GOP pushing for ISPs to record user data. The House Republicans' first major technology initiative is about to be unveiled: a push to force Internet companies to keep track of what their users are doing.
A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users' activities for later review by police. One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned. Tomorrow's data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users' privacy by storing less data. Thanks to the GOP takeover of the House, the odds of such legislation advancing have markedly increased. Police and prosecutors are the biggest backers of data retention.
For now, the scope of any mandatory data retention law remains hazy. These concepts are not exactly new. New weapon in war on Botnets. By George Lawton Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have developed a new technique for tracking stealthy botnets that use peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
BotGrep is an inference algorithm that uses graph analysis to detect botnets that hide from other security tools. Some botnet implementations, such as Conficker and Storm, are fairly easy to identify because they generate a lot of spam or denial-of-service (DOS) traffic. But others like Zeus, a popular malware family often used in stealing banking data, preserve their stealth by sending far less information. "As long as the botnet uses P2P communications," said Nikita Borisov, an UIUC associate professor and coauthor of the BotGrep tool, "we are able to identify its existence even though it does not have the loud activities. " Hacker explains why he reported 'Wikileaks source' 7 June 2010Last updated at 13:46 By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News Video of 'US military killings' in Iraq, reportedly leaked by Mr Manning Hackers often pride themselves on their anti-authoritarian and counter culture stance.
So news that former high-profile hacker Adrian Lamo had turned over an Army intelligence analyst to authorities was met with derision by some. "A lot of people have labelled me a snitch," Mr Lamo told BBC News. "I guess I deserve that on this one but not as a generality. " "This was a very hard decision for me.
" Mr Lamo is a former hacker, who exposed security flaws at the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft. 'By the book' Mr Lamo says that he was responsible for reporting Specialist (SPC) Brad Manning to the military authorities after the analyst boasted to him that he had handed over thousands of classified documents and classified military video to whistle-blower site Wikileaks. "I have never once turned them in, even when the FBI offered me a deal. "