09.06.11
Links – Microsoft Bought Sweden, BP Spews Again, Anti-Trust News
Reader’s Picks
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Security
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DNS hack attack mutilates multiple Web sites
Many popular Web sites, such as the Coca-Cola, UPS, and the Register, had their Web addresses hijacked over the weekend by a Turkish hacker. … Although the DNS records have been corrected and the attacks appear to have been more mischievous than malicious, the fact remains that for several hours numerous important Web sites were, for all practical purposes, off the air.
I wonder if they collected company email.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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How far Gadhafi went to monitor Libya’s Internet activity
Amesys [and others, perhaps Boeing] installed ‘deep packet inspection‘ technology for the Libyan government, giving them data mining, eavesdropping and censorship capabilities. … mail, voice over IP (VoIP), webmail, chat, web browsing … Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, as well as MSN, Yahoo, AIM chat, and P2P file sharing. … they would also make their monitoring presence painfully known in the most bizarre and intentional of ways. … targeted intimidation … They captured roughly 30 to 40 million minutes of mobile and landline conversations a month and archived them for years
The US has similar but more competent tracking capabilities. Microsoft and other non free software owners, of course, have even greater spy power. Free software and encrypted communications may not be perfect but they are the only solution that has a chance of working.
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‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command
The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. … troops from this other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many [as CIA's hundred]… The president has also given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar, but shorter roster of names.
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Cablegate
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The Great Copyright Conspiracy Laid Bare
it’s not as if the US really wants to subvert the entire edifice of European civil liberties simply to sell a few more albums and films, is it? Well, those cables have delivered again, and suggested that is *precisely* what is going on … That is, the US has been driving the entire copyright legislation programme for Sweden. And it would be remarkable if it had not made exactly the same demands to every other European country – indeed, we know from previous leaks that it has, at least for some of them.
It’s not about music, it’s about control of knowledge and culture. It’s not for companies it’s for their rich owners who are used to that control. The owners don’t care about customers or employees. Cables from Turkey show that the US favors monopolistic control of media, “The fact that Dogan Holding dominates local print and broadcast media didn’t hurt.” US control of software and the internet are horrific extensions of that monopoly. Elsewhere, this author points to a study showing that strong copyright enforcement also results in a trade disadvantage but it is better to deal with the moral issues.
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Europeans Care About Civil Liberties: US Shocked
So the Euro-trash Data Protection Supervisor and the Article 29 Working Party tasked with protecting privacy in the EU have dared to assert themselves and stand up for European citizens by giving “primacy to civil liberties-based approaches for the EU’s Single Market, consumers, or law enforcement”, while the US’s official lapdog in Yurop, the European Commission, has somehow failed to smack them down.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Anti-Trust
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Judge tosses antitrust claims over Microsoft, Yahoo spam filters
A federal judge in California has dismissed a pair of cases that were filed last year against Microsoft and Yahoo by a bulk emailing firm that argued the companies violated antitrust laws when their spam filters blocked its emails. [PJ adds this from the ruling, "Section 230(c)(2)(A) of the CDA grants immunity to interactive computer service providers that act in good faith to "restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."]
The operational portion seems to be “otherwise objectionable” as it was when Microsoft blocked the Truthout newsletter that people wanted to receive. Microsoft’s hypocrisy an arrogance is on display as they claim the right to block anything they find objectionable while funding spammers like Foundem in their Anti-trust suit when Google’s search algorithms blocked them for low quality pages and other misbehavior.
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Apple Cries About Samsung and Motorola’s Patent “Monopoly”
In a scene straight out of Bizarro World, Apple, Inc.’s lawyers are crying foul about Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. and recent Google Inc. acquisitions Motorola’s allegedly “anticompetitive” use of patents.
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Privacy
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Lawsuit says Microsoft tracks customers without consent
Microsoft allegedly tracks the location of its mobile customers even after users request that tracking software be turned off, according to a new lawsuit. The proposed class action, filed in a Seattle federal court on Wednesday, says Microsoft intentionally designed camera software on the Windows Phone 7 operating system to ignore customer requests that they not be tracked.
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