‘Researchers who launched an experimental cyber attack caused a generator to self-destruct, alarming the government and electrical industry about what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale, CNN has learned. [..]
Sources familiar with the experiment said the same attack scenario could be used against huge generators that produce the country’s electric power.
Some experts fear bigger, coordinated attacks could cause widespread damage to electric infrastructure that could take months to fix. [..]
In a previously classified video of the test CNN obtained, the generator shakes and smokes, and then stops.
DHS acknowledged the experiment involved controlled hacking into a replica of a power plant’s control system. Sources familiar with the test said researchers changed the operating cycle of the generator, sending it out of control.’
‘One Dylan Stephen Jayne of Pennsylvania filed suit against “Google Internet Search Engine Founders” in Pennsylvania Civil court, seeking the small amount of $5 billion dollars. Jayne claims that his safety is in jeopardy because of Google releasing personal information about him.
Jayne asserts that individuals looking to perform acts of terrorism could obtain his information from Google, making it more likely that he will be detained wrongfully in the future. Jayne’s statement of claim is that, “Dylan Steven Jayne, plaintiff, has a social security number that when the social security number is turned upside down in its entirety it is a scrambled code that does spell the name Google.”‘
‘More searches which Mother Nature never intended! Most of these are handy for finding security exploits on your own site; simply add a string from your own domain’s URL to check. But really, why limit ourselves? If it has an evil purpose, I’m including it. By the way, there is nothing illegal about typing in a search string; it is up to the website to secure this data. It’s what you DO with this information that you find which makes all of the difference.’
‘It’s said the powerful write their own laws but, in New Zealand, now everyone can.
Due to a new wiki launched by the New Zealand police, members of the public can now contribute to the drafting of the country’s new policing act.
NZ Police Superintendent Hamish McCardle, the officer in charge of developing the new act, said the initiative had already been described as a “new frontier of democracy”.
“People are calling it ‘extreme democracy’ and perhaps it is,” he said.
“It’s a novel move but when it comes to the principles that go into policing, the person on the street has a good idea … as they are a customer,” he said.’
‘You Get Signal is a free AJAX utility you can use to identify your external IP address and detect open ports on your connection. This tool is useful for finding out if your port forwarding is setup correctly or if your server applications are being blocked by a firewall. It is important to note that some ports, such as port 25, are often blocked at the ISP level in an attempt to prevent malicious activity.’
‘A man has been arrested for allegedly downloading child porn in a first-class airport lounge in view of other passengers.
Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg said the 44-year-old man had been downloading child pornography in the first-class lounge at Melbourne Airport on Friday.
He was using a free access computer at a desk and was overseen by passers-by.
The commissioner said the man had IT expertise and had been able to circumvent the lounge’s computer firewalls.
His home in Naremburn, Sydney, was searched and a computer and CDs were seized.’
‘Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we’ve been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.
While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.
The companies that are being reported are the following:
* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
* Emi Music Sweden AB
* Universal Music Group Sweden AB
* Universal Pictures Nordic AB
* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Atari Nordic AB
* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
* Ubisoft Sweden AB
* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB
Stay tuned for updates.’
‘A cop has quit after his web profile on Facebook exposed him as a gun-toting pervert.
Fellow officers were stunned when they logged on to the social networking site to see 29-year-old Simon Purcell proudly brandishing an MI6 semi-automatic rifle.
The police community support officer went on to list his hobbies as “making sex toys for all the ladies” and “spying on doggers”. Other interests included “women, masturbation, any order I don’t mind.” Among his favourite films he put simply: “Porn”.’
‘Welcome to the home of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.
The Heinlein Archives is a cooperative project between The Heinlein Prize Trust and the UC Santa Cruz Archives.
The Heinlein Archives presents digital copies of the entire collections of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein in downloadable form for research and academic purposes. Heinlein’s OPUS manuscripts is the first complete collection presented. These manuscript files include Heinlein’s files of all his published works with his notes, research, early drafts and edits of manuscripts, to the final published form. These files provide both a look at Heinlein’s creative process and add insights into his intent and the meaning in his stories.’
‘A Hartlepool man is facing jail after he urinated on a disabled woman who lay dying in the street.
The 27-year-old shouted “this is YouTube material” as he degraded Christine Lakinski, 50, who had fallen ill, magistrates heard. [..]
Anderson had smoked a cannabis joint and been drinking when he and two friends spotted her.
He tried to rouse her by throwing a bucket of water over her, before urinating on her and covering her with shaving foam. The incident was filmed on a mobile phone.
She was later declared dead at the scene, the cause of death being given as pancreatic failure.’
‘Internet auction website eBay today withdrew an unusual second-hand sale item, the country of Belgium, which had attracted an offer of 10 million euros ($A16.68 million).
“Belgium, a kingdom in three parts” was posted on the Belgian eBay site as offering “plenty of choice” despite the caveat that it comes with “300 billion of National Debt”.
Offered in three parts – Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia – the accompanying blurb said the kingdom “can be bought as a whole (not recommended)”.
The vendor also included as added extras “the king and his court (costs not included)”.
EBay spokesman Peter Burin said the site could not host the sale of anything virtual or “unrealistic”, the Belga news agency reported.’
‘Hackers are taking credit for at least three breaches at anti-piracy firm MediaDefender. The newly revealed attacks threaten to turn what started as an embarrassing e-mail leak into a full-blown security meltdown for the company.
The revelations began Saturday, when more than 6,000 internal company e-mails were exposed in a 700-megabyte BitTorrent download. A note from the hackers that accompanied the download points to a MediaDefender employee’s personal Gmail account as the source of the purloined mail, which covered six months of internal correspondence.
At least two more MediaDefender hacks have emerged since Saturday. In one, hackers obtained a copy of an internal company database identifying some of the decoy files the company has slipped onto peer-to-peer networks. In the other, intruders released a digital recording of a private phone call that appears to be a discussion between MediaDefender personnel and staff at the New York attorney general’s office.’
‘A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.
Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate.
The couple met on an online chat forum while he was at work and she in an internet cafe, and started chatting under the names Sweetie and Prince of Joy.
They eventually decided to meet up – but there was no happy ending when they realised what had happened. [..]
“To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”‘
‘A coroner has called for “insult chatrooms” to be banned after a man took his own life while being watched by others on a web cam.
A verdict of suicide was returned on Kevin Whitrick, 42, of Wellington, Telford, Shropshire, who died in March.
The court heard he was using Paltalk, which urged users to insult each other, when he said he wanted to kill himself.
He hanged himself while some internet users urged him on and others tried to stop him, coroner Michael Gwynne heard.’
‘Web search leader Google Inc. will sponsor a $30 million competition for an unmanned lunar landing, following up on the $10 million Ansari X Prize that spurred a private sector race to space.
Like the Ansari X Prize, which was claimed in 2004 by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen for a pair of flights by SpaceShipOne, the Google Lunar X Prize is open to private industry and non-government entities worldwide, organizers said on Thursday.
First prize is $20 million for the group that can land a lunar rover – an unmanned robotic probe – on the Moon, take it on a 500-metre trek and broadcast video back to Earth by 31 December 2012.’
‘A police operation to covertly follow a Central Otago man came to an abrupt halt this week when the man found tracking devices planted in his car, ripped them out and listed them for sale on Trade Me. [..]
Williams said a cellphone sim card in one of the devices appeared to transmit messages to the mobile phone of Detective Sergeant Derek Shaw, of the Central Otago CIB.
Williams provided The Press with emails from Shaw saying: “If you have got something of ours it would be good to get it back. You can call me and I can come meet you.” [..]
Williams said he did not know why police were interested in him. He spent two years in jail “20 years ago” for selling marijuana to an undercover policeman, but had no convictions since then.
Williams said the devices were not hard to find and he described the operation as “a bumbling attempt” by “weirdos”.’
‘A service offering a complete “revenge package” in which people can destroy the financial status and relationships of their enemies at the click of a mouse is being offered over the internet.
For as little as £10 a month, customers of the confidentialaccess.com website can make the credit ratings of people they dislike plummet and even have them suspected of fraud.
Their bank accounts can be shut down remotely and all their essential utilities cut off.
Fake e-mails and text messages which purport to come from someone else, such as the victim’s spouse, can be sent containing false accusations of affairs or sexual liaisons.
The new “revenge” services are the latest example of the harm the internet can cause individuals. ‘
‘Marry Our Daughter is an introduction service assisting those following the Biblical tradition of arranging marriages for their daughters.
Those who wish to list their Daughters with our site should click on SIGN UP OUR DAUGHTER on our main page for a form to fill out.
Those who wish to propose to a specific Daughter should click on the PROPOSE button on the Daughter’s INFO CARD.’
‘Computers inside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s network are spamming the internet with e-mails touting the company’s flagship erectile-enhancement drug Viagra, along with ads for knockoff Rolexes and shady junk stocks.
But the e-mails are not part of Pfizer’s official marketing efforts.
Pfizer’s computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public’s inboxes with ads for the company’s own product.
“There is a disaster inside this company, and they don’t know it,” says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence — a small San Francisco-based security company that alerted Wired News to the problem.’
‘Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.
He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.
About the only thing he can’t do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks — or touch anything, for that matter.
It’s not that Bowman doesn’t have hands or a mouth; they’re just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.
In fact, it’s not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It’s IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away. [..]
The computer screen displays a live shot of Bowman’s face from his living room in Nova Scotia. [..]
When Bowman has a question for a colleague, he doesn’t pick up the phone; he uses his joystick to drive his doppelganger to the team member’s office.’
‘The company who has been doing billing for our websites is no longar able to accept credit card payments of any kind for bestiality content, and because of this, is shutting down. This company has been our web host and also collected payments for two thirds of our total sales. There is simply not enough money coming in to sustain our operation any longer, and we are in the process of liquidation. If you have been waiting to order, wait no longer. We may be closing sooner than October 31. After our closing, it is likely that this website will never reopen. If we do reopen at some point in the future, we have no idea what date that will be. And petlust will never again sell dvds, even if we are able to open again (it would only sell digital downloads of the movies).
We will not be producing ANY new bestiality movies, so please do not ask about starring in a movie.’
Followup to Petlust Videos.
‘As Stephen A.’s client was walking him through their ASP.NET site, Stephen noticed a rather odd URL scheme. Instead of using the standard Query String — i.e., https://their.site/Products/?ID=2 — theirs used some form of URL-rewriting utilizing the “@” symbol in the request name: https://their.site/Products/@ID=2.aspx. Not being an expert on Search Engine Optimization, Stephan had just assumed it had something to do with that.
A few weeks later, when Stephan finally had a chance to take a look at the code, he noticed something rather different…’
‘P2P traffic stats always cause quite a bit of controversy. In 2004 several respectable sources were reporting that BitTorrent was responsible for 35% of all internet traffic. This was probably a huge overestimation at the time, today this figure sounds more realistic.
Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic. P2P traffic is responsible for 50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.’
A robots.txt file on a web site instructs search engines to ignore certain pages. Basically, this is a list of web pages on whitehouse.gov that they don’t want search engines to keep a record of.
‘A man looking for a new home on an online mapping service has stumbled across an aerial image of a US nuclear-powered submarine in dry dock showing a part of the vessel that wasn’t meant to be seen.
The image – which appears on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping service – is of the seven-bladed propeller used on an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine.
The vessel was being worked on at a dry dock at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Washington State, in the north-west of the United States. The base is part of Bangor’s Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific which houses the largest nuclear weapons arsenal.
Propeller designs have been closely guarded secrets since the days of the Cold War. It is still common for them to be draped with tarps or removed and covered when a submarine is out of the water.
The propeller design is an integral part of a submarine’s ability to remain undetected during operations, ensuring that it can patrol the seas in stealth without giving its position away to surface ships.’
‘This document describes the various keyboard combinations that you can use with the flight simulator features of Google Earth. To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key + Option + A on the Mac). Once you have entered flight simulator mode for the first time, you can re-enter the mode by choosing Tools > Enter Flight Simulator. To leave flight simulator mode, click Exit Flight Simulator in the top right corner or press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key+ Option + A on the Mac).’
‘China’s Shaolin Temple, the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is demanding an apology from an internet user who said its monks had once been beaten in unarmed combat by a Japanese ninja, Chinese media reported today. [..]
The internet user, calling themselves “Five Minutes Every Day”, said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.
“The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain,” the internet user was quoted as saying in the post.
The Shaolin temple “strongly condemned the horrible deeds” of the user, the newspaper said.’
‘Internet cafes and “manga” comic cafes are omnipresent in urban Japan, offering couches, computers, soft drinks and comic books to stressed businessmen or commuters who missed their trains home.
But a government survey found that an estimated 5400 people have virtually moved in to the 24-hour cafes.
It said some 80 per cent of Japan’s “net cafe refugees” are men and that 52.7 per cent said they decided to live in the lounges because they lost their jobs.
Another 13.8 per cent said they moved into the net cafes because of deteriorating relationships with their families, according to the survey by the health and welfare ministry.’
‘The Chinese government has clamped down on the amount of time youngsters can spend playing online games, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
Under-18s who play for more than three consecutive hours a day will have limits imposed on the amount of points they can score, the agency reported. [..]
Chinese gaming firms such as NetEase and Shanda Interactive Entertainment have until 15 July to install software which will halve the number of points gamers can score if they play for more than three hours, said the report.
Determined gamers who play for more than five hours will get no points at all and face an on-screen warning that they are entering “unhealthy game time”.’
