blogesphere, they have been claiming that it is 'Robots' that are locking blogs, not actual people. In a post I wrote yesterday I countered that claim with the charge that it is a well organised cell of zionists at work.

That very 'cell' I spoke of now openly confesses and are proud to make Google censor the anti-zionist websites!

Especially if the 'CAMERA' in question is the name of an organisation called The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Accuracy to a group such as this means lying and rewriting history, which is exactly what they are doing by editing entries on Wikipedia's Internet site. This is specifically done to entries dealing with Palestinian history.

VIDEO - Pointless 20 - Pointless Upgrade...

This is the fourth time Google Inc. discontinues indexing Uruknet; in the past Google Inc. reinstated it following many complaints sent in by Uruknet's readers.

Dear Valued Customer, If you have purchased from us before and feel we did a good job, please use the link below and rate us 10/10 and we will give you $5.00 in credit to use for anything on our website.

n the past two days, the same number of pro-Palestinian Blogs were locked by Google.... accusing them of being Spam Blogs. They claim it is 'Robots' that are doing the dirty work.... I claim it is a very sophisticated, well organised cell of zionists at work.

Thousands of powerful US executives have received the bogus emails that contain links which, if clicked on, install software letting hackers take control of computers and swipe passwords or other sensitive data.

Internet security insiders refer to the attacks as "whaling" because they use social-engineering trickery involved in "phishing" but target individual "big phish" instead of casting nets in a sea of Internet users.

Blu-Ray sales tank for good reasons...

Uruknet is up and working! Technicians were able to fix the problem. In the past few weeks there were three major hacking attacks against Uruknet. Despite having a powerful Firewall, they were helpless against big D O S (Denial of Service) attacks.

A US politician has accused the Chinese government of ordering US-owned hotels in China to install internet filters that can spy on international visitors coming to watch the summer Olympic games.

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

URUKNET HAS BEEN HACKED ~~ ACTION ALERT!...

Deborah Jeane Palfrey - Telephone Records...

Wikinews has learned that a United States Department of Justice (DOJ) IP Address has been blocked on Wikipedia after making edits to an article which were considered "vandalism". In two separate instances, the IP address from the DOJ removed information from the Wikipedia article about the organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), regarding an attempt by the organization to secretly gain influence on the site. The IP address has been confirmed by Wikinews to be registered and used by the DOJ located in Washington, D.C.

The concept of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal tool not being a backdoor is flawed. For starters, no information is ever disclosed to someone installing the Windows Malicious Software removal tool: "Windows will now install a program which will report suspicious activity to Microsoft". As far as I can recall on any Windows update, there has never been any mention of it.

"But this is a wonderful tool, why are you being such a troll and knocking Microsoft for doing the right thing!". The question slash qualm I have about this tool is I'd like to know what, why, when and how things are being done on my machine. It's not a matter of condemning Microsoft, but what happens if at some point in time Microsoft along with government get an insane idea to branch away from obtaining other data for whatever intents and purposes?

We've seen how the NSA is allowed to gather any kind of information they'd like (http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying), we now have to contend with Microsoft attempting to do the same. Any way you'd like to market this, it reeks of a backdoor: (again pointing to the definition) A backdoor in a computer system ... is a method of bypassing normal authentication, ... obtaining access to ... , and so on, while attempting to remain undetected. There's no beating around the bush here on what this tool is and does.

I Googled videos for " DC Madam Murdered" and got the following list. The only problem is that most of the videos with this title won't play. Censorship? Hope it's just me. Can you play them?

YouTube Domain Down? Hacked? Denied?- Entire Site Down [Briefly]...

Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia...

Cyberwarfare: Darpa's New 'Space Race'...

VIDEO - The average laptop has more germs than a toilet seat apparently....

The Recording Industry Association of America suffered a legal setback this week in a music piracy case where a judge ruled that the sole act of making a music file available in a "shared folder" does not violate copyright laws.

ReactOS® is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.

ReactOS is the most complete working model of a Windows® like operating system available. Consequently, working programmers will learn a great deal by studying ReactOS source code and even participating in ReactOS development.

"I wouldn't put on Vista if it was free," says Weider, chief information officer for Ministry Health Care. "In the past, there's always been an important reason to upgrade, but XP (the previous version of Windows) is perfectly acceptable."

SCAM ALERT: 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. SCAM...

Several news reports have suggested that Microsoft is also providing law enforcement with new tools to defeat BitLocker in Windows Vista or access to a secret back door within Windows. A Microsoft spokesperson denied this, saying, "COFEE does not circumvent Windows Vista BitLocker encryption or undermine any protections in Windows through secret 'backdoors' or other undocumented means."

The zionists are in a frenzy. Their crimes are being exposed and that has them running in circles. Their cries of anti-Semitism have been falling on deaf ears so new tactics had to be developed...

Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up...

'Children Killed In Gaza' video taken down by Youtube...

A Colorado man accused of sending hundreds of thousands of spam e- mails has been sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and falsifying e-mail headers. ... Federal prosecutors say Davidson's operation used false e-mail headers to disguise the sender. Prosecutors say some of the spam was meant to dupe stock investors and manipulate markets.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

...

Smith acknowledged Microsoft's efforts are not purely altruistic. It benefits from selling collaboration software and other technology to law-enforcement agencies, just like everybody else, he said.

As more people become 'Netsavvy', the powers that be have become 'Netcensors'. We see this happening on a daily basis as we watch Websites get shut down, Websites blacklisted, and now the newest 'game' of hacking Websites.

The latter has become a favourite game of the zionists in recent weeks, hacking into the Websites that speak the truth. Two recent examples of this mischievous activity are What Really Happened and Tikkun Magazine. Both had their mailing lists hacked and subscribers received most annoying emails from them.

Wikinews has learned that a United States Department of Justice (DOJ) IP Address has been blocked on Wikipedia after making edits to an article which were considered "vandalism". In two separate instances, the IP address from the DOJ removed information from the Wikipedia article about the organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), regarding an attempt by the organization to secretly gain influence on the site. The IP address has been confirmed by Wikinews to be registered and used by the DOJ located in Washington, D.C.

What Laptop does Microsoft`s CEO Use?...

The crime itself is horrific -- beyond comprehension in its cruelty -- so there's some hesitancy to complain about semantics. But this is a technology blog and the underlying issue -- society's tendency to blame modern-day bad deeds on technology instead of the bad-deed doers -- is an important one.

In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically.

DIGG.COM & Wikipedia EXPOSED!!!...

SELLING KOSHER VIAGARA ON THE NET...

Attacks on legitimate Web domains, including some belonging to the United Nations, have infected 500,000 pages since earlier this week.

FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity...

Lew Rockwell of LewRockwell.com describes himself as "an opponent of the central state, its wars and its socialism." But don't decide that the central state wages it's wars to benefit Israel becuase he won't print your conclusions.

Customs at Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) searches through mobiles phones and laptops....

Microsoft took another hit on the legal front Monday when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to let the software behemoth appeal a ruling by the judge in the so-called "Vista Capable" lawsuit that had granted the plaintiffs class action status.

The online auction giant eBay is suing the popular internet community ad site Craigslist to "safeguard its four-year financial investment".

In a statement, eBay claimed that in January, Craigslist executives took actions that "unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest by more than 10%".

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A cross-site scripting vulnerability in the social networking section of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign site was exploited over the weekend to redirect users to the URL of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), researchers claimed today.

According to the U.K.-based antifraud company Netcraft Ltd., someone identified only as "Mox" confessed to the hack in an entry on the Community Blogs section on the Obama site Sunday. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, leads Clinton in the race for the party's presidential nomination. The site exploit occurred just before this week's big Pennsylvania primary.

...On the hot spot is NDS Group, a UK-Israeli firm that makes smartcards for pay-TV systems like DirecTV. The company is a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation. The charges stem from 1997 when NDS is accused of cracking the encryption of rival NagraStar, which makes access cards and systems for EchoStar's Dish Network and other pay-TV services. Further, it's alleged NDS then hired hackers to manufacture and distribute counterfeit NagraStar cards to pirates to steal Dish Network's programming for free.

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

Microsoft and Novell announced yesterday that they are intensifying their joint effort to persuade Chinese IT executives to pay for their software, specifically through the much maligned marketing relationship that finds Redmond beating its deafening drum for the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution controlled by its onetime bitter, now compliant rival.

When users visit a website like Wired.com, the DNS system translates the domain name into an IP address such as http://72.246.49.48. But if a particular site does not exist, the DNS server tells the browser that there's no such listing and a simple error message should be displayed.

But using Barefruit's technology, Earthlink instead intercepts that Non-Existent Domain (NXDOMAIN) response and sends the IP address of Barefruit's ad server as the answer. When the browser visits that page, the user sees a list of suggestions for what site the user might have actually wanted, along with a search box and Yahoo ads.

The rub comes when a user is asking for a nonexistent subdomain of a real website, such as http://webmale.google.com, where the subdomain webmale doesn't exist (unlike, say, mail in mail.google.com). In this case, the Earthlink/Barefruit ads appear in the browser and the title bar indicates that it's the official Google site.

Aside from some interesting trademark questions, the issues is serious because Barefruit neglected basic web programming techniques which exposed its servers -- and therefore every website on the internet -- to a malicious JavaScript attack.

Proof Google is God - Church of Google...

State and federal attorneys-general met in Adelaide late last month to canvass options for empowering the Australian Communications and Media Authority to order internet service providers to cease hosting racist and anti-Semitic websites.

Researchers have identified the malicious executable that attackers have been using to compromise thousands of websites for the last few months and serve up malicious code.

The executable turned out to be a utility designed to perform automated SQL injection attacks against websites found to be vulnerable through specific Web searches, according to an analysis done by the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center. The utility seems to be written in Chinese and gives users the ability to decide which HTML tag he wants to insert into the vulnerable Web page.

About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99...

A former West Haven rabbi has been given a suspended five year prison sentence for possessing child pornography.

"Clearly a line has to be drawn between freedom of speech, voicing of differing opinions - and material that just incites racial hatred, religious intolerance and violence. When that line is crossed, that material ought not to be freely available to all who log onto the web."

"The network is asserting almost complete control of the users' ability to use their network as a gateway to the Internet," said Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group. "They become gatekeepers rather than gateways."

CENSORING BY GOOGLE EARTH...

Recently, the poll asked "As a parent, which would you find most offensive in a video game?" The results, as you can see to the right, found that more parents would be okay with cursing or even a severed head in video games over hetero-sex and "two men kissing." Yep, horrific violence just ain't so bad compared to two adult sharing a passionate moment together.

IronPort's Patrick Peterson observed that an IT graduate in Romania might be able to earn $400 per month legitimately, compared with several thousand per month in the cybercrime economy. And I've spoken with security researchers who suggest the difference in pay between being a security researcher and a security exploiter differs by a factor of 10 quite often.

Hubble maps the changing constellation of Internet 'black holes'...

"At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts.

The Man Banned By Digg...

It all started with Mac OS X, the multi-core, multi-processor platform officially released in 2001. Based on "Mach," a university UNIX research prototype, Mac OS X represented a clean break with the computer industry's uniprocessor past. The modular new OS allowed Apple to condense its core task management function into a tiny computing kernel.

That kernel has proved easily adaptable across the entire Apple product line, from highly complex servers all the way down to the relatively simple iPod Touch. Such modularity allows Apple to add whatever functions are necessary for each product environment--all while maintaining cross-product compatibility.

By contrast, Microsoft has held on to an OS tethered to the 1980s, piling additions upon additions with each upgrade to Windows. With last year's arrival of Vista, Windows has swollen to 1 billion bytes (a gigabyte) or more of software code. The "Mach" kernel of the Mac OS X, however, requires less than 1 million bytes (a megabyte) of data in its smallest configuration, expanding modestly with the sophistication of the application.

In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.

Here's the deal. In a sample of 20,000 users, TiVo monitors traffic -- which contestants get replayed (a sign of popularity) and which one's get fast-forwarded.

You think it's bogus? Well, the TiVo system has nailed who got booted four weeks in a row.

And who does TiVo say is getting the ax tonight? Poor Syesha. Take it to the bank, people.

Major General William T. Lord is commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command (Provisional), Barksdale Air Force Base, La. He is responsible for establishing cyberspace as a domain in and through which the Air Force flies and fights, to deliver sovereign options for defense of the United States. In his current duty, he is creating the Air Force major air command for organization, training and equipping of combat forces to operate in cyberspace.

It was a happy moment when I heard the news that UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched in coordination with Google Earth, a new layer that focus on refugee camps around the world.

However, my happiness did not last for long when I discovered that NONE of the Palestinian refugee camps within the Occupied Palestinian Territories are published there (see map below). So, even if you "Sit in front of your computer", with a few clicks you can "see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee", but not the Palestinian refugees' experience. They don't exist!

Gangs of thousands of zombie home computers grinding out spam, committing fraud and overpowering websites are the most vexing net threat today, according to law enforcement and security professionals.

Today's botnet herders have hundreds of thousands of computers at their command and use technically sophisticated ways to hide their headquarters, making it easy for them to make millions from spam and credit card theft. They can also be used to direct floods of fake traffic at a targeted website in order to bring down a rival, extract protection money or less frequently, used to make a political point in the case of attacks on Estonia and the Church of Scientology.

I started transcribing this video ( http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/81878 / ) from Lamont/Lieberman primary day 2006 but frankly I'm just too pissed to do it. Although the FBI investigation in to the incident was concluded in 2006, due to the perseverance of the Stamford Advocate the results were revealed today, and found what we all know to be true at the time -- no blogger hacked into Joe's website.

Joe Lieberman crashed his own website.

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has dropped the bomb.

At a speech to hundreds of security professionals Wednesday, Chertoff declared that the federal government has created a cyber security "Manhattan Project," referencing the 1941-1946 project led by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop American's first atomic bomb.

This is being pushed by none other that Rep. Jane Harman, who's behind the "Thought Crime Bill" that is now sitting on that Senator from Tel Aviv's desk, Joe Lieberman.

This hearing ties in nicely with certain elements in the US government that want to censor the Internet, since it's such a dangerous source of.... REAL NEWS.

Sometimes Blogging is no Fun at All....

Prominent writers, members of progressive American organizations known for their heavy criticism of Israel will tour the country, meet with top officials. 'We want to provide them with an eye-opening experience that will help them better understand the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict,' says trip organizer Ira Forman

Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist is being accused of illegal eavesdropping in a civil lawsuit that alleges he and his polling firm monitored the personal e-mails of a former associate who started a rival company.

Germany likes to call itself the "Land of Ideas" - and over the centuries it has certainly had plenty of them. It was Germans who invented the aspirin, the airship, the printing press and the diesel engine.

But Germany has surely never produced anything quite as weird as the automated restaurant.

Brian Krische and his roommate had a lot of their Netflix discs go missing before they received them, and they grew suspicious. So, like any self-respecting and enterprising geeks, they set up a motion-sensing camera pointed at their mailbox. The results? One chubby, shirtless criminal caught red-handed.

As the slowing economy and growing unemployment send ad revenues falling at Monster and CareerBuilder, Smuz.com is growing rapidly with its free job posting service. As more and more people turn to new job search engines like Indeed.com to find their next career move, paying expensive fees to get your job on major sites is becoming harder to justify.

"The idea grew out of pure frustration," says Smuz creator, Paul Pickthorne. "As a recruiter for 15 years, I often didn't have the budget to advertise all the jobs I was working on. Now that job seekers are increasingly using job search engines like Indeed, SimplyHired or Jobster instead of visiting job sites directly, it's the perfect time to offer a free alternative. Those job seekers don't care which site a job is on, they are all listed in the search results the same way. Why pay CareerBuilder hundreds of dollars for a single page of HTML? It makes little sense."

Launched under a month ago, Smuz already has thousands of companies listing jobs on the site including household names like Marriott, Allstate and ADP. With job search engines totaling over 7 million unique visitors a month, the future of traditional job boards is looking bleak. Smuz even competes on features with the major sites. Email notifications and one-click-apply features both come as standard. Smuz is one of a growing breed of websites that are shaking up markets by using Google AdSense to remaining free while generating profit for its owners.

List of 272 Republicans charged with criminal activity, 60 of which are pedophiles. Each name is linked to a group heading of the type of crime alleged or convicted.

It's not paranoia: they really are spying on you.

He said Windows 7 could be released "sometime in the next year or so" during a Q&A session at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Banking giant HSBC (HSBA.L: Quote, Profile, Research)(0005.HK: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it has lost a computer disc containing details of nearly 400,000 customers.

The disc contains the names, dates of birth and insurance cover levels of 370,000 people who hold life assurance policies at the bank.

Remember last November when the "Israeli online military intelligence magazine," DEBKAfile, reported that al-Qaeda was poised to attack "Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites," according to an unconfirmed report? On October 29, "Osama bin Laden's followers" supposedly announced they would "test their skills by launching cyber attacks against 15 targeted sites" and would expand the "e-Jihad" thereafter until "hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites," Fox News reported. Sure, from caves and CIA constructed tunnels in Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the "preponderance of cyberattacks against the U.S. military still comes from individual hackers, not nation-states, a senior defense," reports United Press International.

Youtube hacks Ron Paul vote count CIA Brainwashing...

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, "the grid" will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The e-mail addresses of registered child sex offenders would be sent to social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, which could then bar them.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

A tribal audit last year revealed that Utah-based provider OnSat Network Communications Inc. may have double-billed the tribe.

Those documents you agree to -- usually without reading -- ostensibly allow your ISP to watch how you use the Internet, read your e-mail or keep you from visiting sites it deems inappropriate. Some reserve the right to block traffic and, for any reason, cut off a service that many users now find essential.

The Associated Press reviewed the "Acceptable Use Policies" and "Terms of Service" of the nation's 10 largest ISPs -- in all, 117 pages of contracts that leave few rights for subscribers.

"The network is asserting almost complete control of the users' ability to use their network as a gateway to the Internet," said Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group. "They become gatekeepers rather than gateways."

BT tested secret "spyware" on tens of thousands of its broadband customers without their knowledge, it admitted yesterday.

It carried out covert trials of a system which monitors every internet page a user visits.

Companies can exploit such data to target users with tailored online advertisements.

An investigation into the affair has been started by the Information Commissioner, the personal data watchdog.

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."

Feds Overstate Software Piracy's Link To Terrorism...

Some may say that Artificial Intelligence has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, but perhaps a very practical use for this has been discovered by a group of Tel Aviv University students. They have combined pinpointing software with physiological research. Amit Kagian, the program's developer explained, "Coordinates are used for calculating geometric features and asymmetry".

In the latest attacks, which occurred last week, hackers planted malicious search terms in Web addresses along with popular search words so the sites would be ranked high in Google searches.

One site that was infected, the TalkingBiz blog run by the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, tried to get visitors to download malicious code from a site hosted in American Samoa that has since been taken down. The location of the site does not indicate the location of the hackers, however.

Over the past few weeks it has been revealed that employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission have been using fake pseudonyms to sign up accounts on website they have targeted as "hate" sites. In explosive allegations filed by Marc Lemire with the Ottawa Police Service and the RCMP, not only were the CHRC spying and posting misinformation on targeted websites - but they connected to the unsecured wireless access point of an unsuspecting neighbor and impersonated her internet connection to do it!

Sprint to Sell IPhone-Like Device...

Child pornography investigations in Atlantic Canada are being held up by internet service providers who require search warrants before providing customer information, say RCMP.

The websites say Israeli surfers have used the site to upload and share pornographic material in large numbers, "forcing" them to place a blanket ban on Israeli web users.

Today, many people fear US government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons".

Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues.

FACED WITH PRESSURE FROM THE Federal Communications Commission, cable company Comcast said Thursday it will end its practice of slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites.

A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.

AOL-Time Warner's popular social networking website Propeller.com has banned submission of all Prison Planet.com material - citing Prison Planet's "inflammatory" articles about 9/11 as its justification.

It turns out that the federal government's Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia just for spies and spooks, is as prone to altercations as is its public counterpart.

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room finds a 2006 report written for U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests ways the military should deal with the blogosphere. One suggestion is for the military to hire bloggers to "pass the U.S. message":

It is my argument that the future direction of present technological emergence is one that seeks to go beyond networks; rather it is towards ubiquitous technologies that offer a complete immersive (or rather 'sub-mersive') experience of a digitised environment. With networks there is always the possibility of moving into the grey and illusive areas in-between. These are the areas where the networks do not, or cannot, cover; neglected zones of poverty and risk, and insecure zones of warlord regions, and smuggling zones. With immersive technological mapping there may one day be no 'spaces in-between'; the distinction between 'in' and 'out' dissolved; boundaries melted away under the digital gaze. In this article I argue that the US military-industrial complex is attempting to gain full dominance over the complete information spectrum, including dominating the electro-magnetic spectrum and the Internet, in order to gain full total coverage for purposes of containment and control.

Warner Music Group has proposed a $5/month music tax to be charged by ISPs for 24-hour access to high-quality music downloads:

This Year's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries...

Former First Lady Kept Insisting She Came Under Sniper Fire in Bosnia Despite Newspaper Stories to the Contrary and Backed Off Only After Video Footage Proving her Claim to be False Was Posted on YouTube -- and Picked Up By the TV Networks

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

"Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA's propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the 'creators' of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song -- about 13% of the wholesale price -- down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."

Sony BMG, a company known for enforcing its intellectual property rights, is now facing the other end of an Intellectual Property related lawsuit. A report (French) says the complaining company, PointDev, seized some of Sonys assets which revealed that the pirated software appeared on four of their servers.

Since 2003, Chinese military hackers have been causing havoc in the computer networks of some of America's most secure military and nuclear centers. It is now believed terrorists can also see the value in launching cyber attacks against U.S. computer systems.

VIDEO - Zyklon-B test on humans...

One of the things that Apple has always prided itself over and promoted in no uncertain terms, has been the so-called 'robust security' offered by its OSX operating system. However this supposition of Apple's took a huge beating on Thursday when a team of researchers from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) managed to hack a MacBook Air in just two minutes using a previously unknown security vulnerability in Apple's own safari browser.

Under pressure from federal regulators, Comcast Corp. reversed its stance over hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers and promised Thursday to treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Vietnam Wall)...

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

Mukasey, who did not elaborate and did not take questions, said his department is devoting increasing resources to prosecuting such crimes and filed 7 percent more IP cases in 2007 than in 2006 and 33 percent more than in 2005.

A congresswoman calls for a probe after finding tapes that still contain bank account numbers, tax and benefit information, expense reports, and more

Ron Cooke, the owner of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Messenger Solutions, stands accused of violating Washington's Computer Spyware Act and Consumer Protection Act for marketing programs that went under names including WinAntiVirus Pro 2007, System Doctor, WinAntiSpyware and Messenger Blocker.

According to a complaint filed Tuesday in Washington state court, the company caused some people surfing the net to receive a torrent of pop-ups that advertised porn links and other sketchy sites. The messages were sent through Windows Messenger Service, a feature in Windows that allows network administrators to send notices to users.

Mozilla Corp. yesterday patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked "critical," in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to Version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging Inc. spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.

A researcher at MarkMonitor has discovered that 75 percent of phishing sites are built around Google search terms traded and shared in underground forums.

Phishers use these so-called "Google dorks," or search terms, as a simple way to search for and locate vulnerable Websites to hack -- mainly those based on PHP -- that they then can use to host their phishing attacks. John LaCour, CISSP and director of anti-phishing for MarkMonitor, says he found the trend while canvassing some hacker forums and sampling a group of phishing sites.

According to a report issued yesterday by WhiteHat Security, nine out of 10 Websites still have at least one vulnerability that attackers could exploit. On average, there are about seven flaws on each site studied.

The FBI has begun busting people for clicking on links that advertise child pornography. At first blush, that may sound like a good thing, so let me just re-state: The FBI can arrest and convict you based on no other evidence than the fact that your browser visited a Web page.

Still not scared? Let me give you a few examples of how I could easily make your browser visit the wrong site, if I wanted to ruin your life.

Is Vietnam the next haven for cybercrime? The country is apparently facing a major Internet security crisis, with some 95% of its PCs infected with viruses and 40% of its stock brokerages vulnerable to attack, according to officials there.

A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.