RSA 2011: Winning the War But Losing Our Soul. Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law) At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name's registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography. But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might "take as long as 3 days. " One outraged user took to his blog to tell ICE to "get out of my Internet.
You'd get no argument from me that there are truly distasteful and illegal things on the Internet. Mooo.com had been seized as part of ICE's Operation Protect Our Children (the better-known Operation: In Our Sites targets piracy and counterfeiting). Rep. Lofgren wasn't appeased. Rep. Rep. Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world. What would you do if you registered on a site to buy something, only to find months later that your user account was searchable and your purchases were exposed? That scenario is currently playing out for Etsy users, who are dealing with the fallout from Etsy's decision to roll out a new People Search tool. The site, dedicated to enabling crafters and artisans to sell their work online, has yet to notify its user base of the change that exposes users' real names and, via their profile pages, anything they have purchased and left feedback on. The controversy began last week when Etsy flipped the switch on People Search as part of its effort to make Etsy feel more like a social network.
Now, when users run a search for a person's full name, that user's account will show up in the search results, even if that person is only a buyer. Even if users haven't entered their full names, their profiles are still searchable by username. Why does this matter? Beacon redux. Anonymous to security firm working with FBI: "You've angered the hive" Internet vigilante group Anonymous turned its sights on security firm HBGary on Sunday evening in an attempt to "teach [HBGary] a lesson you'll never forget. " The firm had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to unmask members of Anonymous following the group's pro-WikiLeaks attacks on financial services companies, and was prepared to release its findings next week. HBGary had been collecting information about Anonymous members after the group's DDoS attacks on companies perceived to be anti-WikiLeaks.
The firm had targeted a number of senior Anonymous members, including a US-based member going by the name of Owen, as well as another member known as Q. In addition to working with the FBI (for a fee, of course), HBGary's CEO Aaron Barr was preparing to release the findings this month at a security conference in San Francisco. "We’ve seen your internal documents, all of them, and do you know what we did? How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price.
Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code. In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project.
"They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases! " But had he? "We are kind of pissed at him right now" Barr's "pwning" meant finding out the names and addresses of the top Anonymous leadership. "At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls," he wrote in an internal e-mail. Indeed, publicity was the plan.