More on Cyberwar
April 7, 2011 Leave a comment
Short Video from PJTV featuring an interview with Paul Rosenzweig.
Good News for InterNet Freedom
March 12, 2011 2 Comments
As reported by the National Post
Canada’s telecom regulator said Friday it will not expand its probe into Internet pricing to look at the billing practices of retail Internet services because market forces are working just fine for consumers.
A related editorial, explains why this is the right approach.
A “Free” internet does not mean that users should not be paying market prices for connectivity or services.
See my previous post.
Net Neutrality, another bad idea [Updated]
March 3, 2011 4 Comments
What can go wrong with the government dictating how much companies can charge for bandwidth on the internet?
They certainly have a very good track record regulating it.
Regulators are congenitally incapable of grasping that they create more problems than they solve
This is why I am always wary of attempts at regulation.
It didn’t take very long… [UPDATED]
February 21, 2011 3 Comments
for my prediction to become a reality.
PC world reported on Feb 18 that a bunch of websites, only 84,000, were taken down “accidentally” by the ICE.
I have zero sympathy for people who uses the web to steal or commit morally reprehensible acts, however, if I can anticipate the heavy damage that a government agency with the power to shut down internet domains can unleash on hardworking and honest people,you cannot convince me that the legislators cannot figure this was bound to happen. Obviously they don’t care about the consequences of their grandstanding have for the rest of us mortals. And at the end of the day, shutting down websites doesn’t stop the traffic of child pornography or stolen intellectual property, it is just a nuisance for the bad guys that now need to go and setup another channel.
The danger for the rest of us is this, if we trust the government, any government, with the switch to the Internet, how long before the shutting down of domains is used as a way to silence dissent?
Oh wait! It did already happened? That was another prediction that turned to be right!
UPDATE
Check this Hall of Shame page at the EFF
The End Of IP As We Know It (from SANS website)
February 19, 2011 2 Comments
SANS Institute has the best article I’ve seen on the issue of IPv4 address space exhaustion. A good read, including the comments.
Today, IANA announced that it had handed out two more /8 IPv4 assignments to APNIC. As a result, IANA is down to 5 /8s, triggering its special policy to hand out one address to each regional registrar (RIR). The 5 RIRs are AFRNIC (Africa), APNIC (Asia Pacific), ARIN (North America), LACNIC (Latin
2011 at its Prime
January 5, 2011 Leave a comment
The fact that 2011 is a prime number didn’t escape the mathematical inclined minds. Moreover, as tweeted @mathematicsprof 2011 can be expressed as the sum of the 11 consecutive primes 157+163+167+173+179+181+191+193+197+199+211.
This already sets the stage for a year that, I will dare to predict, will not be easily forgotten. A confluence of processes already in motion may result in drastic changes for the world and in particular the Internet. To wit:
- Cyber-attacks can get ‘physical’ as the stuxnet virus proved,
- There is a struggle to control the internet at all levels,
- Privacy and mobile computers have compatiblility issues,
- All this against the backdrop of economical and political turmoil.
As the Chinese say “May you live in interesting times” ….
Another bad idea become law
November 21, 2010 1 Comment
Look like the US Senate made the power to censor the web into a law. The music and movie industry successfully lobbied the US government into work for them as the enforcers of copyright. As I said long time ago, a new business model needs to fill the chasm created by the new technologies between the labels that want to conduct business as usual, the artists and the consumer.
Round-up of bad news on Social networks. (Updated)
April 8, 2010 Leave a comment
HOW THE HACK WORKED
-The attackers used social media networks, blogs and email accounts to send out links to Web domains that they controlled.
-When users clicked on the links, the attackers were able to gain control of their computers and retrieve documents from them.
-The use of intermediaries such as Twitter allowed the hackers to cover their tracks so network administrators would not realize the computers had been compromised.
The cyberspies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google’s Google Groups and Yahoo mail, to access infected computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China, according to the report, “Shadows in the Cloud”.
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Data Security and Information Theory are essential to modern life. Far from being the exclusive domain of academics and geeks, the fundamentals and its application are easy to understand for most people. Here, my modest attempt to bring some of the issues to the public discourse and spread the knowledge to make the internet a safer place for your virtual self.
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