Sunday, April 16, 2006

ISP snooping gaining support | CNET News.com Top Bush administration officials have endorsed the concept, and some members of the U.S. Congress have said federal legislation is needed to aid law enforcement investigations into child pornography. A bill is already pending in the Colorado State Senate.   Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months. And some proposals would require providers to retain data that ordinarily never would have been kept at all. CNET News.com was the first to report last June that the U.S. Department of Justice was quietly shopping around the idea of legally required data retention. But it was the European Parliament's vote in December for a data retention requirement that seems to have attracted broader interest inside the United States. 9:02:37 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Support for U.S. Mandatory Data Retention Laws. Support for U.S. Mandatory Data Retention Laws. chill wrote to mention a C|Net article about an upswell in support for a mandatory data retention policy here in the U.S. From the article: "Top Bush administration officials have endorsed the concept, and some members of the U.S. Congress have said federal legislation is needed to aid law enforcement investigations into child pornography. A bill is already pending in the Colorado State Senate. Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months." [Slashdot: Your Rights Online] 8:48:44 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Microsoft Bypasses HOSTS File. Microsoft Bypasses HOSTS File.  whitehatlurker writes  "Dave Korn announced on the Full Disclosure and Bugtraq security lists that Microsoft is bypassing local lookups for some hosts, meaning that you can't locally block some sites through your HOSTS file. All of these sites are MicroSoft controlled sites. The general feeling in the rest of the thread is that this was to obfuscate these hosts and prevent them from being blocked by malware. However, there are no non-MicroSoft hosts listed, giving a competitive advantage for MicroSoft's anti-malware tools over other brands."  [Slashdot: Your Rights Online] 8:40:11 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Sprint Helps Parents Keep Tabs on Kids. Sprint Helps Parents Keep Tabs on Kids. Mobile phone service allows parents to track their children with the help of GPS technology. [PCWorld.com - Latest News Stories] 8:36:17 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Gartner: Pharmaceutical firms slow to update IT for coming mandate. Gartner: Pharmaceutical firms slow to update IT for coming mandate. Pharmaceutical companies have been slow to update sales force automation systems to comply with a July 1 mandate from the AMA, according to Gartner Inc. The new rule limits the sharing of physician-specific prescribing data for doctors who have opted out of the system. [Computerworld Data Mining News] 8:33:32 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

EFF Defends American's Free Speech Against Foreign Court. EFF Defends American's Free Speech Against Foreign Court. Your online speech may be perfectly legal under our laws, but when can a US court be made to enforce a foreign law against you? Can the First Amendment be undermined by court decisions from nations that are less protective of free speech? That's the issue addressed in an amicus brief filed by EFF on Monday, arguing that the First Amendment blocks two French fashion design companies from enforcing a French court judgment in the U.S. [...] The brief is available here. [EFF: Deep Links] 8:28:27 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Lessig, Stallman on 'Open Source' DRM. Lessig, Stallman on 'Open Source' DRM. Best of all possible shaftings? When Sun trumpeted its 'open source DRM' last month, no one at first noticed an unusual name amongst the canned quotes. Lending his support to the rights enforcement technology was Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and Software Freedom Law Center director, Professor Lawrence Lessig. A name usually associated with the unrestricted exchange of digital media.  [The Register - Internet and Law: Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs] 8:26:13 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Chertoff Doubts DHS Official Hurt Security House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., has vowed to investigate the department's hiring procedures, saying Doyle may have provided "potentially sensitive information over the Internet to a complete stranger." But Chertoff, noting that "individuals will misstep," said he doubted the offense created a risk to national security based on the allegations. "We try to weed out those who pose a security risk," Chertoff said in a briefing with reporters. "I don't know ... that background checks with people hired will predict future behavior." But he added: "We are always focused on tightening our security. We will certainly cooperate with Congress." 8:23:48 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Secretary of Homeland Security admits doubts on background checks. Secretary of Homeland Security admits doubts on background checks. "I don't know ... that background checks ... will predict future behavior." (USA Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, quoted in an Associated Press story in the Washington Post. Thanks to Adam Shostack for bringing this to my attention.) [The Practical Nomad] 8:20:06 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []

Disturbing developments in DDoS attacks | Threat Chaos | ZDNet.com I had a chat yesterday with someone who is on the front lines in the fight against cyber-extortion. Barrett Lyon is an expert on building the infrastructure and defenses to survive Distributed Denial of Service attacks. His story is fascinating. You can read more about it in the New Yorker. Traditional DDoS of course is when an attacker uses thousands of centrally controlled zombie machines Barrett raises the specter of a new generation of zombies. to direct millions of packets at a single destination. Most web servers shrivel up and die when subjected to that much attention. According to Barrett even the upstream infrastructure cannot withstand some of these attacks. The firewalls, routers, sometimes even the ISP go off line. A recent new technique is for the zombies to all perform DNS look-ups causing a failure of the DNS server for the target to die, effectively taking down a site without even hitting it directly. But in the podcast I did with Barrett yesterday he raises the specter of a new generation of zombies, Linux zombies, being used to launch attacks against targets. He says in a recent battle he had to defend a site that was under attack from a Japanese hacker who had been hired by someone to take out their competitor, Barrett's client. 8:16:40 PM  PermaLink   / trackback []