Apparently camera shy Police officers have started to fight back against cellphone recordings of them ending up on youtube.
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
If you want to read more of the article head over to www.boston.com
Bruce Schneier is literally the king when it comes to knowledge on computer security. He is a cryptographer, computer security specialist, and writer. He has a master’s degree in computer science from the American University in Washington, DC. He has taken part in the creation of some of the worlds best cryptographic algorithms, such as Helix, Blowfish, Threefish, and MacGuffin. If anyone knows what they are talking about when it comes to computers and security its this guy.
Recently he published an essay on the whole Chinese hacking thing.
Here is a link to his essay I HIGHLY suggest you read it, its informative to say the least.
Link
Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.
Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.
One word, Piracy, its one of the major reasons behind all these new 3D movies (besides the gimmick factor), think about it can you pirate a 3D movie? Probably not (at least for now). Its almost impossible to record a 3D movie by sneaking in with a camera. It stops or at least slows down the whole piracy culture, free-loaders going and downloading movies instead of going to the Theatres or buying the DVD. With 3D movies like Avatar, you cannot watch it and get the full experience unless you have the hardware, a 3D capable TV and the special glasses. Essentially they have cleverly enticed people to come in and watch the 3D films on the only available hardware that is capable of doing so. 3D theatres have unintended DRM if you know what I mean. This may change, when or if 3D TVs become mainstream as then you could just watch the pirated 3D film on your 3D TV.
This is in my opinion a big factor in why the movie industry is seemingly pushing 3D as the next great technology, I always wondered what they would do to get people to upgrade from their HD TVs, well it looks like 3D TVs are “it”.
Just recently Googles CEO Eric Schmidt said something that blew away peoples confidence in Googles privacy ethics.
Eric Schmidt said the following in an interview with CNBC.
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
What he said is essentially what every police state and totalitarian regime has said concerning privacy. Its shocking that he, being the CEO of Google has such a basic understanding of privacy. Privacy is fundamentally important to being a free individual.
The hypocrisy in all this is that according to the EFF “Schmidt blacklisted CNET reporters from Google after the tech news company published an article with information about his salary, neighborhood, hobbies, and political donations — all obtained from Google searches.”
If you lose privacy, you lose your individuality because instead of being unique individuals with private lives you become a data farm. Its not about your privacy as one person but the combined privacy of everyone, its what makes us unique. If you could have access to all my data ever, big deal, you wouldn’t get much out of it… But if you have access to all my data and everyone elses combined, you now have allot of power to do evil, such things like insider trading would be a good example. If a company like Google could search all your emails and everyone elses then they could literally have an inside view at the stock market, when to buy or sell based on insider emails.
Privacy is a big deal, its important and if we lose privacy on the internet then we give up our individual identities.
Here is a link to the CNBC interview: CNBC Link
If you want to read more, PCWord did a great job covering it. PCWord Link
The EFF also did a good job covering it. EFF Link
According to news.cnet.com Twitter was hijacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army” an amateur hacking group with malicious and political intent.
Here is a quote from the cnet article.
Twitter.com was down Thursday evening, and it appears that the microblogging site may have been hacked or the victim of a DNS hijacking.
The site, which was inaccessible for about an hour starting around 10 p.m. PST, was defaced with the following image before it was taken offline:
Source: Link
It looks as though they wanted to get their misinformed message out. They defaced the website by replacing it with propaganda written in very poor English and all capital letters with an image of a flag in the background… I suggest next time they hack such a well trafficked American site that they use proper English and not type in all caps to get their point across. Then again twitter users aren’t big on punctuation or spelling either.
This raises an important issue about how we are still in the early days of the web, and websites aren’t really that secure at all. Should it not be the website owners responsibility to keep their website clean of malware or hackers? Most hackers are amateurs like the ones that hacked Twitter, and if someone actually was good at hacking im sure even the top web sites would be in trouble. Most websites these days are a hastley compiled absolute mess of code, written without even the slightest knowledge of security.