Liudvikas Bukys

Financial Times: Crime gangs extort money with hacking threat:

Evidence of a new type of international extortion racket emerged on Tuesday with revelations that blackmailers have been exploiting computer hacking techniques to threaten the ability of companies to conduct business online.

Gangs based in Eastern Europe have been found to have been launching waves of attacks on corporate networks, costing the companies millions of dollars in lost business and exposing them to blackmail.

SecurityFocus: Wireless hacking bust in Michigan:

In a rare wireless hacking prosecution, federal officials this week accused two Michigan men of repeatedly cracking the Lowe’s chain of home improvement stores’ nationwide network from a 1995 Pontiac Grand Prix parked outside a suburban Detroit store.

JP Brown’s Serious LEGO – CubeSolver:

Wired News: Yet Another Rendition of Linux:

The new version of Linux, called UserLinux, is being proposed by open-source sage Bruce Perens, who claims to have the backing of some of the world’s largest companies, across a number of business sectors. UserLinux, which will be paid for with multimillion-dollar donations from Perens’ corporate backers, will be free for unlimited use, and will be certified by large computer makers.

Red Hat users balk at Enterprise Linux licensing:

While Red Hat says the GPL gives customers the right to copy Red Hat Enterprise Linux freely, it also says it considers unauthorised copying to be a violation of its service contract – something that could lead to a breach of contract lawsuit, according to Bryan Sims, Red Hat’s vice president and associate legal counsel.

…

It will take more than that to win over customers like Argonne National Labs’ Beckman, however. He would like to see Red Hat produce a plain English document that explains what users can and cannot copy under the Enterprise Linux support licence, and he would like to see a price structure that better accommodates the needs of his class of user.

“I don’t know of any site that has lots of processors that plans on buying a per-processor licence,” he said.

Buying into some digital right management scheme or another is a little tricky, especially when you’re doing on behalf of diverse student body. Penn State students react, see The Register:

At the heart of the Penn State/Napster service is something the organizations are calling a “tethered download.” As romantic as that sounds, it’s not all that convenient. Students can download – or stream – all the songs they like for free but can only use or play the tunes while at Penn State. After their four tuition-paying years are up, their tethered downloads disappear.

Student can opt to pay 99 cents to burn the songs on a CD, but even then there is another catch. Napster is a Windows-only service, so all the Mac fans out there receive squat for their $160 contribution to the IT fund.

…

“They are throwing the labels what is left of our IT fee and then once you leave Penn State, you won’t even be authenticated as a user,” he said. “They are deciding for us what service we want, and we are paying their bills.”

The Advocate – Bethel woman snares Canadian man charged with e-mail hoax:

Evans met Horvath-Howard in Bethel, where she said he expected to pick up more than $200,000. Instead, Bethel police were waiting for Horvath-Howard and charged him with first-degree attempted larceny.

Horvath-Howard was arraigned in Danbury Superior Court on Monday. Bond was set at $250,000 and his case was continued until Nov. 10.

I know that law enforcement must prioritize, but I hypothesize that making examples of a few tens of these criminals would deter quite a few more.

Note: My own personal observation is that many of my Nigerian 419 spam actually involves web crawlers with Nigerian IP addresses. I can’t say whether or not those are merely proxies.

Wi-Fi Networking News: Vertical Handoff Has Liftoff:

A press release (not included on this site) says that TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Radionet, and the Helsinki University of Technology have demonstrated a seamless handoff across commercial networks. The benefits they cite are absolutely the case: users want uninterrupted services and no monkeying around.

Note that
the article’s links
all point to Finnish-language web sites.

The article (by Glenn Fleishman) continues:

Interestingly, if you use NetMotion Wireless software, you can achieve most of this effect today. While you’re responsible as a user for changing your connectivity, the NetMotion client and server software maintain the persistent state of the Internet connection.

California Court Issues First Anti-Spam Judgment:

On October 24, 2003, the Superior Court of California for the County of Santa Clara issued a final judgment and injunction in the civil case of People v. Willis, ordering defendants to jointly and severally pay a $2 million fine for violating California’s anti-spam, consumer protection, and unfair business practice laws and enjoining them from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail messages and other practices that would violate the law. The judgment — entered by default because defendants failed to appear in court or defend themselves in a timely way — marks the end of California’s first ever anti-spam lawsuit.

…
Besides assessing $2 million in fines, the court enjoined defendants from nine specific business practices. Several of the injunction’s provisions require defendants to comply with existing law. However, the injunction also bars defendants from a) sending unsolicited commercial e-mail; b) sending any e-mail for which the sender appears to be something other than the actual sender, or for which replies could not be received by the sender, or which includes misleading information about the country/mail server sending the message; c) using false or misleading information to register an Internet domain name; or d) selling or otherwise distributing lists of e-mail addresses for use in sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. The injunction also prevents either Willis or Griffin from owning or operating any business (other than a publicly-traded business) that advertises over the Internet for ten years.

Robert Moskowitz: Wi-Fi Networking News: Weakness in Passphrase Choice in WPA Interface