"Fall back and Spring ahead." Don't forget to reset your clocks. About Daylight Saving Time - History, rationale, laws & dates.

Slashdot | Pushback against DDOS Attacks.

Huusker writes "Steven Bellovin and others at ATT Research Labs and ICIR have come up with mechanism to stop DDOS attacks. The idea is called Pushback. When the routers get flooded they consult a Unix daemon (/etc/pushbackd) to determine if they are being DDOS'ed. The routers propagate the quench packets back to the sources. The policy and propagation are separate, allowing hardware vendors to concentrate on the quench protocol while the white hats invent ever more clever DDOS detection filters for /etc/pushbackd. The authors of the paper have an initial implementation on FreeBSD."

CNET NEWS.COM - Pro-privacy senator dies in crash.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat who fought to bolster Americans' privacy rights and limit government surveillance of the Internet, was killed in a plane crash on Friday afternoon.

Wellstone, 58, was an unapologetic liberal who was elected in 1990 and opposed the Gulf War, sought to increase the minimum wage, and envisioned a tax-funded health care system. He was enmeshed in a tight re-election bid this year.

In January, he asked the Federal Communications Commission to require telephone companies to seek customer permission before selling personal information. That information would include telephone number details of a customer's incoming and outgoing calls.

"Consumers have a right to know that their confidential records, including records of telephone numbers called, will remain confidential," Wellstone said. Later that month, Qwest Communications said it would postpone plans to market its phone records.

Economist.com - Securing the cloud.

Digital security, once the province of geeks, is now everyone's concern. But there is much more to the problem--or the solution--than mere technology, says Tom Standage

[ ... ]

Until recently, most people were either unaware of computer security or regarded it as unimportant. That used to be broadly true, except in a few specialised areas--such as banking, aerospace and military applications--that rely on computers and networks being hard to break into and not going wrong. But now consumers, companies and governments around the world are sitting up and taking notice. Why?

Big Brother Awards 2002, Deutschland.

On Friday, October 26th, the German BigBrotherAwards 2002 will extend the illustrious list of institutions and persons with addidional names. The bestowal dignifies organisations and individuals for their sustainable and lasting negative effects on privacy issues.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Big Brother Lifetime Award Goes To Microsoft.

D4C5CE writes "Microsoft's ceaseless "success" in bringing instability, insecurity and breaches of privacy as well as a deplorable lack of open standards to almost Every Desktop on Earth has now earned them an "Oscar" for Data Leeches, the Lifetime Award for "outstanding mis-achievement" from the BigBrotherAwards 2002 in Germany. Microsoft's Data Protection Officer actually attended the ceremony to collect the prize (probably delighted that unlike the "laureates" of last year's event in Austria, at least he would not receive live cockroaches), and this unlucky winner took the opportunity to make some critical remarks on the company's communications regarding the Windows Media Player and Digital Restrictions (or, euphemistically, in his words: Rights) Management technologies which he deemed crucial for modern business models, rather than acknowledging that it's in fact not just the advertising but the approach itself which is fundamentally flawed."

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Hilary Rosen Defeated at Oxford Union.

yogi writes "Oxford University Students' Union had a debate last Thursday, titled This House believes that 'the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music.'. Ordinarily, not too exciting, but since it is the Oxford Union, they get Hilary Rosen to speak. She lost the debate, and had to have pictures like this taken. Read the writeup at NTK, or a more detailed one here. I especially like the bit where she asked all the file downloaders whether it made them buy more music."