This article at Silicon.com, written a couple of days ago, makes me want to weep. It only goes to show the general level of tech-cluelessness at all levels of the police, civil service and parliament.
UK tech police: Cash-strapped and ineffective
January 26 2005
by Will Sturgeon
A UK high-tech crime buster has warned that his investigations are
being severely hampered by a lack of money and has said funding could
still be pared down further to the point that police units such as his
become untenable.
...
Noble said the funding available doesn't even stretch as far as
providing him with a car
...
Noble also admitted the police still have a long way to go before
they are up to speed on the various ways in which cybercrime can
manifest. While each of the 45 constabularies in the UK now has a
dedicated cybercrime investigator, Noble admitted these individuals
may still be the only person who comes close to understanding a
technical complaint, citing a "sorry, we don't do computers" culture
among front desk and uniformed police.
And even if companies do get through to the dedicated computer crime
investigator, they may be surprised by the level of expertise. Noble
warned that many will be novices on many types of cybercrime and
complete strangers to some.
"You might speak to an officer on one high-tech crime unit with a
complaint about a DoS [denial of service] attack and he really might
not know where you are going with it.
"You may have to help him out because he's going to need you to be
the expert."
A driver praised as a hero when he rang police on his mobile phone to say his 38-ton lorry was out of control has been charged with dangerous driving.
Michael Rayner, 26, now unemployed, from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, will appear before Hendon Magistrate's Court on 17 November.
Mr Rayner was praised for preventing an accident on the M1 in May when he said his accelerator had jammed on the motorway.
The articulated lorry careered towards London for more than 20 miles at speeds of up to 80mph.
Mr Rayner gave police a running commentary and the busy motorway had to be cleared by patrol cars and a helicopter.
The Scania P124 lorry finally came to a halt by hitting a crash barrier and fence near Hendon in north-west London.
It runs all the time on one of my desktops - IMHO
it is the very best source of concise, up-to-date information.
Here are some dumps of the current BBC front pages,
courtesy of alevtd and w3m (some stuff snipped
to avoid slashdot "junk" lameness filter).
101.00 CEEFAX 2 101 Thu 23 Sep 14:46/55 HOSTAGE'S RELEASE 'SABOTAGED BY US' 104 Straw rules out Bigley negotiations 105
BARRACKS Fresh abuses claims probed 113
LIB DEM We're on the move Kennedy 115
AIR BA taking on 200 Heathrow staff 110
FBI Deported Cat Stevens back in UK 108
SOCCER Keane denies assault charges 122
HAITI Toll from flooding tops 1,000 114
TRIBUTES Ceefax celebrates 30 years 111
CATCH UP WITH YORKS & LINCS NEWS 160
News index Top story TV/Radio Main menu
<< < o > >> 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 about Jump to page [ ] [ok]
<hr> 104.00 CEEFAX 2 104 Thu 23 Sep 14:48/20 UK hostage's release 'sabotaged' The brother of British hostage Kenneth Bigley says the US has "sabotaged" his brother's release by refusing to free a detained woman scientist in Iraq.
Paul Bigley told the BBC there had been "a shadow of light" when Iraqi ministers said the woman would go free.
But the US ruled out freeing the woman one of two held in Iraq - saying it would not give in to the kidnappers.
Kenneth Bigley was seen in a video appealing to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to help save his life.
Home news digest 141 World digest 142 News Index 102 Flash 150 Regional 160 Next News News Indx Headlines Main Menu
<< < o > >> 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 about Jump to page [ ] [ok]
There are two sorts of trafficmaster detectors.
There are the blue poles on major roads, to which
I was referring.
There are also infra-red sensors mounted on bridges
over motorways which do measure average speed.
Some references from the Trafficmaster web site that confirm that the Blue Poles do read number plates.
A new sensor technology was developed for the trunk routes - Passive Target Flow Measurement (PTFM). Using video-based technology, the sensor head captures the centre digits of a vehicle number plate and converts them to an electronic 'tag'. This tag is then followed down the road, from sensor to sensor enabling the time to travel a known distance to be computed.
Trunk roads use a different technology to cater for the different traffic patterns experienced on such roads. Traffic turns off at junctions and may stop in lay-bys, at shopping centres etc, so simple speed measurement would not generate quality data. Passive Target Flow Measurement (PTFM) uses number plate recognition technology to ''grab'' the four centre digits of a vehicle number plate. This is turned into a four figure electronic ''tag'' on site - no number plate data is retained.
As the vehicle proceeds along the road and passes the next site(s), average journey times between sites are calculated and sophisticated computer programmes establish the speed of the traffic over those ''links''. In a seamless process, traffic speed on that particular section of road is then delivered to the traffic information product.
This private company has erected thousands of
cameras on blue poles on major roads around the UK.
They scan the number plates of cars, and (allegedly) strip off
the leading and trailing alpha-numeric, encrypt the result, and transmit it to a central computer.
This can make an statistical analysis of the congestion based om the time for a car to pass two
cameras.
How can one be sure that the system has not been
compromised by the security services?
The mobile phone operators can track your
position, sometimes to within a few tens of metres, if your cell phone is switched on, whether or not you make a call. They always log your position if you make a call, whether or not you
are being singled out for special monitoring, and keep this data for many months.
why has English since then been stealing words from other languages like a slum rat during a riot in a shopping mall?
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D. Nicoll
I would love to see a study comparing how english is read to how chinese is read by native speakers.
There is an interesting article at the Harvard Gazette about research which seems to show that thought comes before language. The Korean language distinguishes between
two meanings of "in" - fitting loosely or tightly.
Research shows that
Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.
The ISC would like to go out on a limb and predict that the Internet will not vaporize into a cloud of nothingness this Thursday, but if it does, it's been our pleasure to help stave off its inevitable annihilation this long.
See also this VMyths posting to theFull Disclosure mailing list
(Riker) "Good God captain! Those are humans floating straight toward the Borg ship with no life support suits ! How can they survive the tortures of deep space ?!"
(Data) "I don't believe that those are humans sir, if you will look closer I believe you will see that they are carrying something recognized by twenty-first century man as doe skin leather briefcases, and wearing Armani suits"
(Riker and Picard together horrified) "Lawyers !!"
(Geordi) "It can't be. All the Lawyers were rounded up and sent hurtling into the sun in 2017 during the Great Awakening."
If someone tries to whack you, I mean really really really wants to do you in, they're going to, walls and barbed wire and guards or not.
If someone wants to steal your corporate secrets,
they're going to, passwords and firewalls and anti-virus and IDS systems or not. That isn't an argument for abandoning (relatively) cheap and unintrusive security precautions.
As reported
yesterday, Toronto (44%) and Vancouver (37%) have the 2nd and 4th highest proportions of immigrants of any city in the world.
The City of Toronto's website says the largest groups of immigrants to Toronto in the five years before the 2001 census were from China (45,901), India (25,560) and Pakistan (17,495).
unlike Miama (1st, 59%), where the immigrants come from neighbouring Cuba and Latin America, those in Canada have come from more diverse cultures further afield.
SPAM in all upper case is a trademake of Hormel, and refers to their pork luncheon meat product.
They request that when the term is used to refer
to unsolicited bulk e-mail, it is not capitalised.
IIALP allows for an infinite number of different types of annoyances to exist but has concise templates for common annoyances such as SPAM.
One cannot take entirely seriously anyone proposing a new method of fighting net-abuse, who is not aware of this fact.
I have made the effort to grab three additional units, all v2 hardware,
off-the-shelf, and here is what I have found: Two of three units came with
the firewall enabled, while one of the three came with it disabled. The
packaging leaves no evidence as to whether any of these items were
previously opened and returned.
Interestingly, all three units from local resalers came with v2.02.2
firmware, while the second unit from CDW I tested in March came with
v2.02.7. BOTH of the units which came off-the-shelf with v2.02.7 behaved as
previously described in my original notice; I do not have records of the
firewall setting of the units from March, although they both did behave as
predicted after a factory reset.
I would like to assume that the one-of-three v2.02.2 firmware units which
came with the firewall disabled was an anomoly, and possibly a customer
return. Nicely, flashing these units to v2.02.7 retains all settings,
including the firewall status.
Now the catch. In v2.02.7 with the firewall disabled and remote admin
turned off, the admin page becomes available on ports 80 and 443 on the WAN.
This works whether the unit is in DHCP or PPPoE mode.
Port State Service 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https Remote operating system guess: Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.5.20
So part of the original notice is valid, with the exceptions noted. I don't
have any more v2.02.2 units to test as they have all now been flashed with
v2.02.7, I have no more unmolested v2.02.7, and I am out of petty funds to
purchase more:)
So, I will eat some crow on the original notice. To sum up, the admin page
is most definitely available to the WAN if the firewall is disabled,
regardless of the remote admin setting. And at best the potential for
getting a unit off-the-shelf with this behavior is somewhat like an Easter
egg hunt. I have received an even mix of responses positive and negative to
the original notice, so others are reproducing this OTS.
Some thoughts...
It could be resonable that units which come v2.02.2 OTS then flash to
v2.02.7 may not experience this behavior due to stored factory settings from
original v2.02.2 system carried over to v2.02.7. That would explain the
exception of the OTS behavior of the v2.02.7 units received in March.
Now I am also aware that other LinkSys items I have received have come with
firmwares not yet available on the website -- most recent example, a
WPS54GU2 which came with firmware 6032 while only 6031 was available on the
website. It may be more reasonable that since the firmware v2.02.7 is dated
March 17, my order for the WRT54G was placed on March 23, maybe a
pre-release of the firmware? I cannot imagine that there would be such a
diverse distribution of this product direct from LinkSys?
Futureproofing Spamhaus
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In related news, Spamhaus has announced a Funding model based on charging large corporate networks a yearly fee for our Data Feed rsync/ixfr service.
If you have wake up before dawn this week for work or school, take a pair of binoculars outside and scan the eastern horizon. You might see Comet Bradfield. The comet, which had a close encounter with the sun on April 17th, is now emerging from the sun's glare. Although it's too dim to see with the unaided eye, at least for most people, by all accounts Comet Bradfield is a beautiful sight through binoculars, its long tail stretching 10 degrees above the rosy glow of the rising sun.
Slashdot Mirror
This may have been interesting/insightful the first time it was posted, but now it's just trolling. Please don't mod up
9 84255
c id=12667071
Tuesday July 05, @13:28
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154831&cid=12
Sunday May 29, @01:45
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151030&
You can't use the word "Easy". It's a trademark. http://www.easy.com/thieves.html
The original site was flash based, so there's nothing to see at Archive.org from their spidering on May 13, 2004.
1999-06-10 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/365915.stm
1999-06-08 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/364260.stm
1999-06-07 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/363407.stm
1998-10-21 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/197964.stm
Remember, however, that Elcomsoft are associated with spammers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
It runs all the time on one of my desktops - IMHO it is the very best source of concise, up-to-date information.
Here are some dumps of the current BBC front pages, courtesy of alevtd and w3m (some stuff snipped to avoid slashdot "junk" lameness filter).
The UK has a body called ICSTIS which deals with premium rate (but not expensive overseas) tarrifs.
Some other links:n ual_report/
s /
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/01/icstis_an
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/28/mps_icsti
Some references from the Trafficmaster web site that confirm that the Blue Poles do read number plates.
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/page.cfm?key=networ k
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/page.cfm?key=networ k_ptfm-network
This private company has erected thousands of cameras on blue poles on major roads around the UK. They scan the number plates of cars, and (allegedly) strip off the leading and trailing alpha-numeric, encrypt the result, and transmit it to a central computer. This can make an statistical analysis of the congestion based om the time for a car to pass two cameras.
How can one be sure that the system has not been compromised by the security services?
Have a look, for instance, at ChildLocate.co.uk
Some more links:3 96,00.html
0 3,1101683,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-859
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,69
http://www.followus.co.uk/
Research shows that
See also this VMyths posting to theFull Disclosure mailing list
And look what happened to Anna Lindh - a prominent Swedish politician. Stabbed by a nutter as she was shopping in a department store.
See aerial photos of his house.
(mirror site) http://cryptome.sabotage.org/gates-eyeball.htm
(main site) http://cryptome.org/gates-eyeball.htm
The public DNSBL service will remain free.
http://www.darksky.org/
http://spaceweather.com/