Category: Internet


This is exactly the truth.  Read the entirety of the linked article please.

 

There’s been plenty of talk (and a ton of posts here on Techdirt) discussing both SOPA (originally E-PARASITE) and PROTECT IP (aka PIPA), but it seemed like it would be useful to create a single, “definitive” post to highlight why both of these bills are extremely problematic and won’t do much (if anything) to deal with the issues they’re supposed to deal with, but will have massive unintended consequences. I also think it’s important to highlight how PIPA is almost as bad as SOPA. Tragically, because SOPA was so bad, some in the entertainment industry have seen it as an opportunity to present PIPA as a “compromise.” It is not. Both bills have tremendous problems, and they start with the fact that neither bill will help deal with the actual issues being raised.

That main issue, we’re told over and over again, is “piracy” and specifically “rogue” websites. And, let’s be clear: infringement is a problem. But the question is what kind of problem is it? Much of the evidence suggests that it’s not an enforcement problem and it’s not a legal problem. Decades of evidence from around the globe all show the same thing: making copyright law or enforcement stricter does not work. It does not decrease infringement at all — and, quite frequently, leads to more infringement. That’s because the reason that there’s infringement in the first place is that consumers are being under-served. Historically, infringement has never been about “free,” but about indicating where the business models have not kept up with the technology.

Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. As we’ve seen over and over and over again, those who embrace what the internet enables, have found themselves to be much better off than they were before. They’re able to build up larger fanbases, and to rely on various new platforms and services to make more money.

via The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas | Techdirt.

Subway itself wasn’t nailed but it franchisees were.  Most franchise holders are SMB’s and many of them don’t think they are vulnerable due to their size.  However criminals are banking on that thinking now to hijack everything from computers to POS systems(many of which are simply windows computers with POS overlays running on them).  this means proper security for all of these systems are important.  If you are a small business please contact ECC for a security audit if you have never had one done.

 

For thousands of customers of Subway restaurants around the US over the past few years, paying for their $5 footlong sub was a ticket to having their credit card data stolen. In a scheme dating back at least to 2008, a band of Romanian hackers is alleged to have stolen payment card data from the point-of-sale (POS) systems of hundreds of small businesses, including more than 150 Subway restaurant franchises and at least 50 other small retailers. And those retailers made it possible by practically leaving their cash drawers open to the Internet, letting the hackers ring up over $3 million in fraudulent charges.

In an indictment unsealed in the US District Court of New Hampshire on December 8, the hackers are alleged to have gathered the credit and debit card data from over 80,000 victims.

“This is the crime of the future,” said Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee Labs in an interview with Ars. Instead of coming in with guns and robbing the till, he said, criminals can target small businesses, “root them from across the planet, and steal digitally.”

The tools used in the crime are widely available on the Internet for anyone willing to take the risks, and small businesses’ generally poor security practices and reliance on common, inexpensive software packages to run their operations makes them easy pickings for large-scale scams like this one, Marcus said.

While the scale of this particular ring may be significant, the methods used by the attackers were hardly sophisticated. According to the indictment, the systems attacked were discovered through a targeted port scan of blocks of IP addresses to detect systems with a specific type of remote desktop access software running on them. The software provided a ready-made back door for the hackers to gain entry to the POS systems—which is why remote access software is banned from systems that handle payment cards by the PCI Security Standards Council, which governs credit card and debit card payment systems security.

“With PCI compliance, those apps shouldn’t be on those systems,” said Konrad Fellmann, audit and compliance manager for SecureState, an IT security firm with a practice in retail security auditing, in an interview with Ars. But because small retailers who don’t store credit card data, they’re not required to have the same level of auditing as larger companies, Fellmann said.

via How hackers gave Subway a $30 million lesson in point-of-sale security.

 

 

Verizon had started selling off it’s landline business years ago.  they have also begun divesting some FIOS markets as well.  I had been thinking VZ would concentrate on their LTE wireless infrastructure and that has been proven true.  They’ll hang onto their Worldcom Tier1 international backbone so they can wire their own towers without having to pay for backhaul but the cellular systems are cheaper to spool up and now have theoretical parity in speed with wired equivalents.

 

Lame: Verizon is abandoning its FiOS TV & internet service to pursue wireless partnerships | VentureBeat.

 

 

Watch this folks.  I talk about this over and over.  a/v isn’t enough..it is only a start.  Please start with these basics.  Please contact ECC  on how to minimize your exposure.

 

 

The Internet Is Infected – 60 Minutes – CBS News.

SCADA systems and their ilk simply aren’t designed for security.  You do ont want these systems to be acessible by the internet…it is just too easy to take control of them. Get ALL infrastructure systems completely OFF the Internet.

Second water utility reportedly hit by hack attack • The Register.

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes acknowledged that the site was the target of a coordinated spam attack and explained how it went down.

“During this spam attack, users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content,” he said. “Our engineers have been working diligently on this self-XSS vulnerability in the browser.”

via Facebook finds cause of porn, violent images in NewsFeeds – latimes.com.

Read the earlier article i posted about this.  It is not a Facebook issue but the ease of which browsers can be comprised.

 

Facebook explained in a statement that the spam attack was the result of a browser vulnerability that tricked users into running malicious script and sharing the content on their own profiles.

The images on the site are so disturbing that some users say they are threatening to leave the site. Users have reported seeing images of dead animals and altered images of celebrities in explicit situations.

“I am so close to just deactivating my facebook account because of these hackers,” wrote one Twitter user, just one of many who have threatened to leave the network because of the attacks.

via Facebook confirms investigation of graphic images – The Washington Post.

Graham Cluely, a senior technology consultant from Internet security firm Sophos, said it was not yet clear how the malicious content was being spread, but added that the website could face long term consequences.”Its precisely this kind of problem which is likely to drive people away from the site,” he wrote in a company blog. “Facebook needs to get a handle on this problem quickly, and prevent it from happening on such a scale again.”

 

Mr Cluely has it wrong.  Because FB and others of its ilk are browser based this is going to get worse….why?  It is childishly easy to compromise a browser.  Even the mighty Google Chrome with it’s sandboxing is no longer immune.  Once you compromise the browser you now have access to everything the user does at the users level of access at that site.  If you are an admin at a site so is the other person in your system.  As long as your browser is going(or sometimes even after you shut the browser down) the other person has the same level of control at all of your websites you do.

Cloud computing…especially in it’s browser form…is a huge danger to the user, the sites the user access, and everything they all touch.  It’s time to scale this insanity back.  It’s time to change behaviors.  The cloud is never the place to put anything critical or private…it WILL get compromised…that’s a guarantee.  ”Cloud Computing” has a place…but don’t put any trust into it.

via Facebook Flooded With Porn And Violent Images, Company Warns | Fox News.

The so-called PROTECT IP act, sequel to the much-criticized COICA, is under fire again as it enters the process of becoming law. We’ve talked about it on this blog before and no doubt the discussion will continue after it passes or is rejected, but it’s important at this critical moment that everyone concerned weigh in and make an unambiguous statement regarding the quality of this bill. So then: PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal, penned by a dinosauric industry concerned solely with the preservation of its own profits. It will do nothing to curb piracy while at the same time eroding fundamental freedoms of the internet.

The only people who can possibly be in favor of this bill are either ignorant of its implications or stand to gain by its passage. This desperate power grab by a diminishing elite fails to even comprehend the problems it aims to solve, and its blunt force methods are wide open for abuse, and very possibly unconstitutional. Make no mistake about it: this is a kill switch, and if it’s passed, it will revisit us for years to come in ways we never suspected possible. If you think that’s an overstatement, think about it again next time you’re posing naked for the TSA, and ask yourself how that came about.

via Kill Switch | TechCrunch.

The design geniuses at Apple, who are yet to come up with an iPhone 4 which did not have some serious design flaws, are scratching their heads about the latest problem which has hit the cargo cults latest toy.Apple recently released the iPhone 4S which was an iPhone 4 with some software that only Americans could use and the stupid antenna design abandoned. While it was a clever idea to make users pay for something that many manufacturers would be morally bound to recall, it turns out that the iPhone 4S has a design problem all of its own.For some reason the iPhone 4S loses battery faster than its users can charge it. Normally this is not a problem. The iPhone only has to be charged long enough for its users to attempt to convert other people to the Apple cult. It is not as if they use it to call their friends. But it seems that the iPhone 4S cant even manage this task.With normal use, it dropped 19 percent in 50 minutes and sometimes the battery dropped away at an even faster rate than that. Battery life has been dropping ten per cent an hour even when the optional location settings have been switched off.Since the only thing different about the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 is the chip, the fault has been narrowed down to the operating system that was also installed on the phone. It turns out that the iOS 5 cant really handle the new hardware.After shedloads of complaints on Apple bulletin boards and lots of suggested fixes an Apple store staff member was able finally to fix the problem.He claimed it was because the OSs location services was constantly checking location especially for the Time Zone.He was able to solve the problem by switching everything off in the Location Services > System Services menu except for Cell Network Search. His phone now lasts “pretty much the whole day”.While the fault has been causing frustration for users, Apple has done its usual “refusing to comment” thing. To admit there is a fault, means that the iPhone 4S is not as perfect as Apple says it is, and that would create a religious paradox.However, behind the scenes, the outfits engineers have been contacting some iPhone 4S owners who have complained of battery life issues individually and asked them to install a monitoring program on their phones to try to diagnose the problem.But the Sydney Morning Herald has found another serious software fault affecting battery life on the iPhone 4SMathew Peterson, who runs the Australian app development company TheLittleAppFactory, said he found that another problem affecting the iPhone 4S battery life was the iCloud contacts syncing code, which crashes repeatedly when it hit corrupt contacts in a loop.This harms those who have upgraded from previous iPhone models and causes the phones processor to work extra hard. The result is that the phone runs “noticeably warm” and it causes “the battery to drop 20-30 percent in 10-15 minutes”.It can be fixed by disabling contacts in iCloud or restarting the device. Peterson said that you really have to install the entire OS and then copy the contacts back on.

via Iphone 4S drains battery like a vampire – Turns users into Zombies | TechEye.