M&Mâs World Headlines: Mar 12, 2009
Iraqi shoe-tosser jailed three years CNews
The lawyer for an Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at former U.S. president George W. Bush said his client has been sentenced to three years in prison for assaulting a foreign leader.
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BBC botnet investigation turns hacks into hackers – BBC Ddos’s Security Company The Register
An investigation by the BBC into cybercrime may itself have broken UK computer crime law. BBC Click got its hands on a botnet of 22,000 compromised PCs from an underground forum. It used these machines to send spam to two accounts it had established with Gmail and Hotmail. The programme also used these zombie machines to show how they might be used in a denial of service attack. “The BBC appears to have broken the Computer Misuse Act by causing 22,000 computers to send spam,” said Struan Robertson, editor of out-law.com and legal director at solicitors Pinsent Masons. “It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC’s own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer.” “The Act requires that a computer has been made to perform a function with intent to secure access to any program or data on the computer. Using the botnet to sending an email is likely to satisfy that requirement. It also requires that the access is unauthorised – which the BBC appears to acknowledge. It does not matter that the BBC’s intent was not criminal or that someone else created the botnet in the first place.”
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Airline sued for $1 million over lost video game CNews
A Yale University student from Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million from US Airways for a video game console he says was taken from his luggage. Twenty-one-year-old Jesse Maiman alleges that during a flight from New Haven, Conn., to Cincinnati in December, his Xbox 360 with a specialized hard drive disappeared from his luggage. Maiman says he got what he called “an unconscionable run-around” from the airline. He’s asking $1,700 for the loss of the gaming system and for the maximum damages allowable, or $1 million.
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GrandCentral Returns as Google Voice ReadWriteWeb
Google today finally announced its plans for GrandCentral, the telephony service it acquired in July 2007. GrandCentral will be reborn as Google Voice, a comprehensive suite of telephony services, including all of GrandCentral’s features. In addition, Google Voice will also include an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free.
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Robbie Williams, Billy Bragg et al say downloads aren’t illegal The Register
Hits out at music industry bigwigs. A lobby group consisting of well-known UK musicians has argued that individuals should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the interwebs. The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) was stitched together last autumn and is made up of 140 or so of Blighty`s rock and pop stars including Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, Annie Lennox and Radiohead`s Ed O`Brien. It`s also seeking support from the government in the hope of creating a nationwide education programme to offer advice about the music industry biz to young artists. Billy Bragg, who sits on the newly-formed group`s board of directors, told the Independent last night that the majority of artists who had registered their support of the FAC`s charter were opposed to criminal prosecutions against individuals accused of downloading music illegally. He did not reveal which musicians supported such a move that some execs within the music industry have recently been pushing for. The coalition also plans to meet with Lord Carter, who has previously come out in favour of throwing the book at ordinary members of the public who illegally download music. “What I said at the meeting was that the record industry in Britain is still going down the road of criminalising our audience for downloading illegal MP3s,” Bragg told the Indie. “If we follow the music industry down that road, we will be doing nothing more than being part of a protectionist effort. It’s like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.
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Can NASA take a joke? Try space station named Colbert after the comedian CNews
Earth to Space Station Colbert: The cosmic joke may be on NASA. [Colbert] convinced his many fans to write in his name in NASA’s online public vote to name a new room to be added to the international space station. The count by mid-Tuesday had votes for the comedian just shy of 115,000 and Serenity trailing at 98,641. More than 451,000 people have voted. The name Colbert doesn’t quite fit with NASA’s theme, said agency spokesman John Yembrick. Other U.S. rooms in the international orbiting outpost are named Unity, Harmony and Destiny. However, the space agency hasn’t made any decision and voting continues until March 20. NASA has a legalistic out. Its contest rules say voting results “are not binding on NASA and NASA reserves the right to ultimately select a name” in keeping with its best interests. And don’t cry for Colbert if NASA uses its regulations to thwart him. He’s already managed to get his name attached to an ice-cream flavour, a Hungarian bridge and an eagle, to name a few.
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Web searches may have foreshadowed listeriosis crisis Ottawa Citizen
Search engine queries of the term “listeriosis” demonstrated a possible signal of the deadly outbreak that killed 20 Canadians a month before the official announcement was made in Canada, a new analysis shows. The public was officially informed by federal officials that one death and 16 cases were linked to the listeriosis outbreak on Aug. 20, 2008. But researchers from the University of Ottawa and Harvard Medical School found peak searching for the term “listeriosis” spiked beginning in mid- to late-July, “nearly a month before the declaration of the public outbreak,” the team reports in an article released Thursday by the Canadian Medical Association Journal. “Interestingly, peak searching for ‘listeriosis’ correlated more with the retrospective epidemic curve than with the publicity of the outbreak as measured by news volume,” the authors write. “In comparison, a massive increase in searching for the word “Listeria” coincided perfectly with news media attention. Therefore, it appears there was a clear Internet signal related to ‘listeria’ that preceded the official federal announcement.”
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UK.gov thinks internet should be run like BSkyB The Register
Makes case with Wikipedia cut’n'paste. Which is worse: the fact that the UK government appears to favour replacing free access to the internet with a model that looks suspiciously like that of a cable TV network, or that whoever helped draft this measure cut-and-pasted text from Wikipedia in support of it?
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Parent group files FCC complaint against ‘Family Guy’ THRfeed
The Parents Television Council is filing an indecency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against Fox’s “Family Guy” for a March 8 episode that included — and this is from the press release — “bestiality, orgies and babies eating sperm.”
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Court rules ‘ceaseless liability’ for net libel fine for free speech The Register
European Court of Human Rights backs old English law. Publishers’ indefinite liability for defamatory material in their online archives is not a restriction on their rights to free speech, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled. The decision backs a 160-year-old rule of English law. The Times newspaper had argued that the burden of indefinite liability was so onerous that it would have a ‘chilling effect’ on archive publishers, but the ECHR has reaffirmed that a new defamation action can be taken every time online defamatory material is accessed. [Comment: These 200-year old defamantion/lible laws also exist in Canada. What do you think? Are they still required in order to protect the king? Ask Jon what he thinks about them - http://www.p2pnet.net/story/17398]
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Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop’s Facebook Status – The Cop Who Posted Too Much on MySpace Slashdot
“A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer’s Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne’s MySpace “mood” was set to “devious” on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure.
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Rigged podcasts can leak your iTunes username/password ZDNet
Hackers can create malicious podcasts to hijack usernames and passwords from Apple`s iTunes software. According to a warning from Apple, a design issue in the iTunes podcast feature can be abused via rigged audio files to cause an authentication dialog to be presented to the user. From that dialog, a hacker can hijack iTunes credentials and upload it to the podcast server.
March, 2009
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