Liudvikas Bukys

MPs call for anti-spam rethink. BBC Feb 10 2003 5:40AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]

Clay Shirky:
Customer-owned Networks:
ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry
“Two years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, FedEx pulled the plug on ZapMail, allowing it to vanish without a trace. And the story of ZapMail’s collapse holds a crucial lesson for the telephone companies today. …
The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies’ most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail.”

SlashDot: Kevin Mitnick:

• “In that same defamatory article, Mr. Markoff falsely claimed that I had wiretapped the FBI (I hadn’t), that I had broken into the computers at NORAD (which aren’t even connected to any network on the outside), and that I was a computer “vandal” despite the fact that I never intentionally damaged any data I’ve ever accessed.”
• “As described below, I was never accused of abusing a position of trust, profiting from any illegal activity, or intentionally destroying information or computer systems.”
• “I believe that former non-malicious (no intent to cause harm) hackers can be extremely valuable in helping businesses identify their weaknesses in technologies and procedures.”

To which I respond:

“A number of systems at the University of Rochester
were compromised during the Shimomura incident.
The compromises included deliberate destruction of
log files. So which is it:

• Deliberate destruction of log files doesn’t count as deliberate destruction according to KM?
• Somebody else did it?
• Oops, caught in a lie?”

Robert Graham on SQL Slammer:

• Internet Infection was instantaneous
• For individuals, it was binary, a square-wave
• Better patch management would not have solved this
• Easy – and obvious – remediation
• The worm attacked everyone, all at once
• Worst attack ever

“ ‘This is a wake up call’
This is what they say every time a worm hits. It’s hard to believe them when their next sentence contains statements that demonstrate that they still don’t get it.”

Plaid up in arms as Commons spam filter bans Welsh.
“Parliamentarians from the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, are complaining that bilingual English-and-Welsh emails are been blocked as containing “inappropriate content”, the BBC reports. … Evidence points to Clearswift’s (formerly Content Technologies) MAILSweeper as the package to blame for the debacle. ”
[The Register]

BBC:
E-mail vetting blocks MPs’ sex debate:

A new e-mail vetting system at the House of Commons is stifling debate among MPs over serious parliamentary business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, it is claimed.

The system was introduced last month after MPs complained about getting inundated with pornographic and rude e-mails.
official

More than 900 e-mails were blocked in its first week, and the new system is now proving too restrictive and causing “chaos”, according to one MP.

Shane Harris:
The worm that turned: A new approach to hacker hunting:
About the dissection of the Leaves worm, leading to the arrest of its author.
A bit breathless, but entertaining nonetheless.

Jakob Nielsen: 10 Best Intranets of 2002:
Notable points:

• “In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department.”
• “Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies.”
• “The one-stop shopping approach extended to the security features for most of the winning intranets. Single sign-on is finally becoming a reality on many good intranets, following years of persistent user requests.”
• “The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments.
  Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.”

and you can buy a
158-page report on the annual competition, including 104 screenshots of the 10 winners.

Brad Templeton on
E-Stamps:

I first started thinking about this at the very start of the spam problem, (around 1995) as an interesting technical solution that hits at one of the root causes of spam. I leave it up here since it was my first idea in the quest for a solution to spam. I may have been the first to think of it, but many have also come up with the same idea independently, based on the thought that if you can make even a small negative cost to spam, the problem would go away.

However, I have since abandoned now even
oppose the idea for a variety of reasons. These include the total failure of the several serious attempts to build an online money micropayment system or other such infrastructure, and the almost impossible problems raised by any solution that needs new software at both sender and recipient. There are also free speech concerns. As such, it remains an academic exercise.

White Hat Security:
Cross-Site Tracing (XST)
[Press Release]
[White Paper]