Slashdot Mirror
MI6 Terror Photos, Data Accidentally Sold On Ebay
Barence writes "In what's turning out to be a bad week for security in the UK, confidential MI6 documents, fingerprints and photos relating to suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists have been found in the memory of the second-hand Nikon Coolpix camera, which was bought on eBay for only £17. The buyer immediately went to the police, who initially treated it as a joke; when they realised he was serious, they swooped on his home and seized his camera and PC. Remember, this is the same MI6 which plans to recruit new members via Facebook, a userbase not exactly famous for its dedication to privacy, security and discretion. The news comes on the back of yesterday's embarrassment over a local council whose VPN device ended up on eBay with confidential login details left on it."
George Smiley would whip out a light-saber and... oh, wrong Alec Guiness film. Sorry.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The UK government has approved a 700 billion megabyte bailout to stop the Data Crunch causing the End of the Internet.
Rather than just giving the data to those who have it already, the government is distributing everyone's information free. "We feel that there is strong bipartisan support for a bottom-up data distribution initiative, such that everyone everywhere can share in the data generated and held by government," said a spokesman whose name was lost.
Reports that Neo-Nazi organisations are asking for "lost" data disks with the name and address of every immigrant in the country are as yet unconfirmed.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
With just 2 people doing this, there would be a whole lot of clean drives going back and forth between them. You need something like a TTL to prevent a complete DoS.
The buyer immediately went to the police, who initially treated it as a joke
I'll just type it up on my invisible typewriter.
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
But then again, in the US they would have tasered him for no reason.
You are badly misinformed. American police do NOT ever, under any circumstances taser people for no reason.
They taser them because it is funny.
He should leave negative feedback. That will teach them a lesson.
Next time, send the data anonymously to Wikileaks.
its a sad,sad state of affairs when this is modded "funny".
its is naive to label them a bunch of C&nts and then hope they are nice to you later on.
Whether or not he got his personal data back is another question, as anyone knows it is the time invested in generating your own data that is the real value in your PC. I hope he had a backup.
It's OK, he can just buy them back when they turn up on ebay ...
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Not to hard just don't drives twice from anybody that sells you clean drives.
I accidentally the whole drive?
If I had mod points, this post would be +1 funny. Unfortunately, +1 insightful would also apply.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
He got a Nikon Coolpix camera for £17? Holy crap. What a great deal.
That depends on your definition of "important". If by "important" you mean, has the most value to the person who received it, then I'd personally have to go with sex vids/pics. Those I can use right away, as often as I want, and then trade to get more nudie pics.
WTF am I going to use nuclear bomb codes for? I'm no longer in the nuclear blackmail business, and all my former henchmen are employed elsewhere. Mostly at Oracle and Microsoft. We still send each other xmas cards, and talk about getting together for a reunion, but it's hard to get all our schedules to line up, especially since most of us have young families now anyway. Back in the day when we were all single, it was easy to commit all our waking hours to work (building a massive underground fortress in a dormant volcano, etc.), but none of us really have the time anymore. Sigh. I guess you really can't go back to the glory days once they're gone.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The money is there, but the competition got to be too much. In the mid-90's we were doing great. Our business plan was solid, and we were swimming in venture capital. We even considered an IPO at one point. Then in the late 90's, Microsoft got wind of what we were doing, and met with us to discus a merger. The rest of the story is fairly predictable: sell to them at a discount, or they would simply "embrace and extend" our blackmail model and include it as a free feature in the next version of Windows.
After we sat back, talked it over amongst ourselves and considered it, we agreed to sell to them. Looking back, I'm not so sure that was really the right thing to do, but at the time the ground was littered with companies who had crossed them and lost. Anyway, a few of us got buyout packages and moved on elsewhere, but most stayed with Microsoft for awhile at least. It's not a bad place to work. Nice campus and all, but it sure wasn't as cool as the supersecret lair was.
Eventually, they managed to integrate some of our world-domination technology into the next build of their OS, but they never really understood it, and it was a disaster (remember ME?). At that point, I was pretty disgusted, so I left to join another start-up.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Well, I guess it's a good thing you didn't buy a digital camera that had a flash disk full of classified information, isn't it?
I think you should cheer up! Now sing along!
You're gonna go to that store and buy a backup disk! YEAH!
You're gonna get over your ex and score with a hottie real quick! ALL RIGHT!
And if the government man wants to take your flash drive, tell him that it's all right!
Cause you've got a backup drive and a hot chick tonight! (GUITAR SOLO!)
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
1) Sell camera on ebay
2) Wait for buyer to report MI6 photos
3) Steal Camera back
4) PROFIT!!!
5) Go to 1
So you're the one we have to kill for Windows ME, eh?
I've got some friends over at Oracle that could take care of... Oh, hey, wait a minute! Small world, isn't it?
If you see Dave, let him know I still want my 20 sided dice back.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.