Legislation to tackle internet piracy, including bans for illegal file-sharers, has been passed by the Lords.

The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to be rushed through the Commons before the general election.

“The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out”. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whisteblowers”, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site”.

From The New Zealand Herald

.... “Operation Titstorm”, part of an assault targeting a range of government servers.... launched by hackers aligned with an internet protest group known as Anonymous.... Although the Australian government knew about the planned assault last Friday, it was powerless to prevent it.... The federal government plans to introduce a mandatory filtering system by early 2011 that would block a list of banned websites... some pornographic films are being rejected by censors because they feature women with small breasts who could be confused with under-age girls. Anonymous said in an email: “No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be ‘unwanted’.”

Polls have found that the Australian public strongly supports the planned restrictions.

The flyer through which Anonymous published the event states "emails/faxes should focus on small-breasted porn, cartoon porn, and female ejaculation, the 3 types banned so far" - even if you buy the implied assumption that 'small breasted porn's women's only attraction lies in their resemblence to children,' this does not explain why female ejaculation is on the list....

The Department of Internal Affairs' (DIA) internet filter is now operational and is being used by internet providers (ISPs) Maxnet and Watchdog.

Thomas Beagle, spokesperson for online freedom lobby Tech Liberty says he's "very disappointed that the filter is now running, it's a sad day for the New Zealand internet".

The transcript of recent emails regarding Paypal's shutting down Cryptome's account make for VERY INTERESTING READING (links for further research at source):

From a phone call with PayPal

Claiming that China is the origin of malicious cyber activities targeting the US, a noted American security expert on Wednesday said the government here should vigorously monitor and defend its computer and critical infrastructure networks.

"China is the origin of extensive and malicious cyber activities that target the US," Larry Wortzel, vice chairman of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said at a Congressional hearing.

That’s fast.

You could also use speed like that to download the entire Library of Congress in about a second, fill up your iTunes library with over 4 billion MP3 files in about a minute, or download every movie ever made in 4 minutes, SVI says.

Now we´re talking speed.

Microsoft on Tuesday warned that hackers are targeting a freshly-uncovered weakness in some earlier versions of its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser software.

Microsoft said it is investigating a hole that cyber attackers are taking advantage of in IE 6 and IE 7.

Patients’ confidential medical records are being placed on a controversial NHS database without their knowledge, doctors’ leaders have warned.

Those who do not wish to have their details on the £11 billion computer system are supposed to be able to opt out by informing health authorities.

But doctors have accused the Government of rushing the project through, meaning that patients have had their details uploaded to the database before they have had a chance to object.

Microsoft appears to have begun to release details of its latest device, the Courier tablet computer. In a clear attempt to rival the Apple iPad, the touchscreen device is shown in a series of videos as a way of organising a user’s digital life, including organising contacts, ideas and sending emails and browsing the web.

The Courier’s interface operates across two screens, like a book, and both can be operated using touch or a stylus. The device appears to recognise a user’s handwriting, is less than an inch thick and approximately 5 x 7 inches. It does not use Windows 7, instead favouring the Tegra 2 operating system that powers the Zune HD.

Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals.

Although Google, Facebook and their rivals have enjoyed a relatively "safe harbor" from prosecution over user-generated content in the United States and Europe, they face a public that increasingly is more inclined to blame them for cyber-bullying and other online transgressions.

The poll, which collated the answers from more than 27,000 people across 26 countries and was conducted on behalf of the BBC World Service, found that 87 per cent of intent users felt that web access should be a basic right. More than 70 per cent of non-users felt they should have access to the net.

In Japan, Mexico and Russia, nearly 75 per cent of respondents said they could not cope without their internet connection. Ninety per cent of those polled in Turkey believed web access was a fundamental human right, making it the strongest supporter of the widely held sentiment.

Media Release from Privacy International.

It has been reported in the press that Virgin Media is planning to deploy the trials across 40% of its customer base without either obtaining a warrant or seeking the consent of all parties involved in the communications.

Spanish police have arrested three men accused of masterminding one of the biggest computer crimes to date, which created a network of 13million virus-infected computers.

Good

A top Microsoft executive on Tuesday suggested a broad Internet tax to help defray the costs associated with computer security breaches and vast Internet attacks, according to The Hill.

It would seem StarCraft II Beta players were among the first to notice low frame rates while using the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and further digging has uncovered that the automated fan-controlling part of said firmware was failing to act as intended. The result? Overheated chips, diminished performance, and in some extreme cases, death (of the GPU, we think the users will be okay). The totality of it is that you should avoid the 196.75 iteration like the plague, and NVIDIA has temporarily yanked the update while investigating the reported issues.

The Obama administration lifted the veil Tuesday on a highly-secretive set of policies to defend the U.S. from cyber attacks.

It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.

High street retailer Argos has compromised its customers' security by sending their credit-card details - including the vital security code - in unencrypted emails.

The company has been including the customer's full name, address, credit-card number and three-digit CCV security code in order confirmation emails, which are sent once a customer has placed an order on the Argos website. Although the credit-card details don't appear in the text of the email itself, they are contained - in plain text - in the HTML code of the order confirmation.

"An air traffic controller who brought his son to work let the youngster read a few routine messages to pilots — and then brought in another child the next day — in an incident that amused pilots but not the Federal Aviation Administration.

Authorities suspended the controller and a supervisor Wednesday after a recording of the radio calls was posted on the Internet, then reported by a Boston television station."

Alex talks with Declan McCullagh, who specializes in computer security and privacy issues, talks with Alex about the growing threats to internet freedom. Alex also covers the latest news and takes your calls.

Alex also talks with John Young, webmaster of Cryptome, a website that covers news on freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance. The ISP Network Solutions shuttered Young's site earlier in the week after he posted a document summarizing Microsoft's dealings with law enforcement agencies.

One of the dirtiest secrets of the Internet is that it runs on ads for monetization. All of us who surf the web and use systems had lots and lots of free lunches because of advertisements being shown on web sites. The only difference to TV is that they are less obtrusive and you can choose to ignore or skip them (for now).

Self-righteous developers who do not quite grasp this dirty secret use all kind of tricks to remove adversiting from web sites they surf. This could be because of not wanting to support the corporate machine but also because of security reasons. Ad code on the internet is dire – it is built to support every possible imaginable environment and work around restrictions of setups – the ads need to show, no matter what.

The US government’s policy of leaving the Internet alone is over, according to Obama’s top official at the Department of Commerce.

Instead, an “Internet Policy 3.0” approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, according to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance.

The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation, Strickling said in a speech at the Media Institute in Washington this week.

It's a day for scams. Think you've been given the chance to sign up as an iPad tester via Facebook? No you haven't - it's a scam which actually signs you up to a premium rate mobile service, warns the security company Sophos.

"Facebook pages with names such as "iPad Researchers Wanted - Get An iPad Early And Keep It!" and "The Mega iPad Giveaway!" prey on the public's desire to own a free iPad," notes Sophos.

THE GLORIOUS BRITISH GOVERNMENT, upon which the sun finally set almost 100 years ago, has decided that having open WiFi networks is bad for the general population and it wants them all shut off.

The app was released last week for the iPhone, and the company expects to roll out apps for Blackberry and Android in the next few weeks.

A prototype camera phone application that enables the user to find names and numbers of complete strangers has been labelled a 'stalker's dream'.

The application, called Recognizr, has been developed to find personal information through facial recognition software.

The user simply has to take a picture of a person and hit the 'Recognize' button.

The photo is then compared to shots on social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter before personal information, which can include phone numbers, addresses and email addresses, is sent to the user.

Government’s secret Celldar project will allow surveillance of anyone, at any time and anywhere there is a phone signal

Physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, created an atomic circuit that may help quantum computing become a reality.

Quantum computing represents a new paradigm in information processing that may complement classical computers.

Micro-blogging giant Twitter was affected by a serious phishing attack which resulted in a flood of spam messages coming from hacked accounts, with most of them belonging to some high-profile UK cabinet ministers and a few banks.

It was reported that the Twitter accounts of British MP Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and the Labour Party Deputy Leader Harriet Harman were sending links to websites selling fake medicine after being compromised by the phishing attack.

Popular telephone banking service FirstDirect was also affected by the attack, which sent out links to suspicious websites that tricked the unsuspecting users into giving their Twitter log-in credentials.

Alex Jones talks with John Young, an independent scholar, architect, and webmaster of Cryptome, a website that functions as a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance. Young's site came under fire last week from Yahoo's lawyers when it posted information on Yahoos Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement, a 17 page guide describing Yahoos data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it offers law enforcement.
http://cryptome.org/

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bachar Assad were finally united in one and only one picture

Google can’t make money delivering video content that costs them NOTHING over the net for free, what do you think will happen to internet rates when you REQUIRE NBCUniversal/Comcast to deliver content that costs millions of dollars per hour for free ?

The noted government whistleblowing website Cryptome has been taken down after Microsoft saw red over its publication of a top-secret Internet surveillance guide normally shown only to law enforcement agencies.

The 22-page Global Criminal Compliance Handbook contains a reasonably detailed rundown on the information gathered by Microsoft from its various Windows Live operations, including Hotmail, Messenger, MSN Groups, and even the gaming platform, Xbox Live. The guide explains the information that is retained by Microsoft from customer activities, for how long it is saved, and how it can be accessed by police and security services in accordance with US legal requirements.

Controversial proposals that would give Lord Mandelson unprecedented powers to amend copyright laws will be jettisoned next week when the Government suffers the first large defeat of its flagship media plans.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat lords will unite to vote down Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill, which has been criticised by internet giants such as Google and Yahoo!, when the Bill is put to vote in its report stage.

For all you Facebook fans.

Three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations today in allowing a video of a boy with autism being abused to be posted online.

Italian Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three to a six-month suspended sentence in a case that has set a new precedent for internet freedom.

Google called the decision 'astonishing' and said it would appeal.

'The judge has decided I'm primarily responsible for the actions of some teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google video,' Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, who was convicted in absentia, said in a statement.

Lawyers for California based Google had argued that regulation would be impossible as it would have to preview thousands of hours of footage before it was uploaded every day onto sites like YouTube.

The trial centred on footage posted on You Tube, of a teenager suffering from Down's syndrome and who was being bullied by four other boys, at a Turin school.

The footage was uploaded in September 2006 where it shot up to number one in the most viewed section and remained there for two months before finally being removed.

Twitter, which was launched in 2007, has enjoyed rapid growth in recent months. In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day, with that increasing to 300,000 messages per day in 2008. The number of tweets sent last year grew by 1,400 per cent, to around 35 million per day, and that figure now stands at 50 million tweets sent per day.

"Tweets per day is just one number to think about," wrote Kevin Weil, a member of the Twitter analytics team, on the company blog. "Tweet deliveries are a much higher number, because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across the information network. We'll take time to share more information, so please stay tuned."

People who use social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook have been warned that they could eventually face rises in their home insurance premiums of as much as 10pc.

Services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz can alert criminals when users are not home, according to Confused.com, the price comparison service. Foursquare, for example, shows that people are in a specific spot and, more importantly, that the user is definitely not at home, Confused.com added.

The scandal surrounding kids being spied on at home via webcams in laptops provided by schools extends further than just schoolchildren – four years ago Google admitted that it was implementing similar invasive surveillance technologies that would target all Americans.

...

In 2006, Google announced that they would use in-built microphones to listen in on user’s background noise, be it television, music or radio – and then direct advertising at them based on their preferences.

A researcher has unearthed a bug in software used to install Adobe's ubiquitous Reader and Flash applications that can be exploited to remotely install malicious files on end user PCs.

The Adobe Download Manager is an ActiveX script that is invoked when people install or update Reader or Flash using Internet Explorer. Researcher Aviv Raff has figured out how to exploit it to install any file he wishes simply by tricking a user into clicking on a link on the Adobe.com domain.

State agencies would be forbidden from further compliance with the federal Real ID Act under a measure the Utah House approved Thursday.

The move would do nothing to end hours-long waits at state drivers license offices, but could mean that Utah residents won't be able to board airplanes or enter federal buildings in the future.

The New York Times reports that two educational institutions - Lanxiang Vocational School, which has links to the Chinese military, and Shanghai Jiaotong University - were involved in a series of cyber-attacks on Google and other American corporations which may have begun as early as April last year.

Several companies, including Adobe and Rackspace, have confirmed that they were also targeted in the attacks and other targets are thought to include Yahoo! and Northrup Grumman.

“The school district has the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time,” the lawsuit says.

“Many of the images captured may consist of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including various stages of undress.”

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come.

Tampa police, TSA and Homeland Security agents are teaming up “to keep your family safe,” according to ABC News, by implementing random searches at bus depots, in yet another example of how airport tyranny is being rolled out onto the streets.

“Bomb sniffing dogs, pat-downs and metal detector wanding, gloved inspections of hand-held bags” are all now going to become a routine part of everyday life as the Fourth Amendment is completely trashed in the name of “security”.

The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline. The great promise of the Internet, to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy and unleash innovation and creativity, has been exposed as a scam. The Internet is dividing us into antagonistic clans, in which we chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies, while our creative work is handed for free to Web providers who use it as bait for advertising.