The French Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés has issued an order (archived) to Google demanding that the search provider enforce European "right to be forgotten" protections globally in its search results. Such extraterritorial aggression on the part of regulatory bodies in recent times has been more characteristic of United States government action that that of European governments. There will likely be further confrontation as the French CNIL works to make Google results even more useless than Google itself already has. France has escalated their previous demands to an order. Google intends not to comply with this order.
Category Archives: Shitware
WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Contains Malware
Josh Wieder wrote in to Cryptome describing that while examining documents contain in WikiLeaks full Stratfor email dump he has so far identified 18 pieces of malware embedded in documents and WikiLeaks has taken no actions to warn potential views of the hazards these documents might present. Weider notes particularly that Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel documents have been found with embedded malware in the dump. These of course are all file formats which should be quarantined any time the are encountered in the wild and not opened in their intended runtimes without thorough examination. One particularly interesting tidbit is that according to Weider's initial analysis, it appears that the first infected files were introduced to Stratfor's email system through their Chief executive's wife as early as 2003.
Phuctor Factors 100th RSA Modulus
The Phuctor, operated by No Such lAbs, has factored its hundredth modulus by using Euclid's Greatest Common Denominator algorithm. The Phuctor began digesting a dump of public keys from sks keyservers back in May. Less than two weeks later Phuctor had managed to factor a key attached to a key in the PGP strong set. Considering the way the news of Phuctor's first key factoring was handled all interested parties should examine the set of public keys factored for their own betterment.
Universal Shares Own Film With Pirates
On the 15th of this month Universal Pictures France filed a takedown request with Google (archived) demanding they remove from results sites hosting or linking pirated copies of Jurassic World. Among the addresses Universal demanded Google sanction was 127.0.0.1 which is the IP address a computer reserves for communicating with itself. This means that not only was Universal seeding its own film to pirates, it was likely doing so from the same machine used detect and prepare a report on infringement for Universal. Continue reading
"Entertainment System" Vulnerability Turns Vehicles Into Hot Death
Reports (video) are in that cybersecurity researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have demonstrated a potentially life-threatening1 security vulnerability in a raft of new cars and trucks with "connected" entertainment systems. Continue reading
Michael Hastings, anyone ? ↩
Microsoft Product Critical Vulnerability Week After Update End of Life
Microsoft has now announced a vulnerability in all of its Windows products a week after their Windows Server 2003 product has reached end of life for continued support. For what little it is worth Microsoft has issued an emergency patch to address this vulnerability in supported versions of their Windows family of products. The vulnerability exists in the way Microsoft products handle Microsoft's own "OpenType" format for fonts. This exploit via fonts affecting Windows desktops and servers follows an April exploit which rooted Windows servers using their flawed JPEG handling mechanisms. Microsoft stands to profit from users of Windows Server 2003 both upgrading to a supported version or opting for premium beyond end of life support contracts.
ALM CEO Cries 'Terrorism' after Ashley Madison Hack
Billing itself as a dating site specifically for people in relationships who wish to have an affair, Ashley Madison was recently breached by an entity calling itself The Impact Team. A Gitlab user of the same name reportedly released a partial database dump containing members' personal information, including email and physical addresses and real names, though the dump was no longer accessible as of July 21st. In a message left on the site and since removed, the breacher claims to have "taken over all systems in [Avid Life Media (Ashley Madison's parent company)'s] entire office and production domains, all customer information databases, source code repositories, financial records, emails." The message lambasted ALM for charging its users a $19 fee to delete their account data while keeping their credit card purchase details including names and addresses on file, and threatened to release a complete database dump unless the company "shuts down" Ashley Madison and Established Men, another site it "owns". Continue reading
Kickass Torrents Dropped From Google Search Results
Torrent Freak and others are reporting that Google has dropped Kickass Torrents from its search results, describing Google's action as a "severe penalty" to its search rankings. After the final collapse of the Pirate Bay Kickass Torrents has ascended to become the most popular torrent site. Kickass Torrents as moved domains in its history but at the moment has settled at the domain kat.cr for the foreseeable future. Google over its decade and a half of existence has moved away from its PageRank algorithm which brought it to dominance instead favoring manual actions to shape search results. Immediately after dropping Kickass Torrents from search results the first result on Google for the query "Kickass Torrents" was a known malware site imitating the actual Kickass Torrents site.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
Chain Fork Reveals BIP Process Broken
This weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client named "Bitcoin Core" and the actual behavior of Bitcoin miners. The developers of the Bitcoin Core client through a process they refer to as "Bitcoin Improvement Proposals" or BIPs introduced a "soft" forking change into their client which would be triggered through a voting mechanism. In this case miners had appeared to vote in favor of BIP 66, which would have enforced stricter encoding of signatures in an attempt to address the transaction malleability issue which is most notable for having been used as a scapegoat by Mt Gox while actually having little to do with their collapse. Continue reading