Hacking and Anonymous surfing

The free-and-easy days of illegal downloading of music and movies may soon be over. A proposed new law will enable Internet Service Providers (ISP) to suspend or terminate the Internet accounts of P2P (peer-to-peer) users.

This new law called the ISP Liability act, will be tabled in Parliament next month, according to Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM) chairman Norman Halim.

RIM has been lobbying the Government for an ISP Liability act for the past 5 years as illegal online downloads have been cannibalising the legitimate sales of music, worldwide. “The act makes the ISPs responsible for curbing online piracy. The ISPs will be fined if they don’t take action against illegal downloaders. The ISPs have the technology to track P2P users,” said Norman.

Jurors who use social-networking sites and the internet during a trial could face up to two years in jail, the UK’s top judge has warned.

Speaking at the Judicial Studies Board in Belfast, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, also said if this issue wasn’t dealt with it could lead to the end of the jury system.

“The misuse of the internet represents a threat to the jury system which depends on evidence provided in court which the defendant can challenge. We seem … to assume that the occasions when jurors go to the internet for information are rare. “It is therefore easy to brush them aside as odd moments of aberration. I wonder whether we will still be thinking that in a year or two,” he said.

Cloud-computing providers must build data security into their products to speed Europe’s shift to a single digital market, EU digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has urged.

“A cloud without robust data protection is not the sort of cloud we need. So these features should be well-integrated in the design of cloud-computing products and services, from the very beginning of the business processes,” Kroes said on Thursday in a speech at the Les Assises du Numerique conference in Paris.

Data protection standards must also be transnational, she added, noting that “the free movement of personal data within the EU is another way to complete the digital single market in Europe”. The UK’s communications minister Ed Vaizey stressed on Monday that access to cloud-computing services could ease companies’ entrance into new business markets.

The website of respected security intelligence company Secunia was redirected for over an hour on Thursday morning evening after a DNS hijack pointed visitors to a different website.

From cached images, the attacker appears to be the work of a known Turkish language hacker called ‘TurkGuvenligi’ whose motivations remain unclear. The redirection lasted for just over and hour.

Direct defacement attacks on websites are a frequent hazard of being online, but DNS hijacks should in theory be harder to perpetrate because they involve changing the DNS records of a website. The attacker would have had to hack the DNS database at a weak point in the system, probably a small ISP peered to a trusted provider somewhere on the Internet’s fringes. In many ways, such attacks are a small example of the much larger DNS hijacking event alleged by a US Congressional report last week to have taken place in April 2010.

TalkTalk is to begin trials of its Virus Alert security system, despite having run into trouble earlier this year with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) over the service. Virus Alerts is an anti-malware service that monitors all destination URLs in order to prevent customers visiting unsafe sites.

However, the product angered privacy campaigners when TalkTalk tried to launch the service in September, because users were apparently being enrolled without their knowledge.

Clive Dorsman, technology managing director at TalkTalk, insisted in a blog post that the Virus Alerts system records only destination web site URLs and not information on who sends the request “or other personal data with the URL”. “We’ve had lots of feedback on this topic in recent months. We would like you to know that we have welcomed the chance to review this feedback, and have had some useful discussions with the relevant public bodies,” he said.

UK businesses are struggling to recruit staff with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) skills, according to a report commissioned by business lobbying group the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). According to the research, 45 per cent of employers claim they have difficulty recruiting Stem-skilled staff, while 59 per cent of businesses say they expect to have difficulty within the next three years.

Eighty-one per cent of employers believe that the priority for higher education institutions should be to ensure graduates are equipped with “employability skills”. Some 42 per cent of businesses want the government to implement steps to raise the quantity and quality of Stem graduates.

IT trade association CompTIA said that the CBI’s report highlights serious worries about the level of IT skills among young people entering work. Matthew Poyiadgi, European vice president at CompTIA, argued that the national curriculum simply does not recognise the importance of IT. “English and maths are important, but so is IT – an inability to use a computer would be a bigger stumbling block for most than poor arithmetic,” he said.

The International Telecommunication Union used a meeting in Switzerland this week to formally ratify 3GPP Release 10 (otherwise known as LTE-Advanced) – as a 4G technology.

“This day is a milestone to remember for mobile broadband connectivity,” Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, a wireless industry trade association, said in a statement. The group expects LTE-Advanced to be the “pre-eminent ITU-sanctioned 4G mobile broadband solution for information, communications and entertainment.”

Nine official commercial LTE launches have occurred in 2010, said the group, with 11 more expected before the end of the year. Additionally, more than 250 companies, including Greenfield, CDMA, WiMax and GSM operators, have expressed interested in deploying LTE networks.

In attempting to sum up the world in 2010, one word comes to mind: connected. Everywhere we go we carry devices that keep us connected to something important to us. Be it a sleek new tablet letting you share photos with the person helping load your groceries, or a smartphone making sure you don’t miss that late night e-mail from a colleague; we are now constantly connected to the world around us, more than ever before.

We’ve become dependent on these digital devices to survive both professionally and personally, and with the holiday season now upon us and digital devices topping most of our gift wish lists, the amount of time we spend with these gadgets will only increase. Yet many of us forget to consider two devices we are naturally equipped with that keep us more connected to the world than anything else: our eyes. Consumers often don’t think about the impact digital devices might have on their vision, and it can be to the detriment of not just their health, but also productivity.

A group of seven German men who swapped child-sex pictures on the internet were convicted Thursday of distributing pornography and most were sent to prison.

The top penalty was five years for a man, 34, who admitted in court he had also raped a girl nine times. Now an adult, she appeared as a witness. All seven admitted the charges in court in Darmstadt, south of Frankfurt.

Most were given terms of three to four years. One man was freed with a suspended jail term of two years. Judge Jens Assling said he was appalled that the accused said they had ‘just been looking at pictures.’ He said they clearly had never considered the evil the images depicted.

Microsoft recently announced the decision to drop the Drive Extender feature found in several of its server products, including Windows Home Server (code-named “Vail”), Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Server Essentials.

Drive Extender is a storage technology that enables the of use internal and external hard drives for additional storage on a server. Folder Duplication for specific shared folders on servers is one of the capabilities that allow for the maintaining of two copies of a shared folder on separate hard drives to help protect against the failure of a single hard drive.

Microsoft cites several reasons for the decision. Since SBS 2011 and Storage Server are business offerings, those customers will find storage alternatives in hardware RAID, and application compatibility and data portability solutions.