On Jan 18th, sites will go dark to protest the internet censorship bills.

MemeStreams will be joining the strike on January 18th.

STRIKE AGAINST SOPA

This quote made me laugh out loud:

Oddly, despite the recent rise of the libertarian-leaning Tea Party faction of the Republican Party, no Republican has decided publicly that privacy protection of Americans’ online communications is a winning issue.

Given that the "Tea Party" is supposedly supported by "Libertarians" concerned with individual freedom, and that a number of "Tea Party" supported candidates are in office from around the country, you'd think that "Tea Party" candidates would support clear cut individual liberty issues like the proper extension of warrant requirements to data in the cloud. This is really a no-brainer, as the article lays out:

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was adopted at a time when e-mail, for example, wasn’t stored on servers for a long time. Instead it was held there briefly on its way to the recipient’s inbox. E-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned, and that’s why the law allowed the government to get it...

But technology has evolved, and e-mail often remains stored on cloud servers indefinitely, in gigabytes upon gigabytes — meaning the authorities may access it without warrants if it’s older than six months...

Leahy’s measure, among other things, would require court warrants to obtain all that cloud data.

Either:
1. The "Tea Party" pays lip service to Libertarian views but doesn't actually support them when push comes to shove.
2. "Libertarians" don't really support individual liberty like they say they do - they really only care about money - low taxes, not personal freedom.

You can talk all you want about how you support individual liberty, but when push comes to shove, if you are not willing to take action, you are not what you say you are.

No GOP Senator Supports Bill to Protect Cloud E-Mail Privacy | Threat Level | Wired.com

VSC told the students nothing... In the Fall of last year there were rumors that VSC was open to selling the 60-year-old 91.1 WRVU. There was no more news until Monday June 6th. The call sign change to WFCL popped up unexpectedly Monday morning in the FCC database. The DJs on air used the wrong station ID for most of the day because they were not informed.

Then Tuesday afternoon the DJ on air was told that there was "urgent equipment maintenance" and hurried out the door... which they then locked behind him.

Decius writes:

You can listen to the last moments of WRVU at this link.

There is more detail along with news media links here. Its a fucking disgrace. Its transparently obvious that a bunch of people who don't like college radio saw an opportunity here to kill this station and pocket 3 million dollars in the process which they get to spend on their own projects. It a win, win for them and a travesty for music city.

Its hard for me to really express how disappointed and angry this makes me. This whole deal has been shady, from the fact that WRVU has no representation in the governing body of Vanderbilt Student Communications, to the pre-emptive registration of potential protest domain names by Vanderbilt Student Communications prior to the original announcement back in September, to the fact that the final pulling of the plug was not communicated to the public and was done during the summer when the students are away and cannot comment. Why Vandy tolerates such obvious underhandedness from its student communications leadership is beyond me.

Oh wait, its the money.

What a damn shame.

Totally unbelievable. I hope there is a huge fallout due to this. The Vanderbilt community should be enraged.

WRVU Is Dead

Funny, true.

YouTube - You Should Work for Symantec

Thiessen telegraphs Pentagon statement as threat - shit is about to go down.

"We are making a demand of them," Morrell said. "We are asking them to do the right thing."

"We hope they will honor our demands," Morrell said, adding if WikiLeaks refuses to comply "we will cross the next bridge when we come to it."

"If doing the right thing is not good enough for them," the Pentagon spokesman said, alternatives will be explored "to make them do the right thing."

Sounds like a final warning has been issued -- and that the Obama administration intends to take action to stop WikiLeaks from disclosing any further life-threatening intelligence.

PostPartisan - A final warning to WikiLeaks?

Hoder watch...

Search Engine video podcast: Free Hossein Derakhshan, even if he's kind of a jerk! Boing Boing

Decius:

Several rumours from google sources that China accessed google's US-gov intercept system which provides gmail subjects/dates

This was my suspicion when I read that the attackers had accessed "subject lines" from emails but not the content. It sounds like they got access to a system designed for use by law enforcement when they have "trap and trace" authority but not a warrant. Personally, I think email subject lines are not "routing information" and should require a warrant, but the matter hasn't been litigated to my knowledge and of course, law enforcement disagrees.

This is somewhat relevant to my Blackhat DC talk on lawful intercept vulnerabilities, but of course even if this is true, a totally different technology was involved...

Twitter / WikiLeaks: Several rumours from google ...

Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet

Many goverments require telecommunications companies to provide interfaces that law enforcement can use to monitor their customer's communications. If these interfaces are poorly designed, implemented, or managed they can provide a backdoor for attackers to perform surveillance without lawful authorization. Most lawful intercept technology is proprietary and difficult to peer review. Fortunately, Cisco has published the core architecture of it's lawful intercept technology in an Internet Draft and a number of public configuration guides.

This talk will review Cisco's architecture for lawful intercept from a security perspective. The talk will explain how a number of different weaknesses in its design coupled with publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities could enable a malicious person to access the interface and spy on communications without leaving a trace. The talk will explain what steps network operators need to take to protect this interface. The talk will also provide a set of recommendations for the redesign of the interface as well as SNMP authentication in general to better mitigate the security risks.

//BIO: Tom Cross

Black Hat Technical Security Conference: DC 2010 // Briefings

Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators. Yet the company continues to dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters...

In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith's university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client's student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL. Today, Mr. Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight.

Hey, Texas Instruments -- Stop Digging Holes | Electronic Frontier Foundation

From Decius:

As many of you know, about two months ago TI sent me an email referencing the DMCA and demanding that I take down one of my blog posts. I complied at the time, but I also sent TI a response, requesting that they reconsider their position. They did not respond.

Two weeks ago Jennifer Granick at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent TI an email on behalf of myself, and several other bloggers who received similar notices from TI. In that email Jennifer told TI that we would repost our censored blog posts today if TI did not respond and clarify their position. TI has not responded.

Therefore, the original blog post has been restored, and if you didn't read it before, you can read it now. Its hardly the best post I've ever written. It was jotted down at 9:30 in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I tend to shoot first on this blog and ask questions later, and that certainly leads to posts which are poorly articulated and easily misinterpreted. In a later post I did a much better job explaining the technical concept which drew my interest to this calculator key cracking effort in the first place.

I'd like to thank the EFF and particularly Jennifer Granick for working with me as well as the other bloggers in this case. My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong. Its important that people stand up for that right, and we're fortunate that there are people out there who are willing to do it. Thank you EFF.

The post TI censored has been reposted.