Category: Privacy & Security
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White House Cybersecurity Plan: On Life Support?
The White House’s “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” initially slated for release on Wednesday, has been delayed, the Washington Post reports. This comes on the heels of the removal of some of the report’s proposals, and a leak of the draft proposal. It looks like the report will end up as an eloquent expression of…
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ABC News Hires "Hackers" to Disrupt Police
ABC News reports on their own hiring of “hackers” to disrupt the Huntington Beach, CA police department. (Start reading at the “Testing the system” heading.) They tried to trick an officer into leaving his post to investigate a false “emergency.” They tried to infect the Chief’s computer with a virus. (Fortunately, neither of these attacks…
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Serious Linux Worm
New.com reports on a new worm infecting Linux/Apache servers. (A “worm” is a malicious standalone program that propagates on its own, without requiring any human action.) A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a…
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Rebecca Mercuri on the Florida Voting Fiasco
Rebecca Mercuri writes, in the RISKS Forum: Well, Florida’s done it again. Tuesday’s Florida primary election marked its first large-scale roll-out of tens of thousands of brand-new voting machines that were promised to resolve the problems of the 2000 Presidential election. Instead, from the very moment the polls were supposed to open, problems emerged throughout…
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More on China's Blocking of Google
Several readers responded to my previous entry on China’s censoring of Google. Jeremy Leader pointed out that Google offers a cached copy of any page on the Web. Google’s cache would allow easy access to any blocked page, so any effective blocker must block Google. Seth Finkelstein points to his previous discussion of overblocking due…
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The Inflationary Theory of Censorship
China’s recent decision to block its citizens’ access to Google has been much discussed. Google does not itself offer “subversive” content, so the goal must have been to keep people from finding “subversive” content from elsewhere. This illustrates a general truth about attempts to censor general-purpose communication technologies like the Net. These technologies are so…
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Princeton Accused of "Hacking" Yale
[This is slightly off-topic, but as a Princeton person I have gotten lots of questions about this incident.] Somebody in Princeton’s admissions office, probably an associate dean of admissions, apparently accessed without authorization a Web site that Yale set up for people who had applied for admission to Yale. Yale says that 11 students’ records…

