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News for
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contributed by weld pond
In 1998, the US government established the National Infrastructure
Protection Center (NIPC) as a special unit of the FBI focused on cybercrime.
Enough time has gone by, reasons Lew Koch, that center should ask itself --
to paraphrase his cousin (?) Ed's famous question: "How'm I doing?" Although
the NIPC can report some success in catching criminals, Mr. Koch's column
suggests that the Center's traction continues to be hobbled by an excess of
bureaucratic ego, headline-hogging, and turf-guarding between the various
security and intelligence agencies involved.
Inter@ctive
Week
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contributed by weld pond
Just in time for Election Day! The Republican Party's main site,
gop.org was vandalized by an unknown party. But this was no crude
drive-by job -- the lengthy replacement text passionately rails against
George W. and makes a lurching, half-hearted endorsement of Al Gore. The
website has since been repaired.
Attrition.org
Reuters
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contributed by andrew jaquith
Continuing our Election Day theme, a California judge has refused to re-open
three vote-swapping web sites ordered closed by the state's Attorney
General. The ACLU had vigorously opposed the cease-and-desist letters, which
specifically targeted sites that proposed matching voters living in
different states. Intrastate sites, however, are "distasteful but not
illegal."
CNET
The Industry
Standard
ACLU
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contributed by andrew jaquith
Thought we'd post a positive example of a company opening up its products to
folks who hack. When Danish company Lego introduced its robotic kits in
1998, it wasn't too long before hackers managed to reverse engineer the
programming interfaces. But rather than litigate, Lego decided to publish an
official SDK, and took an officially neutral stance towards open-source
programming efforts. Now, there are Mindstorm bots for everything under the
sun, and interfaces in C, Java, VB, Forth, Perl, tcl, and many other
languages. The overall result? Sales of Lego Mindstorm are soaring.
Wired
News
Lego Mindstorms Internals
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contributed by andrew jaquith
An industry lobbying group the Global Internet Project, which contains
representatives from high-tech companies, urged the Council of Europe to
delay its proposed cybercrime treaty. Proposed earlier this year, the treaty
would assert controls over security tools, and impose heavy recordkeeping
obligations on Internet Service Providers. We think the cure is worse than
the disease.
Infoworld
Global Internet Project
Council
for Europe
Weld
Pond via ZDNet
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