Security Octopus

Bangladesh on Saturday temporarily blocked the social network Facebook amid demands by a radical organisation to ban the website for hurting sentiments of Muslims.

No official comment was immediately available for the closure of the popular network. However, an official source on condition of anonymity said that the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) blocked it on directives from the government.

The private bdnews24 news agency said the measure was taken on a request from the elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) as users suddenly were barred from logging into the network since 6.30 pm.

A RAB spokesman, however, rejected the report, saying no request was made on their behalf to block the network.

The development came two days after the leader of the radical Islamic Shashantantrik Andolon, Fazlul Haque Amini, demanded a ban on the network for reported posting of materials hurting Muslim religious sentiments.

A row erupted in Pakistan when it recently decided to cut off access to Facebook till May 31 over a page featuring blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Mohammed.

Bangladesh government-run BSS news agency earlier today reported that the RAB troops arrested a “cyber criminal” of the city on charges of “cyber crimes”.

It said detained Rodin recently posted “objectionable, disfigured and satirical photographs” of several government leaders using different accounts.

SmartHide Team is ready to supply 100 Free SmartHide Accounts for Pakistani citizens in order to protect the freedom of speech in Pakistan. Please leave a comment in this post in order to get a free SmartHide account.

A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to temporarily block Facebook due to a contest that calls for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

The court order follows a petition by a group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement, which complained that the contest was “blasphemous.” A search on Facebook reveals two sites featuring such caricatures: one supporting Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who created the caricature of the Prophet, published in Danish newspapers in 2005.

The other group is openly calling for caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, claiming in the group descriptions that it has noble intent. From the description: “This group is for everyone, regardless of nationality, political or religious believes, who believe in and want to defend freedom of speech and the foundation of democracy wherever it is being threatened in the world!” In the photo section of the group, one can indeed find several caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Facebook is to remained blocked in Pakistan until May 31. Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court ordered the department of communications to submit a written reply to the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement petition by that date. In 2008, Pakistan blocked YouTube, also because of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that found their way onto the video-sharing site.

(с) Mashable.com

Well, Big Brother’s ambitions are just astonishing. These days FBI Director Robert Mueller made an interesting statement. As it turns out, he is going to strive for the idea that the US providers should log the Internet history of their users. At the same time the data storage term (attention!) should be two years. Besides that the providers should submit this data to the authorities at their first request, literally, without any court decisions, etc.

It is clear that it means the record of IP addresses, domains, web sites the user visits, etc. This data should be accessible, according to Mueller’s idea, to federal authorities, state and local authorities. Shortly speaking, with the corresponding desire any authority representative can penetrate into a private Internet life of any American and dig out whatever stuff he wants.

The argument provided by Mueller is as follows: before the Internet appeared, FBI had access to any information about telephone calls of the US citizens. As of today a bigger part of personal communication between people has shifted to the Internet and there is no chance to track it down there because there is no corresponding law.

Do you know why FBI needs all that? Correct! To fight child pornography. If it’s not the case of Al-Qaeda, then it’s child pornography. And the issues of national security are also mentioned here.

Fortunately it’s too early to speak of a global logging – the corresponding laws were not adopted. But if they are … Americans (and it also concerns us to a certain extent) should start reading or re-reading Orwell, his “1984”.

Copyright (c) SmartHide Security Octopus

One of the biggest sites for open source software developers SourceForge.net was blocked for users from “banned locations”, as Arab Crunch reports. The black list includes Cuba, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and North Korea.

The paragraph informing that users from the mentioned above countries were included into the black list appeared in resource ToS. Besides that the residents of these countries are blocked from the access to GoogleCode. These bans initiated by the US government authorities in fact put the developers from “black list” countries in the dark, not allowing them to contribute to open source development.

It’s worth mentioning that the event took place almost simultaneously with the US secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech about Internet freedom where she reported that “all of humanity has equal access to innovations, knowledge and ideas”. Just to remind you, the US is currently in active contradiction with China about Google freedom. According to some analysts, the whole story was made up with a special purpose – to allow Hillary make a great speech for her US secretary job position anniversary. To put it simply – it was necessary to create an enemy image, exactly to the date January 21^st.

Thus we can see that nobody cancelled double standards of American politics. However this time it involves the programming: the blocking of developers from “banned locations” contradicts to the idea of open source software creation itself and makes it not really open now.

As you all know SmartHide’s goal is not only making people have the ability to communicate without a fear of repression or third party listening to their conversations, but also allowing people to use their democratic rights for freedom of speech and Internet, no matter what country they live in.

We support the words of Hilary Clinton, saying that “all of humanity has equal access to innovations, knowledge and ideas”, but we don’t have double standards…

Unlock SourceForge with SmartHide for Free!

Security Octopus

Copyright (c) SmartHide Security Octopus

France’s parliament on Tuesday, 22.09.09 adopted a new Internet anti-piracy law, known as “Hadopi 2″, allowing authorities to cut off repeat illegal downloaders’ Internet access. The opposition swiftly announced that it would appeal the decision in court.

REUTERS - France’s disputed Internet piracy law, which will allow authorities to disconnect repeat illegal downloaders, was finally approved in parliament on Tuesday but the opposition immediately announced a fresh court challenge.

The bill, revised after France’s top constitutional court overturned an earlier version voted in June, cleared its last parliamentary hurdle when it was passed in the joint legislative committee of the two houses by 258 votes to 131.

The opposition Socialists, who took the previous version of the so-called “Hadopi” law to the constitutional court, said they would mount a second challenge.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has thrown his weight behind the law and has been backed by the recording and film industries, which say they have lost millions of euros through illegal Internet downloads.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, who steered the second version of the bill through parliament, said the law would prevent “pillage” of works of art by “demagogues” who say that works of art should be free just because they were on the web.

“Freedom is not free licence, liberalism isn’t the jungle,” he told the committee.

But the law, which will set up a new regulatory body with the power to investigate suspected illegal downloaders and recommend sanctions, has also been heavily criticised by consumer groups as well as the opposition.

They say it will be ineffective in combating determined pirates and will impose unduly harsh punishment on ordinary Internet users.

The previous version of the law was watered down after the constitutional court rejected a text that would have created a body with the power to cut Internet access for those found guilty of illegal downloads.

The constitutional court ruled that the new body could only have the power to issue warnings and that any disconnections could only be ordered by a judge after two written warnings from the new authority.

The sanctions imposed by a judge could also include fines of up to 30,000 euros ($44,420).

The law will also oblige anyone with a wi-fi connection to block non-authorised users from using the connection.

Mitterrand said he expected the main effect of the law to be dissuasive and he expected actual sanctions to be rare.

France’s attempt to curb Internet piracy has attracted wide interest outside the country as the media industry worldwide has struggled to come up with a response to the challenge to traditional record and film sales posed by the Internet.

Easy access to the Internet is becoming headily popular all over the world, being therewith extremely insecure. Our company has prepared a list of rules and recommendations concerning Wi-Fi security and computers protection from virus software while working via open Wi-Fi access points.

It’s summer. More and more people prefer to work in the open air instead of sitting in stuffy offices. At times you can see many people in a city park relaxing on a bench, by a fountain together with a laptop.

Your confidential information is in danger.

And, actually, it does not matter what exactly they are doing – working with the e-mail or your internet-banking, uploading pictures, using blogs or simply surfing the web.

All of them are connected to the Internet using Wi-Fi access. Every day more and more hotspots become available to users and practically every large city offers such access points.

From the perspective of any software developer who deals with information security issues, there is no secure access to the Internet in the street. Wi-Fi architecture cannot boast of any real security whereas the encryption and access isolation algorithms used here possess weak cryptographic strength and can be easily cracked.

According to the recent ABI Research the number of Wi-Fi hotspots all over the world is steadily growing.

The number of free Wi-Fi Hotspots is rapidly growing.

According to 2008 research results, the largest number of hotspots was found in Europe. For several consecutive years the UK has been the leader in the total amount of hotspots.

The most significant growth in the number of hotspots was recorded in France, Germany and Russia. Today we can easily say that open Wi-Fi access technology exists almost in every major city in Europe and even in the Middle East.

The leading computer security specialists believe that one of the worst types of the threat is the so-called “man in the middle” attack.

This expression is frequently used in cryptography and describes a situation when an intruder can read and modify messages of other correspondents so that neither of the parties will notice the presence of the intruder.

”An attacker may be connected to the same network, is able to constantly control your Internet connection and replace Internet-pages waiting for the moment when you give him your confidential information into his hands”.

Anti-virus researchers add:

”No matter what goals you pursue connecting to the insecure Wi-Fi network, we advise you to use only the protected HTTPS protocol to access the webmail. We highly recommend to avoid using the sites which require personal data entry, such as Internet-banking service.”

It’s not that hard to protect yourself from undesired consequences as it may seem. You should simply introduce a set of changes to your software security policy.

There are several principal security threats while using free Wi-Fi hotspots:

• The possibility to intercept your personal data which you enter to access various servers, payment systems or bank terminals. The networks set up by hackers resemble legitimate Wi-Fi free access points.
• An attack of a computer connected to the same hotspot with the help of an unknown malware, which is absent in virus signatures’ base.
• Sniffing – the interception and analysis of your Internet traffic by attackers may lead to the loss of confidential information.
• Data leakage through the “man-in-the-middle-attack”.

By means of practicing the simple rules below you can prevent such attacks and ensure your Wi-Fi security:

• Use SmartHide technology to connect to the Internet. It’s best to access the web through SmartHide tunnel set up in your network.
• Use only secure protocols, such as HTTPS and POP3s to access the e-mail.
• Disable confidential and personal data transfer through protocols which are not protected by secure data encryption algorithms.
• Avoid using Internet-banking through public Wi-Fi networks unless you are under SmartHide Service potection.
• Make sure that you’ve set up the firewall and antivirus software to block the incoming traffic, updated the virus signatures’ base and activated the extended heuristic analysis mode.

Copyright (c) SmartHide Security Octopus

Peter Sunde, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, said Monday he is abandoning ship.

Sunde, the BitTorrent tracker’s spokesman, and his fellow colleagues each are facing a year in prison following their spring convictions for facilitating copyright infringement. They remain free pending the outcome of an appeal of their Stockholm convictions.

The departure of Sunde, known online as “brokep,” perhaps is the strongest indication to date that the proposed $7.7 million sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software concern is to be completed within weeks as planned.

Global Gaming Factory, its buyer, claims the 5-year-old Pirate Bay will become a legitimate, pay-to-play site for media such as movies, software, music and games. The goal, however lofty it sounds, is to convert the site’s 20 million pirates into fee-paying consumers.

“Today marks the end of a small era for me, but I am simply leaving a role in order to be a person instead,” Sunde said.

He said, “a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read.”

If he loses his appeal, he’ll have plenty of time to write that book.

The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its court case against The Pirate Bay. The Amsterdam court today ruled that the site must cease all operations in The Netherlands within 10 days, or else pay penalties of 30,000 euros ($42,300) a person, per day.

In an Amsterdam court last week, BREIN’s lawyer argued that The Pirate Bay is responsible for millions of copyright infringements every day, and that the site should therefore be blocked to visitors from The Netherlands.

Interestingly, the news came as a total surprise to Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter who said they received no official summons and were not aware of the case. In a counter move, the three sent a letter to the Amsterdam court, asking it to dismiss the case and impose damages against BREIN instead.

Today, the verdict was made public and The Pirate Bay has lost the case. The judge ruled that The Pirate Bay has to stop all of their activities in The Netherlands within ten days. If they don’t comply all defendants will be ordered to pay 30,000 euros ($42,300) per day in penalties up to a maximum of 3 million euros ($4,231,000) total.

The court argued that BREIN had done enough to inform the three defendants about the court case, although they were never officially summoned. In a letter to the court the defendants had indicated that if they had know, they wouldn’t have the financial means to attend the hearing. Because of this the court issued a default judgment and gave in to BREIN’s demands.

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, who is one of the defendants told TorrentFreak that they will appeal the decision, and that they are currently looking for legal representation.

Interestingly, the verdict claims that The Pirate Bay doesn’t have a registered owner, but holds the three accused responsible for it. However, as we’ve reported previously the site is in fact owned by a company called “Reservella” and not any of the defendants named in the case.

In addition to the three founders, GGF, the intended buyers of the Pirate Bay were also ordered to pay 30,000 euros ($42,300) per day in penalties if they continue to operate the site as it is after the deal is closed.

Legal experts informed TorrentFreak that the current ruling can be largely attributed to the lack of defense, and the fact that the defendants failed to show up. With this ruling in hand, it is not unlikely that BREIN will put pressure on Dutch ISPs if the Pirate Bay doesn’t block Dutch visitors within 10 days.

Source: torrentfreak.com

We were shell-shocked when Global Gaming Factory X AB, a Swedish software corporate, announced it was acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8 Million. The Pirate Bay, the world’s epicenter for torrents and illegal P2P file distribution, sold to a company that intended to give it a new, legal business model? It sounded too insane to be possible.

I guess we shouldn’t be shocked then to learn that The Pirate Bay acquisition may not happen after all. Multiple sources are reporting that the acquisition may be canceled in one week’s time if Global Gaming X AB can’t provide investor guarantees. It doesn’t help that the major studios are suing it, either.

Just a strange series of events

The basic story is this: after Global Gaming made the deal public, it hired Wayne Rosso, the former head of Grokster, to negotiate with music and film giants to get legal licenses to their content. He specifically told CNET that he doesn’t think that Global Gaming even has the funds to make the deal happen, and that the Global Gaming hasn’t been straightforward with him. Thus, he’s left Global Gaming:

“I and my colleagues have very strong doubts that the funding is in place,” Rosso said. “And there are other issues regarding Mr. Pandeya’s credibility that trouble us greatly.”

The second nail in the coffin is a lawsuit that nearly a dozen studios have filed to shut The Pirate Bay down, including Disney and Paramount. Their claim is that The Pirate Bay hasn’t stopped their activities after being sentenced to prison. There’s also a separate lawsuit already in progress by the four major music labels.

Combine the lawsuit with losing Rosso and apparent funding problem and you can see why the Pirate Bay acquisition is in doubt. The Pirate Bay saga is just keeps getting stranger.

Are your surprised? Let us know in the comments.

Source: mashable.com

Acording to reddit.com AT&T is now blocking all access to img.4chan.org, effectively blacklisting /b/ and censoring the internet.

From what I can tell, this is only a confirmed issue in Southern California at the moment, but seems to be wider than just a regional problem. Those who have contacted AT&T representatives were told that the site is in fact blocked, so this isn’t a technical problem, and all the other 4chan subdomains work fine.

SmartHide users may not worry. Everyone who is smart enough to use SmartHide enjoys the freedom of Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.