FROM DAILY TECH

U.S. Government Accidentally Abuses Internet "Kill Switch", Shuts off 84,000 Sites


Government believed the sites contained child pornography, but they did not

In evidence of the dangers of the U.S. government's increasing "kill switch" powers regarding web servers inside the U.S., the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE last week essentially shut down 84,000 sites in a case of mistaken identity.

The shutdowns targeted mooo.com, the most popular shared domain at free web service provider FreeDNS.  FreeDNS is a free domain service that is immensely popular among file sharers, blogs, small businesses, and other independent operators.  Its homepage is afraid.org.

With the mooo.com shutdown last Friday, the ICE accidentally shut down 84,000 subdomain pages.  The pages were all redirected to a banner that stated "Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution."

The court order to shut down and redirect the sites was granted via a seizure warrant from a District Court.  The warrant was executed as part of the DHS ICE team's "Operation Save Our Children".

The key problem is that none of the sites thus identified under the mooo.com superdomain had child porn on them.  They appear to have been the victim of an overzealous government police force with a bit too much power on its hands.

FreeDNS has expressed outrage.  In a statement, they comment, "Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible."

Over the weekend they managed to begin restoring some of the pages.  Meanwhile small business owners were left to try to reassure customers that they were note engaging in illegal activity [source example].


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Google's Revolution Factory; Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

In 2008, the Alliance of Youth Movements held its inaugural summit in New York City. Attending this summit was a combination of State Department staff, Council on Foreign Relations members, former National Security staff, Department of Homeland Security advisers, and a myriad of representatives from American corporations and mass media organizations including AT&T, Google, Facebook, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and MTV.(pdf).

One might suspect such a meeting of representatives involved in US economic, domestic and foreign policy, along with the shapers of public opinion in the mass media would be convening to talk about America's future and how to facilitate it. Joining these policy makers, was an army of "grassroots" activists that would "help" this facilitation.

Among them was a then little known group called "April 6" from Egypt. These Facebook "savvy" Egyptians would later meet US International Crisis Group trustee Mohamed ElBaradei at the Cairo airport in Februrary 2010 and spend the next year campaigning and protesting on his behalf in his bid to overthrow the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The Alliance of Youth Movements mission statement claims it is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists to build their capacity and make a greater impact on the world. While this sounds fairly innocuous at first, even perhaps positive, upon examining those involved in "Movements.org," a dark agenda is revealed of such nefarious intent it is almost difficult to believe.

Movement.org is officially partnered with the US Department of State and Columbia Law School. Its corporate sponsors include Google, Pepsi, and the Omnicon Group, all listed as members of the globocrat Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). CBS News is a sponsor and listed on the globocrat Chatham House's corporate membership list. Other sponsors include Facebook, YouTube, Meetup, Howcast, National Geographic, MSNBC, GenNext, and the Edelman public relations firm.

Movement.org's "team" includes Co-Founder Jared Cohen, a CFR member, Director of Google Ideas, and a former State Department planning staff member under both Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton.

Founding Movements.org with Cohen is Jason Liebman of Howcast Media which works with mega-corporate conglomerates like Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, Staples, Ford, and government agencies such as the US State Department and the US Defense Department, to create "custom branded entertainment, innovative social media, and tardeted rich-media campaigns." He was also with Google for 4 years where he worked to partner with Time Warner (CFR), News Corporation (FoxNews, CFR) Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, the New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.

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FROM THE NEW SCIENTIST

The cyberweapon that could take down the internet

A new cyberweapon could take down the entire internet – and there's not much that current defences can do to stop it. So say Max Schuchard at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues, the masterminds who have created the digital ordnance. But thankfully they have no intention of destroying the net just yet. Instead, they are suggesting improvements to its defences.

Schuchard's new attack pits the structure of the internet against itself. Hundreds of connection points in the net fall offline every minute, but we don't notice because the net routes around them. It can do this because the smaller networks that make up the internet, known as autonomous systems, communicate with each other through routers. When a communication path changes, nearby routers inform their neighbours through a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). These routers inform other neighbours in turn, eventually spreading knowledge of the new path throughout the internet.

A previously discovered method of attack, dubbed ZMW – after its three creators Zhang, Mao and Wang, researchers in the US who came up with their version four years ago – disrupts the connection between two routers by interfering with BGP to make it appear that the link is offline. Schuchard and colleagues worked out how to spread this disruption to the entire internet and simulated its effects.

Surgical strike

The attack requires a large botnet – a network of computers infected with software that allows them to be externally controlled: Schuchard reckons 250,000 such machines would be enough to take down the internet. Botnets are often used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which bring web servers down by overloading them with traffic, but this new line of attack is different.

"Normal DDoS is a hammer; this is more of a scalpel," says Schuchard. "If you cut in the wrong places then the attack won't work."

An attacker deploying the Schuchard cyberweapon would send traffic between computers in their botnet to build a map of the paths between them. Then they would identify a link common to many different paths and launch a ZMW attack to bring it down. Neighbouring routers would respond by sending out BGP updates to reroute traffic elsewhere. A short time later, the two sundered routers would reconnect and send out their own BGP updates, upon which attack traffic would start flowing in again, causing them to disconnect once more. This cycle would repeat, with the single breaking and reforming link sending out waves of BGP updates to every router on the internet. Eventually each router in the world would be receiving more updates than it could handle – after 20 minutes of attacking, a queue requiring 100 minutes of processing would have built up.

Clearly, that's a problem. "Routers under extreme computational load tend to do funny things," says Schuchard. With every router in the world preoccupied, natural routing outages wouldn't be fixed, and eventually the internet would be so full of holes that communication would become impossible. Shuchard thinks it would take days to recover.

"Once this attack got launched, it wouldn't be solved by technical means, but by network operators actually talking to each other," he says. Each autonomous system would have to be taken down and rebooted to clear the BGP backlog.

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FROM THE RAW STORY

Group plans to beam free Internet across the globe from space

By Eric W. Dolan

The charity group A Human Right said it was planning to purchase a satellite that would provide free basic Internet access to developing countries around the world.

The group, which was founded by 25-year-old Kosta Grammatis, is currently raising money to buy the TerreStar-1, the largest commercial communications satellite ever built. TerreStar, the company that owns the satellite, filed for chapter-11 bankruptcy protection in October 2010, opening the possibility that the satellite may be up for sale.

The group hopes to raise $150,000 to finalize a business plan, investigate the legal and business aspects of submitting a bid for the satellite, and hire engineers to turn the plan into a reality. After this initial phase, the group plans to develop an open source low cost modem that could be used to connect to the satellite and finalize plans with partner governments.

"We believe that Internet access is a tool that allows people to help themselves - a tool so vital that it should be considered a universal human right," the website for Buy This Satellite stated. "Imagine your digital life disconnected. Without access to the 100 million man-hours that have been put into Wikipedia, how much do you actually know?"

Nearly 5 billion out of the world's 6.9 billion people don't have access to the Internet.

A Human Right plans to finance their satellite by allowing telecommunication companies to purchase bandwidth, while providing basic service for free to everyone. "Our goal is to not only get everyone online, but also facilitate the growth of an industry," their website said.

The group has already managed to raise $44,781.

"The idea for global connectivity was born in Berlin, Germany in an innovation 'Do-Tank' called Palomar 5," according to the group. "Thirty people under the age of thirty came together to innovate on what the future might look like, and how to address some of the worlds problems."

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FROM FAST COMPANY

CIA's Revamped Website Has Flickr Stream, New Kids' Games, YouTube Puppy-Cam Vids!

BY JENARA NERENBERGTue Feb 8, 2011The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) wants the world to know that it loves social media--and just re-vamped its site to prove it. The K-9 cam video is the cutest thing since Keyboard Cat.

The CIA has launched a re-vamped website, complete with a YouTube channel and Flickr photo stream, as well as games and an interactive timeline of the agency's history.

“The idea behind these improvements is to make more information about the Agency available to more people, more easily,” Director Leon E. Panetta said. “The CIA wants the American people and the world to understand its mission and its vital role in keeping our country safe.”

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Facebook and Skype deal to dial friends and family
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Together the deal means access to around 1 billion users
Skype is integrating with Facebook to make it easier to call and video chat with friends and family on the social network.

The deal comes amid fevered rumours that Facebook plans to launch a phone of its own.

Meanwhile Skype is gearing up for a $100m (£62m) share issue.

"The essence of the Skype experience is communicating with the people you care about," said Rick Osterloh, Skype's head of consumer products.

The new Skype for Windows will include a Facebook tab. This means that for the first time Skype users can keep up-to-date and interact with their Facebook news feed including posting status updates, commenting and liking directly from Skype.

Added to that, the Facebook phonebook in Skype allows users to call and text Facebook friends directly on their mobile phones and landlines.

And if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact, then users can make free Skype-to-Skype calls.

Group video calling is available in beta form as a free trial.

"We're working with companies such as Skype to make it easier to find your friends anytime you want to connect," said Ethan Beard, director of Facebook's developer network.


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From Gartner Newsroom

By 2015, 10 percent of your online "friends" will be nonhuman.

Social media strategy involves several steps: establishing a presence, listening to the conversation, speaking (articulating a message), and, ultimately, interacting in a two-way, fully engaged manner. Thus far, many organizations have established a presence, and are mostly projecting messages through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates that are often only an incremental step up from RSS feeds. By 2015, efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots — automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual.

Additional details are in the Gartner report "Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2011 and Beyond: IT's Growing Transparency" which is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1476415.

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