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16 Nov 2010 19:57

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U.S.: Congressional commission: China Telecom hijacked U.S. traffic somehow

  • 18 minutes in April where it was like we were living in China source

01 Aug 2010 11:27

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Tech: Want to snoop other people’s phone calls? It’s relatively cheap

  • $1,500 and absolutely zero conscience source

29 Jul 2010 08:50

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Tech: Some dude grabbed everyone’s Facebook data, put it on The Pirate Bay

  • 100 million poor Facebook users’ details scraped source

04 Jul 2010 18:09

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Tech: Thoughts on Flash: We’d like to jailbreak our iPads to use this

  • Need a reason to jailbreak your iPad? This seems like a pretty big one. That’s right, Comex, one of the main guys in the jailbreaking scene, has figured out how to make your iPad work with Flash, essentially taking the Android version of Flash and creating a compatibility layer for it. It doesn’t support video on that (that’s hard) or support keyboards (that’s easy), but we’re guessing that this could make Jobs’ whole “Thoughts on Flash” spiel sound a little stupid if it actually happens (and it works well). source

15 Jun 2010 10:45

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Politics: The Alvin Greene saga: When in doubt, blame hackers

  • yes South Carolina uses touch-screen voting devices. Rep. James Clyburn thinks that the 12,000 voting machines were hacked, leading to Alvin Greene’s victory, which candidate Vic Rawl is protesting.
  • no The state’s election commission says that theory is bunk. Spokesman Chris Whitmire says that the machines are reliable and that “no candidate has made this claim before.” Likely story. source

14 Jun 2010 10:45

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Tech: AT&T trashes on Goatse Security for pointing out unsecured hole

  • If not for our firm talking about the exploit to third parties who subsequently notified them, they would have never fixed it. We know what we did was right.
  • Goatse Security representative Escher Auernheimer • Responding to a letter from AT&T notifying its users of the iPad security breach the group found last week. AT&T called his group malicious hackers who wanted publicity. (You’d think the name was enough for that, but …) Auernheimer, on the other hand, called AT&T out for taking a number of days to actually inform its users of the breach. Expect some sort of legal action soon. source

13 Jun 2010 20:50

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Tech: Hacker who NARCed out Wikileaks source getting death threats

  • I couldn’t just not do anything, knowing lives were in danger. It’s classified information, and when you play Russian roulette, how do you know there’s not a bullet in the next chamber?
  • Hacker Adrian Lamo • Discussing his decision to tell federal agents that he suspected Bradley Manning was leaking information to WikiLeaks. Since then, it’s been anything but fun and games for Lamo, nicknamed the “homeless hacker” for his fairly transient lifestyle. He’s gotten death threats. People have been ordering pizzas under his name. He’s reviled in the hacker community. And before this, he was simply famous for being the guy who hacked into the New York Times. source
 

10 Jun 2010 23:41

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Tech: One of the neckbeards behind Goatse Security speaks up

  • It’s pretty egregious that AT&T would have it for such a device that probably has known exploit candidates (attack code) on, say, the Russian (underground) markets.
  • Escher “Weev” Auernheimer of Goatse Security • Talking about how his group uncovered a major flaw with AT&T’s security mechanism, which led to Gawker posting about the results. Why did they go to Gawker and not AT&T? “We did want not engage directly with AT&T in case they tried to serve us (an injunction) or something,” he said. How did they do it? It was a simple brute-force attack that required no hacking. And people offended about the group’s hilarious name? “If someone is offended to where they can’t deal with us … then they’re a douche bag and we don’t want to be employed by them anyway.” A fun read. source

26 Mar 2010 11:18

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Biz: Cost of a year in prison: Two million stolen debit and credit cards

  • 40
    million
    number of card numbers Albert Gonzalez, 28, stole via hacking
  • 20
    years
    number of years he’ll be spending in prison; privacy is cheap source

03 Mar 2010 21:46

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Biz: A bunch of Wiseguys hacked Ticketmaster, made like bandits

  • one
    million
    number of tickets Wiseguys Tickets and Seats managed to buy through hacking Ticketmaster’s Web site
  • $25
    million
    the amount these Wiseguys made through reselling at a much higher cost ($25 per ticket!) source