LinkBlog: internet

Sunstein "wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading 'rumors,'" wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

US authorities say Americans - the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers - lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. Now financially squeezed, Americans succumb even more easily to offers of riches, experts say. Though statistics are fuzzy, the FBI-backed Internet Crime Complaint Center says that scam reports by Americans grew 33 percent last year, and that after the United States and Britain, Nigeria housed the most perpetrators. Ultrascan, a Dutch research firm that investigates complaints of 419 fraud, says online scam offers from Nigerians in and outside their homeland have mushroomed this year.

Mohamed Abdel Aziz has bolted from trouble a number of times, including dashing from security forces closing in on a demonstration in the port city of Alexandria. His less mercurial moments have three times landed him in police stations, but upon each release he has returned to his computer, opened his blog and conspired in cyberspace to end President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule of Egypt. That's an unlikely prospect. But Aziz, a thin man in black clothes with a wristwatch shimmying up and down his arm, is a founder of the April 6 Youth Movement, which draws from a Facebook group of nearly 76,000 people, mostly high school and university students. The movement opines, plots and Twitters, though it has yet to generate feet in the street: Three of its calls for nationwide strikes drew more police than protesters.

At the height of the Cold War, a U.S. army corps commander in Europe asked for information on his Soviet opposite, the commander of the corps facing him across the inter-German border. All the U.S. intelligence agencies, working with classified material, came up with very little. He then took his question to Chris Donnelly, who had a small Soviet military research institute at Sandhurst. That institute worked solely from open source, i.e. unclassified material. It sent the American general a stack of reports six inches high, with articles by his Soviet counterpart, articles about him, descriptions of exercises he had played in, etc. What was true during the Cold War is even more true now, in the face of Fourth Generation war. As we have witnessed in the hunt for Osama, our satellite-photo-addicted intel shops can’t tell us much. But there is a vast amount of 4GW material available open-source: websites by and about our opponents, works by civilian academics, material from think-tanks, reports from businessmen who travel in areas we are interested in – the pile is almost bottomless. Every American soldier with access to a computer can find almost anything he needs. Much of it is both more accurate and more useful than what filters down through the military intelligence chain.

Map of the detected cases - BE

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

You Tube has permanently suspended another major 9/11 truth account in a continuation of the purge that began following efforts by the establishment to smear the 9/11 truth movement as terrorist propaganda. You Tube has previously been caught blocking 9/11 truth videos from entering into top ranking charts for both views and comments despite their enduring popularity. It also has a record of wanton censorship in deleting videos that are artistically crafted compilations and the furthest possible thing from copyright violation, such as the “Question Your Reality” video.

Finally, under the post-9/11 "homeland security" laws, the government almost certainl routinely demands full access to ISPs and websites. In other words, we've all seen polls at Digg, Reddit, YouTube, and mainstream news sites suddenly disappear entirely if a sufficiently pro-government sentiment was not expressed. Do you doubt that the military and homeland security apparatus would step in to take control of what it considered an "enemy" message? And remember, the government considers any message questioning anything the government does as an enemy message.

The mountainous area of northern Mozambique in southern Africa had been overlooked by science due to inhospitable terrain and decades of civil war in the country. However, while scrolling around on Google Earth, an internet map that allows the viewer to look at satellite images of anywhere on the globe, scientists discovered an unexpected patch of green. A British-led expedition was sent to see what was on the ground and found 7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity, known as Mount Mabu. In just three weeks, scientists led by a team from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew found hundreds of different plant species, birds, butterflies, monkeys and a new species of giant snake.

As of 5:17pm Central Time --11.30.2008-- "Change.org" has removed the request for a new 9/11 investigation from their website.

Lori Drew, 49, of suburban St. Louis, who allegedly helped create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn't exist to convince Megan Meier she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, was charged with conspiracy and fraudulently gaining access to someone else's computer. Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006, allegedly after receiving a dozen or more cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Colbie Caillat (rhymes with "valet") is from California. But sometimes when she encounters fans of the laid-back, R&B-tinged pop of her 2007 debut album "Coco" they believe her hometown is MySpace. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter caused such a stir on the social networking site with her songs - uploaded by her friend Dom - that she went from bedroom composer to major-label artist within a year. Since then she's toured with the Goo Goo Dolls and cruised with John Mayer, for whom she'll open this summer. The root of all this good fortune is Caillat's sexy, playful, and inescapable hit song "Bubbly," which describes the toes-to-nose giddiness brought on by the first rush of love. (Or maybe something else.)

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet. To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Sami al-Murshed, head of development at the International Telecommunication Union, the organization established to standardize and regulate international radio and telecommunications, has made the following comments: "We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago."

Secure Elections in 2 easy steps. 1. Ballots are numbered and voting machines MUST print a receipt when each vote is cast. 2. Results are published online – giving voters the ability to ensure their vote was properly counted.

We are actually on the verge of becoming bigger than the audience for tv news. And we are certainly much more involved and active than the couch potatoes passively consuming the drivel coming from the MSN. In fact, mainstream news is a misnomer. Why? Because the corporate, controlled news does not reflect the views of mainstream Americans. Instead, it reflects the views of the government and the large corporations which own or advertise on the news networks.

"They must promise not to vote twice for president…" Promise?

City officials declared online harassment a crime Wednesday, fewer than two weeks after they learned of a 13-year-old girl who killed herself after receiving hurtful messages on a popular social networking website.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device. "My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."

In less than a week, the number of those pledging support to Ron Paul on Veterans day has moved up from 250 to nearly 2,000. See: www.thisnovember11th.com The result could well put Ron Paul over $8 million in donations for the quarter, which is not yet half over.

he FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

Astute readers have brought some virtual outrage to our attention in the last few days, which we're passing on here, in hopes it will be of help to you in making decisions about virtual privacy and safety, and as yet more evidence that the practice of censoring 'inconvenient' truth is alive and well right here in the good ol' USofA. These readers reported that an internet search for 911truth.org, using Google's search engine, no longer finds 911truth.org in the results! Intrepid researchers that we are, we tried this for ourselves and, indeed, they're right! Go ahead...try it. Enter "911truth.org" in a Google search bar and you'll find, currently, the first entry in response is some unheard of site based in the country Nauru. (Nauru?, we asked ourselves, wondering how we could possibly have missed that in geography class. Wikipedia helped with that oversight. Ah, but, of course! It's that 8.1 square mile phosphate rock island in Micronesia, whose government "has resorted to unusual measures to obtain income." Briefly a tax haven and money laundering center, Nauru now houses a detention center for Australian asylum seekers.) Well, then--that explains it, eh? So then, the site with the greatest number of hits which most closely matches the search string "911truth.org" is ... not ... 911truth.org? In fact, the main (index) page of 911truth.org isn't even in the list generated by a Google search for '911truth.org'! A page from our site linking to the Chicago conference we hosted in June 2006 shows up. Meaning more viewers are looking at last year's conference announcement than the current front page of 911truth.org? Not so with other search engines, such as Ask, AltaVista and Yahoo... as one would expect, the first hit for this search is--surprise--911truth.org.

This is a live vote. Please vote and pass it on. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14727720

Trolls were even allowed to delete the Wiki page for Dylan Avery, who has appeared on Fox News, CNN and in hundreds of newspaper reports. Avery is the producer of the most watched documentary film in Internet history, he clearly merits a biography page on an online encyclopedia, but Wikipedia had no qualms in letting Morton Devonshire and other trolls deep six the entry.

As if it were not bad enough that we are censored by the main stream media, now there's a new type of suppression being implemented upon conspiracy related websites and alternative media sources. It's called Link Relevance Suppression, and it's being used on most of the alternative media websites to lower traffic being driven to them by the popular search engine Google.

“Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, owner of the DailyKos website, now admits that he spent six months in the employ of the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2001,” writes Holland. “In a one-hour interview on June 2, 2006 interview at the Commonwealth Club, Moulitsas, also known as ‘Kos,’ admitted that he was a CIA employee and would have ‘no problem working for them’ in the present.”

KVUE segment on Ron Paul revealing that the Texas Congressman and presidential candidate gets more Google search hits than Paris Hilton or the iPhone. Paul's runaway popularity is growing every day and his chances of beating the other frontrunners are realistic.

In a CNN telephone poll conducted in February 2007, Paul was the candidate with the least name recognition – running just ahead of John Cox, the Chicago businessman and talk show host. But the congressman from Texas has a knack for shining on the Internet -- and winning Internet polls. After the New Hampshire Republican debate, for instance, MSNBC polls showed Paul winning 69 percent of the vote from viewers who tapped him as the "best candidate in the debate."

A new page containing more than 140 Engineers and Architects was added to http://www.PatriotsQuestion911.com on Monday, June 18, 2007. A majority of these new additions are the result of the outstanding work being done by Richard Gage and his colleagues at ae911truth.org. The direct link to the new page is http://PatriotsQuestion911.com/engineers.html

The increasing availability of broadband at home is a big convenience that's accompanied by huge risk. "Equally important is getting computer users — especially those individuals with broadband connections — to lock down their computers. Left insecure, the machines can be turned into zombies," notes Salkever. An unsecured broadband connection that's using Windows — a combination many families use every day — is basically the computer equivalent of leaving your car in the driveway, unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. Oh, and the car's loaded with your most valuable possessions. Obviously, no one would do that, but many people don't think twice about their computer's security. "Today's operating systems, in particular the Windows operating system, are so insecure that it is impossible to say that any one individual was in control of their computer," says computer forensics expert Ted Coombs in Defense Forensics and Child Pornography He notes that there are multiple viruses and related programs written that can put "kiddie porn" onto the computers of unsuspecting owners — and it's not that hard, requiring only a "mid-range capability."

Ron Paul beat the notorious Digg bury brigade to feature on the main page of the social networking giant this afternoon, with the story about his appearance in Austin receiving over a thousand Diggs within hours of its release.

In a discussion thread, a MySpace user complained that his Ron Paul post had been censored, to which a MySpace moderator responded, "Ron Paul wasn't being censored, it was the prisonplanet.com part of the message that was being filtered out." The moderator later clarifies that it was beyond his control and that "prisonplanet.com" is on a list of URL's that are automatically blocked by MySpace's servers. The screenshot can be viewed below.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes. DIY and gardening were named by 39 per cent, hobbies by 36 per cent and travel and walking by 28 per cent. Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers. The most popular online activity was emailing (84 per cent), followed by searching for information (83 per cent). The survey found that 45 per cent bought travel tickets online, 35 per cent used internet banks and 28 per cent surfed the internet for news.

The story that revealed the code got over 15,000 diggs in one day but was pulled from the site overnight sparking some pointed articles discussing the censorship. These legitimate and well thought out stories were then also ruthlessly deleted and their submitters unquestioningly banned. More stories were then submitted discussing Digg censorship. Those stories suffered the same fate.

If you think it's a naked picture or anything inappropriate, you're wrong. Check out what the picture is and you'll be outraged.

TJX Cos., the Framingham-based owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and other stores, said in January that its computer system had been hacked into, compromising millions of customers' credit card numbers and other personal information.

we are calling for the boycott of free speech and America's founding ideals and to encourage Congress to hold a public burning of the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights. We also insist that George Bush be our king until his death. We accept that we cannot live within a free society. Free speech gives us nightmares beyond our collective threshold. We hate America. We want America to end. Leo Strauss was right.

Obviously Drudge still gets a massive amount of traffic, but this is clearly an attempt to mislead his readers into believing his site (and the propaganda which goes with it) is becoming more popular, when in reality, like all the other Neo-Con propaganda organs, Limbaugh, etc., it is losing all its readership and is falling dramatically in popularity.

When the President of the United States of America is reduced to quoting propaganda nonsense fabricated by his own neocon supporters, that's pathetic. When he does so specifically in order to justify failed policies which continue to see dozens, if not hundreds, dead every day in Iraq, that's worse than tragic. It's criminal.

The theft by hackers of data from at least 45.7 million credit and debit cards of shoppers at nearly 2,500 discount retailers owned by conglomerate TJX, including Marshalls and TJ Maxx, is believed to be the largest such breach of consumer information ever reported.

This is how far he, and his argument for continuing the slaughter in Iraq, has fallen: President Bush today was reduced to quoting two bloggers from Baghdad. He cited them as evidence that his surge/escalation is working. One problem: their posts were written weeks ago, and re-published in the Wall Street Journal on March 5. Only hours later did the White House reveal that the bloggers were brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, and these supposedly little-known average Joes had met Bush in the Oval Office in 2004. They are dentists and write an English-language blog from Baghdad called IraqTheModel.com, also available via Pajamas Media.

Mike Davidson, founder of online news emporium Newsvine, recently realized that whoever created McCain's page not only borrowed Davidson's proprietary template but actually pulled images directly from his page, meaning every view of McCain's MySpace home cost Davidson bandwidth. Davidson retaliated by replacing the borrowed image with a graphic announcing that the Arizona senator had "come out in full support of gay marriage ... particularly marriage between passionate females." The genius of the perfectly legal maneuver was that Davidson only had to go into his own files (which McCain's camp was pilfering with every page load) to twist the Senator's message—the "immaculate hack," Davidson called it.

Yet a far more hopeful picture is emerging. In this scenario the mainstream press, though late to the party, figures out how to make serious money from the Internet, uses the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms, and retains its professionalism—along with a readership that is part print, part Web. Newspapers stay alive as hybrids. The culture and civic mission of daily print journalism endure. Can that happen? Given the financial squeeze and the shortsightedness of many publishers and investors, will dailies be able to navigate such a transition without sacrificing standards of journalism? Or will cost-cutting owners so thoroughly gut the nation’s newsrooms that they collapse the distinction between the rest of the Internet and everything that makes newspapers uniquely valuable?

I’ve been reading a lot about the Internet and how people have a tendency to act like assholes when they’re anonymous. The theory is the anonymity makes them a jerk. In reality, they’re all perfectly nice people, but the nefarious Internet forces them to behave out of character. I think that’s all a bunch of bullshit.

A teacher faces up to 40 years in jail for exposing her pupils to online pornography, amid an outcry from computer experts that she is the innocent victim of malicious software.

There is some discussion as to whether or not that time stamp was later edited in by someone tampering with the clip. It is unclear whether that happened or not but the reporting and the time of the reporting as shown does seem to coincide with the other BBC World report.

It took Netflix nearly 7.5 years to mail out 1 billion DVDs, about seven months less than it took McDonald's Corp. to sell 1 billion hamburgers after opening its first restaurant in April 1955.

If Sulzberger had only followed the usual script, he would've assured the reporter that the print edition of the Times would not only be around in five years, the company will have figured out a way to make a profit from online advertising, too. But he ended up saying, "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years. And you know what? I don't care, either."

On August 1, Wolf, 24, was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury seeking unpublished footage he shot during a 2005 protest that turned violent. Wolf was released on bail a month later while his appeal was being considered. But a three-judge panel rejected the appeal and revoked bail.

Google bombs are one thing, delisting web sites for their political content is quite another. For instance, take Google delisting the Italian web site Uruknet as a news source, thus removing it from the Google News page. According to Alexa, the web-ranking organization, Uruknet is highly rated as an Iraqi news source. “URUKNET is and has been the most consistent, credible, and powerful web-based source of News and Information on Iraq during the last 4 years. They have incomparable lines of communication direct from inside Iraq that fly in the face of the lies of the Global Corporate Empire. When the imperialists cannot buy off or intimidate websites like URUKNET, they can always depend on their billion dollar corporations like Google to get the job done,” explains Les Blough of AxisofLogic.

A wave of 9/11 truth and other alternative documentaries have suddenly surged up the Google Video rankings, with three "conspiracy" videos in the top eleven alone, including Alex Jones' Terror Storm.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.) That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

I don't normally do this, and initially, I had planned on writing you a long and nasty email because of your policy of censorship at your website. It angers me that people like you, not unlike the mainstream media in America, decide what people read and what they don't. You will talk and write about how the media in America is controlled by unseen hands, or biased toward the right, yet you practice the same brand of defacto censorship, most notably surrounding the events of September 11th, 2001.

The world's oldest newspaper, Sweden's Post och Inrikes Tidningar, has embraced the digital age, ending its run as a print publication and opting to be published exclusively on the Internet. Founded in 1645 by Queen Christina, the Post och Inrikes Tidningar (PoIT) -- or Post and Domestic Newspapers -- was a staple for readers in Sweden throughout the late 17th and 18th century.

The three blogs are among upward of 65 million worldwide tracked by Technorati Inc., an authority on this freewheeling and frenetic medium -- as well as the newer iterations (focusing on video, podcasting and photo-sharing) of what the California firm collectively calls "citizen media." "About 95 percent of blogs are really personal journals," says Derek Gordon, Technorati's vice president of marketing, adding that technical and gossip-oriented blogs are the most popular on the Web. "There is every kind of obscure blogging community."

The FBI, without a court order, can send a letter to any Internet provider ordering it to maintain records for an investigation, said Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that promotes free speech and privacy on the Web. "There's been no showing that mass surveillance of all Internet users, mandated by the government, is necessary for law enforcement," Bankston said. "If this passes, there would be a chilling effect on free speech if everyone knew that everything they did on the Internet could be tracked back to them."

AT&T’s agreement to Net Neutrality as a condition of their merger with Bell South was a huge victory for Internet freedom. It also debunks a top myth told to the public by Internet freedom opponents like AT&T: that Net Neutrality can’t be defined. It can be – AT&T just did it.

Apparently, if one includes mention of a pop star's genitalia in the title of a post during a time period when said genitalia has been copiously photographed, oh, the bounty that will follow.

“Given the power granted to the office of the presidency and the unaccountability of the intelligence agencies, widespread illegal domestic operations are certain. We as a people should remember history and not repeat it,” writes Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative.