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News for
031000
contributed by Dave Sjerven
When a computerized grading system failed to report the proper grades
for a cell biology class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
officials immediately concluded that it must have been the work of
electronic intruders. After a thorough investigation MIT discovered
that in fact the changed grades were due to a spreadsheet sorting
error. (The simplest answer is usually the correct one.)
MIT
ComputerWorld
Boston
Herald
Boston
Globe (It was on the front page of the Globe yesterday, today it
made it to B3)
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contributed by Evil Wench
The New York State Senate on Wednesday unveiled a package of new
legislation to
protect the privacy of consumers, drivers, and patients that would
place new restrictions on credit agencies, schools, telemarketers,
hospitals, pharmacies, and other organizations that gather and use
personal information. "Our recommendations were guided by a belief
that individuals have a basic right to know who is collecting personal
information, how it is being used and whether that information is
shared or sold without their knowledge or approval," said Senate
Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. (Damn. Makes me want to move to New
York just so I can vote for this guy.)
Reuters
- via TechWeb
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contributed by William Knowles
"Law enforcement couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper bag.
They're people who get paid to do nothing. They never actually catch
anybody," said Curador to an Internet News reporter. Curador has made
a practice of breaking into e-commerce sites, grabbing their customer
database and then posting the numbers online. So far he claims to have
gotten into eight systems and has posted thousands of valid numbers to
his web site. His previous web sites at e-crackerce.com and
free-creditcard.com, which themselves where registered with fraudulent
cards, have been shut down. Curador has said that he will publicize
his newest site with a banner on the Microsoft Banner Network.
Curador's first cyber break in occurred back in January.
Internet
News
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contributed by Evil Wench
Using the example of the recent distributed denial of service attacks,
law enforcement representatives have been asking Congress for a
national court order. Currently law enforcement must seek a separate
court order in each state they track a single piece of data to get to
its source.
TechWeb
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contributed by Anonymous
Raj Reddy, co-chairman of the President's Information Technology
Advisory Committee said while testifying before Congress that "Rather
than leaving the Internet vulnerable because a few persons or
organizations are careless or reckless, we should develop an
information infrastructure that is not dependent on voluntary
compliance with security practices and policies." (Voluntary
compliance? Yeah, that gives me the warm fuzzies.)
Federal
Computer Week
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contributed by Evil Wench
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology,
Terrorism and Government, US Secret Service Special Agent Gregory Regan
explained that organized Chinese fraud rings in the US and overseas are
more and more likely to break into electronic databases to compromise
credit and identity details. In 1999 there were 1,147 cases of
identity theft resulting in 644 convictions.
The UK
Register
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contributed by Turtlex
A report released by a working group led by Attorney General Janet Reno
has said that Internet businesses need to cooperate with law
enforcement to fight online crime. The 60-page report recommended more
resources and training for law enforcement, urged greater promotion of
cyber ethics and concluded that the existing laws should be adequate to
protect against most online crimes.
Reuters
- Yahoo
USA
Today
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contributed by knobdicker
Symantec is pressing the ISP that hosts the Peacefire anti-censorware
organization to remove content linking to a decrypted list of the
thousands of sites blocked by I-Gear, Symantec's Internet-filtering
software. Symantec claims that posting the decrypting software and
site information is a EULA violation, which raises legal issues about
software reverse engineering similar to the MPAA lawsuit over DVD
DeCSS. (Symantec should be thankful for all the free testing instead
of trying to quash what they see as bad press.)
Wired
Peacefire
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contributed by Space Rogue
Yesterday HNN linked to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that
blamed AT+T for sending subscribers cell phone numbers along with web
requests when users surfed with their phones. We received an email,
apparently from an AT+T technician, refuting that article. He said "Our
(AT+T) web-accessible
phones do not use the cellular network at all to surf the web. Our
phones use CDPD--an IP-based protocol having nothing to do with
cellular. Each IP is a real Internet routable IP that is assigned the
same as any CDPD modem--orthogonal to the cellular phone provisioning.
Many current PocketNet phones don't even have voice service (data only)
so they can't even send a MIN!"
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