Hacking and Anonymous surfing

Does a lack of moving parts translate to higher reliability? That’s the assumption many enthusiasts and IT professionals make about SSDs. We go straight to the data centers using these devices, dig into failure rate statistics, and suggest otherwise.

Back in 2008, Intel made a case to us about storage bottlenecking its Nehalem architecture. We were at IDF in San Francisco, the company was introducing its first solid-state drives, and its representatives stood on stage, describing the ways in which a conventional hard drive slowed down a Core i7 processor. Three years later, we’ve seen over and over in benchmarks that SSDs are legitimate performance-adders, changing the computing experience fairly dramatically.

With that said, performance isn’t everything. When it comes to your data, all of the speed in the world means little if you can’t trust the device holding that important information. After all, when you read about Corsair’s Force 3 recall, OCZ’s firmware updates to prevent BSODs, Crucial’s link power management issues, and Intel’s SSD 320 that loses capacity after a power failure, all within a two-month period, you have to acknowledge that we’re dealing with a technology that’s simply a lot newer (and consequently less mature) than mechanical storage.

British police have tonight named the teenager they arrested in Shetland last week, in relation to the LulzSec and Anonymous hacking groups.

Jake Davis, 18, will appear in court on Monday charged with five offences including unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against the SOCA website.

(SOCA is the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency – the very group that investigates serious cybercrime in Great Britain. You can just imagine how they must have felt when cybercriminals launched an attack against their website which made it inaccessible).

Google has snapped up a portfolio of 1,030 granted patents formally owned by one-time PC behemoth IBM.

Having tried and failed to do the same with a 6,000-strong portfolio built and owned by networking outfit Nortel, which eventually went to a high-bidding consortium fronted by Apple, RIM and Nokia, Google has strengthened it position in the patent troll wars currently raging in Technoland with the acquisition.

According to SEO by the Sea, the impressively broad batch of patents include those covering data mining prediction, automatic document evaluation, web-based querying, search engine ranking and methods for detecting duplicate documents. The list includes registered patents for both hardware and software and will have cost the search engine giant a pretty penny, although financial dealings have not been revealed.

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics. But the researchers say the site is using sneaky techniques to prevent users from opting out of being tracked on popular sites, including the TV streaming site Hulu.com.

The discovery of KISSmetrics tracking techniques comes as federal regulators, browser makers, privacy activists and ad tracking companies are trying to define what tracking actually is. The FTC called on browser makers to add a “Do Not Track” setting that essentially lets users tell websites not to leave them alone — though it doesn’t block tracking on its own. It’s more like a “privacy, please” sign on a hotel door. One of the big questions surrounding Do Not Track is about web analytics software, which sites use to determine what’s popular on their site, how many unique visitors a site has a month, where users are coming from, and what pages they leave from.

Cable companies have long since been adept at profiting from man’s weakness. They charge people for movies, knowing that so many families have little time to head out to movie theaters.

They would also charge heavily for porn movies, knowing that, late at night, some people struggle to get to sleep. I am sure, therefore, that you will shed a long, drippy tear for Time Warner. According to AllThingsD, the company is feeling the pain of making far less money out of all things kinky.

You might take some illicit pleasure from groaning words emerging out of the luscious lips of Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt. He told AllThingsD: “One of the things going on with VOD is that there’s been fairly steady trends over some time period now for adult to go down, largely because there’s that kind of material available on the Internet for free. And that’s pretty high margin. That’s been not just this quarter, but going on for some time period.”

Facebook is set to announce today a bug bounty program in which researchers will be paid for reporting security holes on the popular social-networking Web site.

Compensation, which starts at $500 and has no maximum set, will be paid only to researchers who follow Facebook’s Responsible Disclosure Policy and agree not to go public with the vulnerability information until Facebook has fixed the problem. “Typically, it’s no longer than a day” to fix a bug, Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan told CNET in a conference call.

Facebook’s Whitehat page for security researchers says: “If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data, and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you.”

As ‘promised’ earlier this week via Twitter, Anonymous and LulzSec have released another treasure trove of documents, this time stolen from managed security services firm ManTech International, an FBI service contractor.

The nearly 400MB torrent released on The Pirate Bay titled Fuck FBI Friday III: ManTech contains a mix of XLS and Word documents mainly relating to NATO, which AntiSec claims clearly show how ManTech are wasting tax payer’s money.

From the release statement: 

Today is Friday and we will be following the tradition of humiliating our friends from the FBI once again. This time we hit one of their biggest contractors for cyber security: Mantech International Corporation

So we begin by releasing 400MB of internal data from ManTech, this gives some insight on how they are wasting the tax payer’s money. Most of the documents in this first batch are related to NATO who, you may recall, made some bold claims regarding Anonymous earlier this year.

We are providing these ManTech documents so the public can see for themselves how their tax money is being spent. But don’t you worry, the U.S. is a rich  country and can afford to waste money, right?

Hollywood movie studios won a legal victory as Britain’s highest court ordered a telecommunications company to block access to a Website serving up pirated content.

A High Court judge ruled in favor of the Motion Picture Association and ordered British Telecomm on July 28 to block users trying to access Newzbin 2. A members-only site, Newzbin aggregates links to free movies and TV shows posted on Usenet boards.

The case, brought by the international arm of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association of America, would allow major studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Bros., Viacom’s Paramount Pictures and Sony’s Columbia Pictures to go after other ISPs to block other pirate sites. ISPs generally resist requests from copyright holders to block sites, saying the decision lay with the courts.

In two years, Microsoft’s Bing has doubled its share of the U.S. search market, from 7.2 percent to 14.4 percent. If you add Yahoo’s Bing-powered portal, it’s 27 percent. So why are loud voices clamoring for Microsoft to give up on search?

Bing’s Online Services Division doesn’t make money. Shortly after Microsoft released its quarterly earnings results, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan called the OSD an “online sinkhole,” noting that the division last turned a profit in 2006 and had lost $8.5 billion over nine years. Last year, it lost a record $2.56 billion.

Reuters columnist Robert Cyran’s “Microsoft ought to kick off search for Bing buyer” turned up the heat, particularly when it was syndicated the following week in the New York Times under the headline “Bing Becomes A Costly Distraction for Microsoft.” Cyran’s argument is sophisticated: it recognizes the value that Microsoft has built up in Bing (and corresponding value to a buyer like Facebook or Apple). Still, Cyran thinks Microsoft’s continued investment in an unprofitable division doesn’t serve the company’s shareholders. Facebook’s investors — a group that includes Microsoft — would presumably be better suited for the long play that Bing represents than Microsoft’s quasi-blue-chip, profit-maximizing, dividend-minded shareholders.

Former British newspaper editor Piers Morgan, now a presenter for US television network CNN, has denied fresh allegations that he printed stories obtained through phone hacking.

Morgan – a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s now shuttered News of the World paper and of the rival Daily Mirror tabloid – made his latest denial after British media printed comments that he made in a BBC radio programme in 2009.

“As I have said before, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone,” Morgan said in a statement, issued through his publicist at CNN’s parent company Turner Broadcasting System. In the 2009 programme, “Desert Island Discs”, presenter Kirsty Young asked Morgan how he felt about having to deal with “people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people’s phones” to get information for tabloids.