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Category Archives: Digital Warfare

Online wars

RIAA files suit against hospitalized teenager and wins

According to various reports [1,2,3] the RIAA won a lawsuit against Ciara Sauro due to her inability to respond to court documents in a timely fashion. The unnamed judge has rendered a verdict in the amount of $8,000. This case was brought by the RIAA over 10 songs.

Why RIAA tactics are unconstitutional

Charlie Nesson explains in this article just how far the RIAA has perverted the American legal system. It should be noted the $750 statutory minimum is just that. A minimum. It can go as high as $30,000 per infringement. The defendant in this trial has had to endure 7 years of legal troubles over allegedly […]

Hpricot Workaround for ASPX viewstate

I’ve switched over to Hpricot for HTML parsing in my various ruby projects. This was a long time coming and the performance is impressive. I happened to catch a page with ASPX viewstate on it and was faced with the following error: ran out of buffer space on element There are various pages out there […]

Federal Judge holds that people can not be identified by IP address

Judge Nancy Gertner held that a person can not be readily identified merely by an IP address with any “reasonable degree of technical certainty”. This is something that most of the technical community has claimed for years as the RIAA made countless fishing expeditions using universities as unwitting accomplices. It is refreshing to see a […]

hi, botnet Jack here

I received what was obviously spam this morning with the subject “VideoTube.com: The Best!” Because I work on the Youtomb project this sort of caught my attention. The message simply read “eX-eX-eX girlfriend!” and there was a zipped attachment. I detached the file and moved it to one of my test boxes. Once there I […]

MBTA security fail

In light of the events of last week I couldn’t help but be amused by this dialog box floating on a turnstile display in the central square T stop. EDIT: my cell phone camera takes lousy pictures. The text reads: Program: D:/FOAAA/ File: sprintf.c Line: 94

WordPress 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 vulnerable to attack

Thanks to co-author Brandon Palmen for the heads up to a WordPress hack in progress. The attackers are using a few obfuscation tricks to inject code into WordPress installations using a recently announced vulnerability. More details in a well written write up here. The code snippets from a digitalpoint.com forum are shown using base64 encoding […]

Chinese hackers political assault on the blogosphere

Disturbing news of a hacked blogger in China. This is not a simple DBD setup involving iframes. This was a highly targeted and politically motivated attack. The attackers not only posted a personal picture of her with instructions for viewers to assault her on the street but managed to infiltrate her Skype account.

Tenable alters Nessus plug-in licensing. Still not Open

Dear Nessus Community, On behalf of Tenable Network Security, we would like to thank you for making Tenable’s Nessus® vulnerability scanner the most widely used scanner in the world. Over the last five years, we have seen Nessus grow globally to over 5 million downloads and we have been there every step of the way. […]

Anti Scientology Videos taken down en masse on Youtube

The other day I received an email about a new Anonymous vs. Scientology dispute on Youtube. The enterbulation forum reported that Tory Christman, a very vocal critic of Scientology, had her Youtube account suspended. This time it looks as though Mark Bunker (wise beard man) has had many of his videos taken down as Terms […]