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A top U.S. air force brass has recommended that the U.S. military create their own super bot-net to attack other bot-nets that are attacking U.S. military computer networks. One of the main problems with this idea, among others, is that it will fry thousands of computers belonging to innocent end-users around the world - users who have no idea that their home computer has been controlled remotely as part of a bot-net ring. The rise in social networking has created an information management and overload problem for many users known as the "Data Portability" problem. The problem starts with authentication, includes having data (profile data, media or otherwise) in several different sites and in different versions, and is compounded by the fortress mentality of many social networking sites. These factors make it difficult for users to manage their online identity and control who sees, at what level of granularity, their personal data. The data portability movement is meant to make this easier. On the other hand, it may also make it easier for social networking sites to buy, sell, and use your data. So how come nobody is talking about the privacy concerns inherent with data portability? The controversial online advertising firm Phorm (pronounced "form") has, for much of this year, been in the middle of a maelstrom of criticism over its plans to serve up ads specific to the user's browsing history. Yet to go live, Phorm continues to sign up ISPs, mostly in the UK where their ISP partners cover 70% of the UK broadband market. Their early access trials, though, have been contentious, and the debate is far from over. How do you feel about having someone access your browsing history, the better to serve you relevant advertising? The good news, for savvy users, is that it can be blocked at the user's browser by permanently blocking cookies from the domain www.webwise.net. Yes, it's really true - people are having Internet funerals. Online funerals have the advantage of allowing people who otherwise could not attend the service to tune in. But still, an online funeral? Why would anybody want to have - or attend - an Internet funeral? Do you really want to entrust the paying of your last respects to your wifi connection? It turns out that some people in England do, and here's why. It's long been apparent to our readers that we at the Internet Patrol are not exactly blind fans of online gaming. And we don't exactly holding up gambling sites as paragons of Internet virtue, either. So news from last week's e-crime congress in London, bringing to light a case of the bad (a gambling site) being brought to its knees by the worse (a botnet), has us pondering the larger implications. Chinese cellular providers China Mobile and China Unicom together have over 500 million active cell phone accounts, and recently more than 200 million of these users received a stream of unwanted and unwelcome advertisements as text messages - cell phone spam. Both cell phone providers and the spammers received a stern talking to from the Deputy Head of China's State Council Office for Rectifying Malpractice (yes, really). We in the anti-spam field have known it all along, but the events of this week confirm it: spammers are worse than prostitutes, pimps, and those involved in plying the human traffic trade. Clearly that is the only way to interpret the actions of former N.Y. Attorney General and soon-to-be-former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer this week was linked to - and has admitted to - ties to a prostitution ring spanning several countries, and boasting some of the highest-paid call girls in world - some commanding more than $5,000 per hour. But that was chump change for some of the extremely wealthy clients of the ring, which operated through a group and website known as the Emperors Club VIP Revealing a statistic sure to make J.C. Penney, Sears, and every major mallwalk children's photographer shudder, a British survey has found that one out of every five families with children use their cell phone to take and send pictures of their just-born babies to family and friends within ten minutes of the child's birth. And that's not all! An equal number have created a social networking profile, such as on Facebook or MySpace, for their children! We're really proud to be involved in this effort! The Boulder Dushanbe Relief effort, which is working with the United Nation's World Food Programme, is a joint relief effort coordinated by us, and supported by the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, the Boulder Dushanbe Sister City organization, to help save the 260,000 people in Dushanbe and Tajikistan who are starving and freezing to death due to the extreme winter right now. A few days ago we reported that a third and fourth undersea telecom Internet cable had been cut, following the initial disruptions caused by damage to two underwater cables that had been blamed on anchors dropping on the cables, plunging millions of people in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, into Internet darkness. Now the plot thickens as a fifth undersea Internet cable outage is reported, and Iran is taken offline. Total users affected so far by the outages exceeds 80million. As a third and then fourth submarine Internet cable are cut, further disrupting power to India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Qatar, and other Middle East countries, officials admit that the cuts to the undersea cables have not been caused by poorly dropped anchors, but deny that the cable cuts are the result of malicious activity. If you are having trouble getting email to or from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or the Middle East, it's probably because a badly dropped ship anchor has damaged an undersea Internet provisioning telecom cable in the Mediterranean, disrupting Internet service throughout India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the Middle East. The cable, belonging to Flag Telecom, was badly cut when a ship anchored off the cost of Alexandria was told to anchor in a place that was not their usual anchor location - resulting in the anchor dropping on the cable. This Valentine's Day, give a true gift of the heart by giving the gift of life - help fund heart surgery for a child. Even $5.00 will help, and you can even donate through Paypal - it doesn't get much easier than that. Yesterday we told you how to boost your vocabularly with the FreeRice.com game, today we're bringing you another free and educational online game, Traveller IQ Challenge. Test your knowledge of world geography, learn something, and have fun! For those of you who wonder why people make child pornography videos, it's because it pays. Fortunately, child pornography and the law don't mix. While people may try to find countries that sell child pornography videos, child pornography is illegal virtually everywhere. Last week police cracked an Internet child pornography ring with 2500 customers in 19 countries, leading to 92 arrests. The lawsuit against Yahoo over the jailing of two Chinese journalist whom they helped the government of China to identify has been settled, after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang met with the families of the two journalists. In a rush of pollyanic* optimism, their lawyer says "It's no longer possible for a corporation to say 'We were just following orders'." *Pollyannic refers to a constantly optimistic outlook as epitomized in the character of Pollyanna, the main character in the bestselling novel of the same name, authored by Eleanor H. Porter, and first published in 1913. To say that someone is being 'pollyannic' is to say that they are being overly optimistic, such as "It's pollyanic to think that the economy will turn around by the end of the year." It's like all those foreign movies with bad translations that you like to laugh at, only this time it's real - journalists in Israel used the Babelfish free online translator to translate an email request to the Dutch foreign ministry - and in the process insulted a Dutch dignitary's mother and created an international incident. Who in their right mind would let Babelfish translate a message - let alone send a Babelfish translation - to members of a foreign government whom they wished to interview?? "Is water boarding torture?" is a question that many are asking these days. Now a live water board video has hit the Internet, purposely put on the worldwide web in order to allow people to witness someone being water boarded, and to decide for themselves. See the video of Kaj Larson getting waterboarded here. In a new twist, web spammers are using images of a stripper named Melissa to dupe naive Windows users into helping them break CAPTCHAs - those "enter this text" images that websites rely on to keep spammers from posting spam on their site. Dubbed the CAPTCHA.a or Captchar.a virus, an infected Windows computer will display a picture of Melissa, who promises to remove an article of clothing for each "puzzle" that the user solves. In what may be some very good news for parents, a survey of more than 1200 people has revealed that teenagers and twenty-somethings below the age of twenty-five would rather give up caffeine, chocolate, and even sex, before giving up their cell phone. The military government of Myanmar - formerly known as Burma - has literally cut off Internet access - blaming a "damaged underwater cable" - after an unprecedented sea of images of Myanmar's brutal crackdown on protesters leaked out to the world through the Internet. Burmese bloggers are now afraid for their lives. "When things were hot on the streets, we were not the main worry. But as the situation cools down, they will follow us. They know who we are, they know we are bloggers, and I am afraid," said Myanmar blogger Lo Katt. Project Unity cable - a plan by Google to build a massive, undersea Internet cable across the Pacific ocean, was outed this week as sharp-eyed Google watchers pieced together clues which lead to the discovery of the Unity cable project. Authorities in Guangzhou, China are reporting that a man has collapsed and died after playing online games at an Internet cafe for three days straight. According to news reports, the man collapsed after a "three-day Internet gaming binge." Neither the man's name, nor what he was playing, have been released. Prince - who was formerly known as "the artist formerly known as Prince", due to his adoption of a symbol in place of his name for a period of time - has engaged the aid of online rights audit and enforcement firm Web Sheriff. On behalf of Prince, WebSheriff has threatened both YouTube and eBay with lawsuits if they don't remove what Prince claims is infringing material. Web Sherrif principle John Giacobbi says that eBay and YouTube need to "smell the coffee." The news that famed and beloved Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti had died this evening rocked the world. But what went almost unnoticed - in fact unknown for many - was that the news was broken not by a press conference or press release - not by telephone from his bedside - not by telegram - not even by email - but.. by SMS text message. London's The Times newspaper is reporting that a Pentagon report indicates that China has amassed an enormous, well-armed "cyber army" that is focussed on taking out the United States computer infrastructure, along with that of other "enemies", such as the UK and South Korea. There are a few feactures Of Federal government taxation in Nigeria, along with an overburdened and at times lax penal system, which collude to make Nigeria one of the ideal places to run an advanced-fee scam. In fact, the common name for these scams - 419 scams - comes directly from the Nigerian Penal Code - section 419. A new wave of spam hitting everybody's inboxes takes the form of a welcome to one or another website and service, complete with temporary login information and a link to 'change your temporary password'. The subjects all say some variant of "Login Information", "Member Details", "Registration Details" or, even, occasionally, "Internet Techincal Support" (sic). What they also all have in common is that if you click on that link, your computer will have just become a botnet pimp's newest bitch. Our friends over at SpamShield have come up with a really nifty use for Google maps - they have created a spam map - they call it "Spam World" - which maps where all the spam is coming from - around the world - in real time (well, updated every fifteen minutes). The News Agency of Nigeria is reporting that Nigerian school children who are among some of the first recipients of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops have used them to further their education, as intended - but perhaps not in a way that was intended. They are using them to surf explicit adult websites. A company called Capgemini has been contracted to build an enormous online database of every single child in England, including their address and the telephone numbers. The database, called ContactPoint, is surely the stuff of which the wet dreams of hackers and online paedophiles everywhere is made. Three men were sentenced and jailed in England this past week for using the Internet to incite acts of terrorism. Specifically, Younes Tsouli, Waseem Mughal and Tariq Al-Daour were sentenced to jail after pleading guilty to running a chat site on which they incited people to commit acts which amounted to murder, all in the name of Holy War. Allofmp3.com, one of the top mp3 download sites in the world for people looking for mp3 mp3 downloads, allowing people do to an mp3 search of the works of thousands of popular artists, and then download the mp3s for as little as ten cents, has been closed down by the Russian government in a bid to gain membership in the World Trade Organization. Allofmp3.com was considered a barrier to entry for Russia, with what has been estimated to be the world's largest collection of pirated music, all available as low cost and even nearly free mp3 downloads to Allofmp3's 5.5 million customers. A man in China has died after his Motorola cell phone exploded in his shirt pocket with such force that it broke his ribs, sending a shard of broken bone directly into his heart. The mother of a Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was jailed for ten years by the Chinese government after Yahoo cooperated with Chinese authorities and revealed Shi Tao's identity and personal details to them, is suing Yahoo in U.S. Federal court. Even if you know what are the Seven Wonders of the World, did you know that they are about to become the old 7 Wonders of the World (not to be confused with the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World)? Or that there is a vote going on for the new 7 Wonder of the World, and that there is now an 8th World Wonder? Like it or not it's true, but thanks to the Internet you can cast your vote for the new seven wonders of the world, and your vote for the 7 world wonders actually counts! (The Pyramids of Giza now have honourary status, hence there now being eight wonders of world acclaim.) While the U.S. attempts to keep GIs from blogging and posting video, not everyone has that restriction. Witness this hot-off-the-presses video, made with footage captured by a webcam mounted on one British Royal Marine's helmet! This video takes you with this Royal Marine as he patrols in Afghanistan, become involved in a skirmish, and gets shot (fortunately, in the backside, and he's relatively fine). There is no real gore in this video, but there is gunfire, and a lot of swearing. I read an article this week about "virtual rape". Yes, really. That would be virtual sexual assault on your virtual online character or persona. This is all coming out now because, I kid you not, someone from Second Life reported a virtual rape to the police in Brussels. And they are investigating it. Oh for pete's sake, give me a break! How tenous a grasp on reality do these people have? And how the heck can there be "forced online sexual activity"? Isn't that nearly an oxymoron? Authorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan say that people are in a frenzy because of a rumour of deadly virus being transmitted by cell phone. The deadly cellphone virus rumor is being blamed on the Taliban. The YouTube video website has been blocked from all of Thailand after a video appeared on the YouTube site which insults the Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, explains Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, Thailand's Minister of Information and Technology. Domain tasting may sound like a funny term, but it's no laughing matter. But exactly what is domain tasting? Sometimes called "Domain Kiting", domain tasting is when someone registers a domain name for the express purpose of testing it out during the five-day grace period to see whether it will receive enough traffic to pay for itself, usually with just the clickthrough advertising on the site itself. "Greetings from Iraq," the subject line says. Who wouldn't at least give that a glance the first time they see that in their inbox? And that's exactly what scammer "Merrill Melvin Hansley", a supposed security manager of STE,CCPLUS STORAGE SARL storage company in Iraq, is counting on. The British government is considering making registered sex offenders register their email addresses and chat names - including names that they use in chatrooms along with their other details. Good idea. Let's have them register what sort of clothing they wear, while we're at it. Some complained, some praised, when Yahoo closed their chat rooms to those under 18 in an effort to help protect children. Yahoo and other chat sites also routinely close down chat rooms which have 'themes' which are related to illegal activities, such as child molestation. Now three men - David Beavan, Alan Hedgcock, and Robert Mayers - have been sentenced in the UK for plotting in a chat room to molest 13- and 14-year-old sisters. The Superbowl Trojan, as some are calling it, has been implanted on dozens of Super Bowl related websites, and is installing itself on any Windows computer that happens to visit any of the Super Bowl sites without adequate protection. The Super Bowl Trojan allows the hacker to take full control over any of these infected Windows PCs by connecting the machine to dv521.com, downloading the W1C.exe file, and installing the Wow-PK Trojan. Spam laden with trojan viruses are running high this month - primarily the Small.DAM Trojan - so be extra careful. Common subject lines include those about "Storm Batters Europe", updates on Condoleeza Rice, and claims that Putin is dead and Hussein is alive. The subject lines vary, but the Trojan payload remains the same: executable files surreptitiously installed on your computer, with file names such as "Full Story.exe", "Full Text.exe", "Full Video.exe", "Video.exe", "Full Clip.exe" or "Read More.exe", or such. We keep telling you that Nigerian 419 and British Lottery scams work because people actually send these scammers money. In case you didn't believe us, police in Holland have arrested a Nigerian man over the holidays who is being charged with being involved with a 419 scam, and he had cash amounting to $4,599,577 in his pocket! A company called Accenture has developed a system for a "virtual family dinner". The concept is simple enough. With people scattered across the United States, and around the globe, it's increasingly rare that a family sits down to dinner together around a table. So, goes Accenture's corpthink, let's have their loved ones sit down with them - wherever they may be. The virtual family meal system is aimed primarily at the elderly, whom are often shut in, or may have special dietary needs which could be monitored by family members on the grid of the system. This year, the Queen of England will not only be broadcasting her message by radio and television, but will also be making it available as a podcast. And, in fact, you can sign up right now, in advance, and have the Queen's Christmas podcast delivered right to you as soon as it is available. The 2B1 "one laptop per child" initiative, also known as the $100 laptop project, is looking for experienced hackers to try to hack the $100 2B1 laptop, so that they can trouble shoot its security issues. But what I want to know is, how many of those laptops will stay with the children, and how many will get sold by their families for food? In a move which may have surprised nobody more than it surprised canned meat company Hormel, Hormel lost their legal effort to regain control over their trademark "SPAM". Sony sure is a PR nightmare, not to mention their careless disregard for the safety and security of their customers. Apparently knowingly installing rootkit software on their music CDs which opened up their customer's personal computers to hacking (which ultimately lead to a lawsuit and recall) wasn't quite enough for them, as it's now coming to light that with the current issues that Sony faces with their laptop batteries catching on fire, they apparently knew that the batteries were flawed and vulnerable to overheating and catching on fire! As we observe the anniversary of 9/11 - the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States and the toppling of the World Trade Center - we note some Internet legacies and reminders of 9 /11. The New York Times this week barred web surfers coming in through UK-based IP addresses from reading an article about the terror investigation which is currently ongoing in Britain. "Details Emerge in British Terror Case" read the Times headline, but surfers in the UK could get no further. Some of you may recall Kyle MacDonald and his quest to trade one red paper clip for a house. Well guess what. Kyle MacDonald has done it! In fact, in not quite a year, Kyle MacDonald has managed to parlay one red paperclip, through a series of trades including a part in the movie "Donna on Demand", into a real house. "Limited link marketing", or "pixel marketing", all started witih the Million Dollar Homepage created by Alex Tew. Then came the 1000 Word Page, and now we have expert Internet marketers creating the 500 Word page, the 1024 Ad page, and a new software program to allow even a beginner to put up their own limited link or pixel marketing page. The first clinic specializing in addition to gaming - and in particular video and online computer games - opened this week in Amsterdam. "It can start with a Game Boy... From there, it can progress to multilevel games that aren't made to be won" Blue Security and their controversial Blue Frog program suffered a fatal blow when Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef concluded that the cost to the Internet of their ongoing battle with spammer PharmaMaster, and possibly others, was too high. Gary McKinnon, the hacker known as "Solo", who infamously hacked into NASA and Pentagon computers, and who claimed that once there he found dozens of other hackers, and proof of aliens, has lost his fight against extradition to the United States for prosecution. Chinese writer Yang Tianshu was arraigned this week for posts which he made to the Internet. Yang Tianshu was just released in January 2005 following a Christmas Eve, 2004 detention for similar writings. The Internet Patrol is maintained by the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, and written by ISIPP President Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.. A study just released by Internet security device company SonicWALL reveals that an average of one in ten people who telecommuute do so in the nude. Yahoo is being accused of banning the name "Allah" as or in any Yahoo username, and it looks as if the accusations are true. Nobody has been able to register any username containing the string "allah". Online suicide pacts are leading to an increased number of suicides. These Internet suicide pacts encourage those who might otherwise not take that final step. In Japan, the problem of web suicide pacts has reached such a proportion that ISPs now watch for and report "suicide circles". The most recent outbreak of violence connected to the Danish publication of what Muslims consider to be a blasphemus cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed was provoked by rumours spread by SMS text messages. Today, February 3rd, is Black Worm Day, so called because today is the day that the nasty BlackWorm is posed to strike computers around the world, wiping data files willy nilly. Also known as the Kama Sutra worm, Mywife worm, and a host of other names, it is estimated that as many as 600,000 PCs are infected with the Black Worm. According to best estimates, as many as a half-million PCs world-wide are infected with a malicious "blackworm" code which is set to delete data from their hard drives on February 3rd. The worm, previously identified as the Kama Sutra worm, also known as Blackmal.E, Nyxem.E, Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi, W32.Blackmal.E@mm worm, or W32/Nyxem-D, is set to wipe all Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF data from your hard drive! It's being delivered in email with subjects like "School girl fantasies gone bad," and "Re: sex video." Blackberry maker Research in Motion, also known as RIM, has suffered another blow in the patent infringement lawsuit brought by patent-holder NTP. As the walls close in on RIM, an injunction may be imminent. If you thought that SMS text messages were primarily the domain of teenagers who seem to speak in electronic tongues, using l33t speak, think again. Millennials is the new term for the generation after Gen Y - the netcentric, uberconnected generation. After months of hand-wringing, the international community, in the form of the United Nations, has backed off and left control of the master DNS files with ICANN and the United States. Referred to by some as iGod, Christian podcast shows and Roman Catholic podcasts from the Vatican have proven a huge hit. Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail access is being denied to military personnel in the Navy and the Marines who are stationed overseas. The military has blocked access from all government-owned computers, citing concerns about computer security and viruses. The line in the sand has been drawn, and that line is the Internet. The world wide web has become embroiled in a world wide custody battle over who will control the Internet. Earlier this year, as other countries' grumblings became outright cries ... Chinese Troops Have Invaded Okinawa, said the headlines on the Yahoo site. Only, it wasn't really a Yahoo site, and it wasn't true. Talk about people doing stupid things! How stupid do you have to be to make a death threat against an officer who is investigating you? Spammer stupid! Lazy tea lovers, these tea kettles are just for you! The SMS tea kettle can be turned on remotely by sending it a text message! Free ringtones or pay-for-play ringtones, either way, ringtone downloads have surpassed music downloads for many bands, and now account for more than 10% of the global music market! The BagleDI-U trojan is showing up in a lot of places this week. Being called Bagle.cd or Bagle.da, and hidden in an attached file called either "price_new.zip", "price2.zip" or "09_price.zip", it's turning up all over the place. Yusufali-A is a new trojan worm which censors web sites by minimizing your browser window and displaying a verse from the Koran which includes the phrase "Yusufali: Know, therefore, that there is no god but Allah, and ask forgiveness for they fault, and for the men and women who believe" |