Content Industry Wants to Hack File-Sharers

The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property is regarded by the entertainment industry as an independent and bipartisan initiative of leading US representatives from the private sector, public service in national security and foreign affairs, academe, and politics. Apparently, all of those representatives just happen to be very interested in peer-to-peer piracy.

The group has recently prepared an 84 page report saying that it expects Congress to legalize the use of malware in order to punish those users who are suspected of being copying illegally. The content industry wants to develop software that would be then loaded on PCs. The software in question should somehow detect if the user is pirating, and lock up their machine until the person confesses a crime to the police. Actually, this might be a good suggestion, because there is already a working model. The only problem is that it is used by Russian organized crime and deploys ransomware.

As you can see, it seems like after having run out of ideas, in order to fix their business model, the entertainment industry keeps looking to dictators and criminals. Then, more details on the scheme make it amusing reading. For example, they can design software which would only allow authorized users to open the files that contain valuable data. In case an unauthorized user accesses the data in question, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized person’s PC could be locked down. The software will also provide the instructions about how to contact the police to receive the password the user needs to unlock the account.

It looks really weird that the entertainment industry is asking the American government (which is at the moment failing to cope with malware on its own infrastructure) for the right to use the same sort of techniques to protect its outdated business model. The industry experts believe that the American government is not that dumb. Moreover, the very fact that such ideas are suggested by the content industry demonstrates how little its representatives really care, or know about online security. Hopefully, ordinary citizens won’t be attacked by trojan horses guided by the movie and music studios in the near future.

US Accused Iran Of Hacking Energy Companies

It seems that Iran is trying to prove it can be almost as menacing as China. The country has apparently hacked a number of the American energy companies. Press reports reveal that the hackers managed to access control system software in a number of oil, gas and power corporations. In response, the US officials went as far as to compare the attacks to cyber reconnaissance missions. The American authorities believe that the small scale attacks could be used to find the way to disrupt services later. In other words, in case of war, it is alleged that Iran would be able to target American infrastructure.

Security experts point out that in theory, attacks on control systems may also inflict crippling physical damage. For example, this may happen if the attack turns off safety features, like automatic lubrication of generators and other essential equipment.

Actually, this isn’t the first time the United States has accused Iran of hacker attacks. Earlier, Iran has allegedly targeted American banks with massive DDoS attacks. In addition, the country is said to be aggressively expanding its cyber warfare capabilities. It seems that Iran started taking cyber warfare more seriously after the country was struck by the Stuxnet virus.

Android Malware Forwards Your Messages To Russia

It turned out that the latest malware designed for Android will forward copies of your SMS to Russian criminals. It might appear very interesting for a Russian criminal to find out that you want pizza for dinner or that you cannot speak right now because of the important meeting, but it seems unclear what the hackers hope to achieve with a huge database of useless information.

Anyway, security companies call to admire the coding and tremble with fear at its results. The matter is that once installed, the malware can be used to steal sensitive messages for, say, blackmailing purposes. Worse still, the criminals can learn codes sent to your phone by banks to confirm online banking transactions. The only problem is that the crook would have to install the malware on a specific cell phone manually. This, as you can understand, is not the most efficient way of spreading trojans. Even after doing so, the hackers will then have to sort out the message they are looking for from a huge database created from everyone who had the virus on board.

In the meanwhile, the experts of the Russian security company Doctor Web dubbed the malware in question "Android.Pincer.2.origin". Upon running the trojan, the user will see a fake notification about the certificate's successful installation. However, after that the malware won’t perform any noticeable activities for a while. The security experts found out that the hackers can then send following instructions to the malware – for example, turn it on and off. In addition, the virus can change servers in case the current one is shut down.

Large-Scale Analysis on Digital Piracy

Large-Scale Analysis on Digital Piracy

 

The latest report on sharing computer games through BitTorrent’s networks revealed a number of interesting aspects of the digital piracy problem. The unauthorized sharing of digital material (via P2P technology) has led to heated debates and media headlines. While one side is claiming that Internet piracy kills American jobs and deprives content industry of billions of dollars in revenue, the other one stands for freedom of speech and online freedom.

 

The latest report is focused on game piracy and used open methodologies to collect information which covered a 3-month period in 2010 and 172 games. The interesting fact is that the results tore down all the myths surrounding Internet piracy. For instance, “shooter” games aren’t the most pirated ones – instead, children’s and family games are. In addition, the report points out that the real figure of unauthorized copies which are being accessed via P2P networks is lower than the entertainment industry claims to be.

It turned out that 12.6 million unique peers from over 250 countries/areas shared pirated games. In the meanwhile, of the 173 sampled games, the 10 top popular titles drove over 40% of unique peers on BitTorrent, and 20 of the countries made up over 3/4 of the total file-sharing activity.

Overall, over 500,000 unique peers from all over the world sharing the most popular games titles through P2P were acknowledged in the research. The most dedicated peers were from the following countries: Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Armenia, Serbia, and Portugal. In addition, mass-media’s positive game reviews attract the most attention on file-sharing networks.

Anders Drachen and Robert Veitch, the researchers from Denmark, explained that first and foremost, BitTorrent game piracy was extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed – at least within the period covered by the research. Nevertheless, the numbers in their investigation proved that previously reported scale of game piracy was far too high. Moreover, the researchers point out that some common myths were also wrong, like it was with the belief that it was only shooters that got pirated – instead, the researchers saw a lot of activity for children’s and family games on file-sharing networks within the investigated period.



US Authorities Targeted BitCoin Exchange Service

The Department of Homeland Security seized assets from Mt. Gox Dwolla account a few days ago and accused it of violating money transfer regulations. As everyone knows, BitCoin is growing rapidly today, and some companies invest thousands of dollars on the venture. One of the largest BitCoin exchange services was the Japanese startup Mt. Gox. It allowed people to convert US dollars to BitCoins and vice versa, with their most popular service being Dwolla – an electronic wallet providing real time transfers between people and businesses.

A few days ago the US authorities have seized all of the assets in the Mt. Gox Dwolla account for infringing money transfer regulations. Dwolla had nothing else to do but to acquiesce to the request. The problem is that as a currency exchange service, Mt. Gox set up a Wells Fargo business account for Mutum Sigillum LLC and was asked to complete a document stating whether the company planned to provide money services. The authorities point out that the document listed Mutum Sigillum LLC as a company which didn’t engage in money services. Indeed, the business answered “no” to those important questions: “Do you deal in or exchange currency for your customer?” and “Does your business accept funds from customers and send the funds based on customers’ instructions (Money Transmitter)?”

Moreover, in order to limit fraudulent activity, the company also needed to register with FinCEN like any money services in the United States. For people who use the exchange service, this move will only affect BitCoin traders using Dwolla to fund their trades. In the meanwhile, other traders in the United States may still use bank wires to send and receive money from Mt. Gox trades. Those traders with Dwolla accounts won’t be affected, only their ability to transfer directly to the company with Dwolla will. Finally, all these limitations only apply to the traders from the United States.

Industry experts point out that for those that have utilized Dwolla, there was still a lot of other BitCoin options, including BitInstant. The latter allow people to make deposits by cash. In the meanwhile, BitInstant still accepts Dwolla and is able to make transfer to different exchange services.

Google Deployed Person Finder after Boston Explosions

Just like after Japan and New Zealand earthquakes, the search giant has deployed its Person Finder tool in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings. The instrument called Person Finder combines available records allowing to track down your close ones in the wake of disaster, and now Google decided people need it again. 

The tool dubbed Person Finder was first deployed in response to the Haiti earthquake three years ago. It was also available for Japan’s 2011 tsunami, as well as the Christchurch – New Zealand earthquake.

All gathered data becomes publicly available. The company explains that it cannot and does not verify the accuracy of the collated data. However, it provides room for status updates which may contain information saying whether people have been confirmed alive and well. There is also a space for notes on each page you may use to leave your tips. The service allows to search for people’s names or parts of their names. Person Finder will bring up search results including their status. For instance, the search for “Mary” would result in a list of people with that name and updates to each of them like “someone has received information that this person is alive”.

The webmasters are free to embed the Google’s tool into their websites, and the web developers are encouraged to help improve this open source initiative of the search giant. Google revealed that after a limited time Person Finder won’t be publicly available, in order to assuage privacy concerns. The tool is known as a part of the company’s Crisis Response department.

7 Hackers & A Great Bank Robbery

The US prosecutors announced that a cybercrime ring managed to steal $45 million from a couple of Middle Eastern banks in one of the largest bank robberies ever. The group coped with hacking into credit card processing companies and withdrawing money from ATMs in more than two dozen countries.





8 individuals were alleged to form the NY-based cell of the group, 7 of which are already in custody, while the 8th, allegedly a leader of the gang, was reported to have been murdered in the Dominican Republic this past April.

According to the prosecutors, the ringleaders were outside the US, but the investigation is still continuing. Anyway, it seems that the crooks somehow managed to do some serious damage in short time. For instance, during one of the 10-hours attacks, they raided $40 million from ATMs in two dozen countries through 36,000 transactions.

It turned out that the cybercrime group used laptops and the worldwide web instead of guns and masks. The outfit managed to work its way from the computer systems of large companies to the streets of New York City. Thus, you can see how cybercrime poses a huge threat to the international banks and how tech-savvy criminal gangs are now.

So, within the last 5 months, the collective hacked into the computers of a couple of credit card processors – one in India and the other in the US. They then increased the available balance and withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued by banks of Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Finally, they distributed counterfeit debit cards to their people across the globe, enabling them to extract millions of dollars out of ATMs in a matter of hours.

In the meanwhile, MasterCard announced that it did cooperate with law enforcement in the investigation but its systems weren’t involved or compromised. Experts believe that the robbers targeted Middle Eastern banks because those usually allow people putting larger sums on cards. In addition, they don’t monitor them as closely as other banks. Although it was only a matter of time before the Eastern banks were considered an easy target for cyber criminals, security experts remind that the attack mirrored a similar case four years ago, which targeted the prepaid debit-card unit of Royal Bank of Scotland. In the time, the bank lost over $9 million in just 12 hours.

US Center For Copyright Information Lost Its Title

It became known that the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) lost not only its company status, but also the right to enforce the so-called “six-strikes” regime. It turned out that the Center for Copyright Information breached state laws and is currently forced to close down its doors, at least for a while.

 

 

 

 

 

Established two years ago by the movie and music industries, along with 5 of the most prominent broadband providers of the United States, the CCI was put together with a clear purpose: to educate the public about copyright infringement and enforce the US copyright law.

As you remember, the Copyright Alert System was finally launched by the organization on February 2013 after multiple delays. However, it turned out to have a short life due to some irregularities – recently, the Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs had to revoke the legal right of the Center for Copyright Information to conduct its business on American soil. The authority explained that if organization’s status is revoked then articles of incorporation / organization shall be void. As a result, all powers conferred upon such entity are declared inoperative, while for a foreign entity the certificate of foreign registration is revoked and all powers conferred hereunder shall be inoperative.

In other words, the Center for Copyright Information is currently facing civil penalties and maybe even fines. In addition, its name is no longer protected by the American laws, so the country should be ready for emerging scammers who may register under the organization’s current name. The most important fact is that the company lost its right to enforce the graduated response system.

The Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory explained that if a Washington DC corporation is revoked, its name will be reserved and protected until the end of the current year. However, in 2014, other business entities will be able to use the corporation’s name.

In other words, the CCI could either die completely or run under a different name. However, the industry observers point out that the outfit is much likely to come back. Indeed, the Center for Copyright Information confirmed that the necessary paperwork for the company to take its status back had already been filed.

 

Cable Industry Admits That Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Congestion

Data Caps not Due to Congestion!!!!

A month after one study called shenanigans on the cable industry’s repeated assertion that data caps and usage-based pricing are intended to relieve congestion, the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association has admitted as much.


NCTA president, and former FCC chair, Michael Powell recently told a Minority Media and Telecommunications Association audience that usage-based pricing isn’t about congestion, but “how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost.”

He said that charging more to customers who use the Internet the most “is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs.”

Time Warner Cable recently announced its intentions to make its Essentials broadband service, which provides a $5 discount to customers who agree to stay below 5GB/month in data usage, available nationwide. Consumers voiced their concerns about the program (which really only offers about $1/month in savings when you factor in that you currently must rent a modem from TWC) because a $5 discount for customers who can only use 1/50 of the broadband of regular customers doesn’t seem to add up.

“If usage caps were about ‘fairness,’ carriers would offer the nation’s grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website,”writes DSL reports.com's Karl Bode. “Instead, what I most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like ‘fairness’ to you?”
As for Powell’s assertion that there is such a high fixed cost involved in setting up broadband networks, the December report from the New America Foundation claims that the overall cost of providing Internet service has decreased over the last five years, at the same time as user numbers have grown and the use of broadband-heavy applications like streaming video have become commonplace.

“Despite the substantial decrease in the cost of operating a network and transporting data, consumers have not seen a resulting decline in the cost of service,” wrote the NAF, “nor have many providers increased the usage caps to reflect the decline in costs for Internet connectivity.

Unlocking Cell Phones in U.S. to Become Illegal January 26

 

 

Librarian Of Congress's 90 day window ends Saturday

 

Unlocking Cell Phones in the United States will become illegal on January 26 due to the expiry of a 90-day window that deemed the practice legal.

During the October of 2012, the Librarian of Congress, which decides the exemptions to the anti-hacking law dubbed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), ruled that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be deemed legal in America.

However, it approved a 90-day window that allowed consumers to purchase a phone and unlock it without any legal repercussions. The window, though, comes to an end on January 26.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questions DMCA's right to determine who can unlock a phone. EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said: "Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide."

Unlocking a phone (not to be confused from jailbreaking -- a method to run additional software and instill modified code -- which remains legal) allows it to function on more than one carrier.

While the deadline will make it illegal to unlock cell phones in the U.S., carriers such as Verizon offer devices such as the iPhone 5 as an unlocked smartphone, while AT&T will unlock a handset when its contract has expired.

The War Against Internet Freedom

 

Aaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters

 

On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, "it was not an important failure".

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world. He was 26 when he died, but from the age of 14 he had been astonishing those of us who followed him on the internet. In 10 years he had accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime.

In the days following his death, the blogosphere resounded  with expressions of grief, sadness and loss not just from people who had worked with him, but also from those who only knew him from afar – the users of the things he helped to create (the RSS web feed, social news websites, the Creative Commons  copyright licences, for example), or those who had followed his scarily open and thoughtful blogging.

 

But in addition to the grief, there was real anger, because many people feel that Swartz had been hounded to his death by aggressive federal prosecutors. This view was most vividly expressed by his father at Aaron's funeral service in Chicago on Tuesday. "Aaron did not commit suicide," said Robert Swartz, "but was killed by the government. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government."

What lay behind this anger was United States v Aaron Swartz, a prosecution launched in Massachusetts, charging Swartz with "wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer". If convicted, he could have faced 35 years in prison and a $1m fine. The case stemmed from something he had done in furtherance of his belief that academic publications should be freely available. He had surreptitiously hooked up a laptop to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network and used it to download millions of articles from the JSTOR archive of academic publications.

 

Even those of us who shared his belief in open access thought this an unwise stunt. But what was truly astonishing – and troubling – was the vindictiveness of the prosecution, which went for Swartz as if he were a major cyber-criminal who was stealing valuable stuff for personal gain. "The outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron," wrote Lawrence Lessig , the distinguished lawyer who was also one of Swartz's mentors. "It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behaviour. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' – with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."

 

The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope's famous rhetorical question: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" It would be possible to write off the Swartz prosecution (as some have done) as the action of a politically ambitious attorney general, but actually it fits a much more sinister pattern. It was clear that a decision had been made to make an example of this cheeky young hacker and in that sense this grotesque prosecution sits neatly alongside the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, not to mention the hysterical reaction of the US authorities to WikiLeaks.

What has happened, in fact, is that governments which since 9/11 have presided over the morphing of their democracies into national security states have realised that the internet represents a truly radical challenge to their authority, and they are absolutely determined to control it. They don't declare this as their intention, of course, but instead talk up "grave" threats – cybercrime, piracy and (of course) child pornography – as rationales for their action. But, in the end, this is now all about control. And if a few eggheads and hackers get crushed on the way well, that's too bad. RIP Aaron.

How to disable Java in your browser

 Seem to get a lot of E-mails on how to disable java, So here it is.

Chrome

Chrome will notify you before it downloads or runs Java content. I am  reasonably sure this will prevent security issues.
     
For further protection users can enter"about:plugins" in the address bar to enable and/or disable Java and other plugins. There is a single entry for Java identified as "Java TM" that can be disabled for complete protection in Chrome.

FireFox

Firefox plugin options can be located in "Tools - > Add-ons -> Plugins". There will be one or more Java entries: Examples include "Java Deployment Toolkit" and "Java Platform". I suggest disabling all Java related plugins to ensure your computer’s safety.
For more about Java on Firefox see Firefox’s support website.

Internet Explorer

If you are running versions 8, 9, or 10 you can use this method:

• Open your Internet Explorer
• Click the gear icon in the top right of the browser to open the settings menu
• Click on " Manage add-ons"
• In the left sidebar of the Manage Add-ons window that appears use the drop down box at the bottom to change to "All  add-ons".
• Select each add-on that begins with "Java(tm)" and use the " disable " button that appears at the bottom of the window above the close button

Alternatively Microsoft provides this knowledgebase article that is said to work for all Internet Explorer versions on all versions of Windows. Care should be taken when using this method since it involves editing the Windows registry.

Opera

To disable Java under Opera:

• Open your web browser
• Type "opera:plugins" in the address bar and press the Enter key
• Locate Java(TM) within the list (there may be several listed items)
• Click "Disable"

Safari

Visit http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5241 for more information.

Android & iOS

Your device does not natively support Java in the web browser.

Lynx

You’re probably good to go already.

Disable Java in your browser

 

Java is a plugin for web browsers that is installed on approximately 66% of all computers. However there are very few websites that still rely on the features that it provides, leaving those 66% of computers vulnerable to attack when the dated technology is exploited. This has unfortunately happened several times in the past few months.
     
Leaving Java enabled on your computer could allow hackers to take control of your computer and install and run programs without your permission.

As fewer and fewer sites actually rely on client side Java to power their online applications, and it now seems the risks of using Java greatly outweigh the benefits. The primary issue being that one critical level bug can exploit every operating system and every browser.
The only sure solution to eliminate this risk is to disable Java entirely in the browser, then selectively [and temporarily] enable it when necessary. White-listing functionality exists for most major browsers, which ensures that Java will operate only on websites that you truly trust.
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      My proposal:

• Run your browser(s) without Java for the next 90 days.
• Count how many times you miss it. (So far we are up to zero on 10 systems)
• Continue to move on with your life, knowing you’re safer on the web.

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The Roku Box

We are still under testing with these units. On a better note Time Warner is teaming up with Roku in mid spring . Later details to follow.