Hacktivism and How It Got Here

Hacktivism isn’t found in the graffiti on defaced Web pages, in e-mail viruses bearing political screeds or in smug take-downs...

DVD piracy “more profitable than drugs”

The black market trade in pirated DVDs is expected to top 1 billion pounds by 2007 as organised crime moves...

Piracy Paranoia

Yesterday, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released results of what it called a "worldwide" study on movie piracy through downloading. This self-serving release is obviously crafted to paint a scary picture, and the methodology isn't well explained. (By world, for instance, the MPAA means eight countries.)

Mozilla browser said to have hacker risk

A popular browser for Windows is subject to a security hole for hackers, British researchers say, but this time it's not Internet Explorer.

MPAA’s shock horror study

Nearly a quarter of Net users have illegally downloaded a film at one time or another, says the MPAA (Motion...

Microsoft Patch Leaves Holes Open

Microsoft's effort last week to fix a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer Web browser and end the latest series of Internet attacks doesn't address another closely related and dangerous vulnerability, according to a security specialist.

Interim Fix Released for Critical IE Flaw

Microsoft released an emergency configuration update over the July Fourth U.S. holiday that for the first time gives Internet Explorer...

US-CERT: Beware of IE

The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

The Internet: A Net of Control?

MSNBC.Com – Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in...

Harvard man loses 3,000 weblogs

Eccentric software developer Dave Winer has removed access to 3,000 weblogs hosted by the company he founded Userland at weblogs.com, without giving any prior notice. Bloggers have been told that if they ask nicely, they may have their data back next month. Winer blamed a computer for his decision. This strange story grows stranger, however. Winer made the announcement after the fact, in a rare audio mumble: third parties had to provide their own transcriptions. The change didn't affect friends and paid subscribers, and Winer has admitted he's continuing in the hosting business - he's simply moving locations. "The DNS service provider just can't handle the number of different domains under weblogs.com," said Winer. "We had to put them all in one place, and they had to be on one of my servers. Lawrence and I moved the sites over, and when we put the sites on the machine the performance of the machine became incredibly bad." Network administrators tell us his excuse holds little water. Netcraft reports that Weblogs.com is running Windows 2000 - not many people's first choice for BIND - but even so, it should be able to cope with what is a trivial load. "Either his hardware can't cope with the traffic, or his Win2K has some kind of resource limitation issue, or he's got something mis-configured," a sysadmin told us.