After The Pirate Bay defendants lost a high-profile copyright infringement trial in Sweden, they charged that the judge belonged to pro-copyright groups and was therefore biased against them. A Court of Appeals ruling today disagrees; there will be no retrial.
Three judges are currently reviewing the judge that handled the Pirate Bay trial to discover if he was biased or not. No decision has yet been made but the New York Times and several other publications report inaccuracies and plain wrongs that claim otherwise. Time to get the facts straight.
Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon hacker and security conferences, was among 16 people sworn in on Friday to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
The HSAC members will provide recommendations and advice directly to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.
What kind of far-reaching implications does this have? Can organization's, working with the government, really be allowed to monitor communications unencumbered? Can they watch for some sort of illegal activity, terrorist or not, and then arrest someone, without having previously had a warrant?
A federal judge on Wednesday threw out 46 civil lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for allowing the National Security Agency to probe their networks for terrorist communications without approval from a court.
Companies such as AT&T were granted immunity under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISAAA), signed into law in July 2008, ruled U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker in a 46-page opinion.
Interesting article. Do you agree that such a position needs to be created? Will the official have enough of a technology clue to make the right decisions?
President Obama used a White House speech yesterday to try to raise national concern about threats to computer networks, drawing praise from some industry executives and lawmakers but criticism from others who said his initiatives do not go far enough.
Don't tools like this already exist on the Internet and through open source that enable script kiddies to launch an attack?
The U.S. military is putting together a suite of hacking tools that could one day make breaking into networks as easy for the average grunt as kicking down a door.
That’s the word from Aviation Week, which snuck an unusual peek inside a “U.S. cyberwarfare attack laboratory.” There, researchers are building a “device” that would “weaponiz[e] cyberattack for the non-cyberspecialist, military user.”
This could set an interesting precedent. I understood that European adoption of open source was very high. In fact, higher than in some areas in the US. Is Red Hat fighting a losing battle?£8 million a year to Microsoft, with no public bidding. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, say open source activists.
Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators.
The request from four major record labels to fine the Pirate Bay operators for every day the site remains up and running was declined by the Swedish District Court today. Contrary to what the labels had requested, the court said it wants to hear the defendants before it will take any action.
The U.S. government has dropped -- for now -- a plan to classify the use of "proxy" servers as evidence of sophistication in committing a crime. Proxy servers are computers that disguise the source of Internet traffic. They are commonly used for legitimate purposes, like evading Internet censors and working from home. However, they can also be used to hide from law enforcement. The U.S. Sentencing Commission was considering a change to federal sentencing guidelines that would have increased sentences by about 25 percent for people convicted of crimes in which proxies are used.
A pretty good read:
So we can't help but wonder: What is the point of certification? How can federal agencies ensure that their cybersecurity staffers, and their contractors' staff, have the right skill sets?
What do you think?
