Turkey cuts off Internet service to BFF Iran. (Taz).
Turkey cut off Iran’s internet service by 50 Gigabytes (GB) due to
some internal problems, the Iranian Deputy Minister of Communications
and Information Technology, Mahmoud Khosravi said. He made the remarks while commenting on recent problems in Iran’s Internet.
The incident took place last Friday night, which affected the
Internet service in Iran, the Iranian official said, Fars news agency
reported Sept. 6.
He further said that the lost traffic was restored after a few hours.
Turkey is only one of the routs which provide Iran with Internet
service, so the lost 50 GB of Internet traffic did not impose great
impact on Iran’s network, Khosravi added.
It was similar to the recent gas pipeline explosion in Turkey, Khosravi said, without unveiling further details.
Earlier in October 2012, a pipeline supplying Iranian natural gas to
Turkey was damaged by an explosion, halting gas flow, and surprisingly
disrupting Internet connectivity to northern Iran and Iraq.
Internet communication lines are often installed along the existing
physical routes, such as highways, power lines, rail lines or oil and
gas pipelines. It was supposed that Turkish Internet and mobile provider
was using communication lines along this pipeline to provide northern
Iran and Iraq with Internet. Hmmm.......Testing ...1,2,3...
'SKYNET?' - SpaceX Files with Government to Provide Internet Surveillance Service from Space. (Wapo).
Elon Musk’s space company has asked the federal government for
permission to begin testing on an ambitious project to beam Internet
service from space, a significant step forward for an initiative that
could create another major competitor to Comcast, AT&T and other
telecom companies.
Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born Canadian American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and chairman of SolarCity. He is the founder of SpaceX and a cofounder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and Zip2.He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop
The plan calls for launching a constellation of 4,000 small and cheap
satellites that will beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of
the globe, including its most remote regions. Musk has said the effort
“would be like rebuilding the Internet in space.”
If successful, the attempt could transform the L.A.-based SpaceX from
a pure rocket company into a massive high-speed Internet provider that
would take on major companies in the developed world but also make
first-time customers out of the billions of people who are currently not
online.
The idea of saturing Earth with Internet signals from space
has long been the dream of prominent business tycoons, including Bill
Gates in the 1990s.
But many of these ventures have run into obstacles
that Musk is working to avoid. Musk has his own rocket, and he has said
his swarm of satellites will be more efficient and inexpensive than
relying on a handful of big devices that are difficult to replace. Hmmm......Why are all these alarm bells going of in my head? Read the full story here.
Iran launches children’s SIM card with controlled access to 'Halal' mobile Internet. (Taz).
Iran has unveiled a special SIM card that allows parents to control
the mobile Internet usage of their children. The children’s SIM card was
unveiled April 30 in Iran’s central city of Qom during a ceremony
attended by parliament speaker, Ali Larijani.
The SIM card allows parents to control how their children use the
Internet and even monitor their contact list in the cell phone, Iran’s
Mehr news agency reported.
Iranian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology earlier
adopted a decision according to which all Iranian mobile operators
should issue special SIM cards for children and teenagers with
restricted access to 3G and 4G networks.
Under the ministry’s decision, sale of SIM cards to children and teenagers under 18 will be prohibited in Iran.
The latest statistics of Iran’s Internet Penetration Management
Portal put the number of Internet users in Iran at 40 million,
indicating that the Internet penetration rate of the country stood at
53.29 percent in June 2014. About 11.07 million of the users in Iran
have used GPRS connection to access the Internet over the same period.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks,
such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still
able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant
to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates
that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to
by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.
Windows 10 Lets You Say Goodbye to Passwords 'and privacy' Forever.(Fars).
Microsoft is adding support for the Fast Identity Online (Fido) standard to Windows 10 to enable password-free sign-on for a number of applications.
PC users' reliance on weak passwords that are easily cracked (and yet somehow still easy to forget, leaving the IT department with the tedious and time-consuming chore of managing them) coupled with regular password leaks by consumer apps mean moving to fingerprint or other biometric authentication methods could make signing in easier for users and make systems more secure as well, ZDnet reported.
Dustin Ingalls, Windows security and identity program manager at Microsoft, said the company has contributed "design inputs" to the Fido's upcoming 2.0 technical specs.
"Transitioning away from passwords and to a stronger form of identity is one of the great challenges that we face in online computing," said Ingalls.
The Fido standards aim to create a "universal framework" for secure but password-free authentication. Fido supports biometrics such as face, voice, iris, and fingerprint or dongles, and members of the group include Samsung, Visa, PayPal, RSA, MasterCard, Google, Lenovo, ARM, and Bank of America as well as Microsoft.
Ingalls said the Fido implementation in the Windows 10 Technical Preview reflects Microsoft's contribution to the Fido 2.0 specification technical working group, and showcases integration with Windows 10 sign-in, Azure Active Directory, and access to software-as-a-services packages like Office 365 Exchange Online, Salesforce, Citrix, Box, and Concur.
"With Windows 10, for the very first time Windows devices and Microsoft-owned and partner SaaS services supported by Azure Active Directory authentication can be accessed end-to-end using an enterprise-grade two-factor authentication solution - all without a password," he said.
Windows 10 will also include Active Directory integration and Microsoft Account integration for consumer Microsoft services such as Outlook.com and OneDrive, Ingalls added.
Hmmm......The possibilities are endless.....Time to stock up on Windows 7-8 hardware and software.
@ColorMeRed just imagine the potential this has : 'User John Doe' ID xxxx will be blocked from the internet starting now
Google buys SlickLogin, looks to swap passwords for inaudible sound waves.....now that's 'CHANGE'. Engadget
If Google’s latest acquisition is anything to go by, entering a password on a website could soon be as easy as placing your smartphone near your computer.
Israeli startup SlickLogin confirmed today it has become the latest company join Mountain View’s ranks (although it’ll work from Google’s local offices), bringing its patented sound-based smartphone technology with it.
While neither party has disclosed much information, Google’s intentions seem clear: the company already offers its two-factor authentication tech free to everybody, but it can be a pain to enter a six-digit authentication code (which changes every minute). Read the full story here.
Undersea fiber optic cable cut affects 50% of Pakistan's internet traffic.(ET).
KARACHI: A fiber optic cable got cut in the Arabian Sea near Karachi resulting in nearly 60 per cent decrease in internet speed across Pakistan on Wednesday.
Nearly 50 per cent of Pakistan’s internet traffic faces disruption as SMW4 – one of the four undersea cables that connects the country with internet was damaged.
The disruption occurred around 12pm on Wednesday. The country’s internet traffic is currently running on two cables instead of four.
SMW is also referred to as SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia Middle East and Western Europe).
PTCL and Transworld – the internet gateways for Pakistan – provide internet using this fiber optic cable.
This is the second submarine cable that has been effected after IMWE which was cut more than a week ago.
A consortium of internet service providers is working on the issue but they have not come up with a resolution time for this problem.Hmmmm......Twice in a week?Read the full story here.
We the People’website cracked the 100,000-signature threshold now White House must respond to 'Stop CISPA' petition.(RT).A petition
on the White House’s ‘We the People’website cracked the 100,000-signature
threshold needed to provokean official response this week, and now a member of
US PresidentBarack Obama’s staff will have to speak out about the CISPA
bill,which was recently reintroduced before American lawmakers.
Up until earlier this year, the White House required petitionsto collect only
25,000 signatures to garner an official response.In a matter of just three
weeks, however, an anti-CISPA petitionhas become one of the most popular ones on
the site.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Sen. Dutch Ruppersberger(D-Calif.) unveiled
CISPA to their Capitol Hill colleagues last year and touted it as a surefire
solution to the impending cyber war that lawmakers in Washington — including the
Pres. Obama — have repeatedly warned of during his tenure as commander-in-chief.
In the wake of protests aimed at other computer bills, such as the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill, the Protect IPAct (PIPA), the public
response to CISPA was overly negative and it never advanced in the House of
Representatives far enough to be voted on before the last congressional season
expired. Rogers and Ruppersberger recently reintroduced their
failed bill, however, and hope to have it added to the books soon as warnings of
a cyberwar with the
likes of Iran and China continue
to come from Washington’s elite.
The authors of CISPA describe it as a bill “to provide for the sharing of
certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the
intelligence community and cyber security entities,” but critics say it does
much more than that. Because it creates an inter-connected system for private
businesses and government agencies to share information, privacy advocates say
it puts too much personal information into the hands of Uncle Sam. “CISPA is about information sharing. It creates broad legal exemptions that
allow the government to share ‘cyber threat intelligence’ with private companies,
and companies to share ‘cyber threat information’ with the government, for the
purposes of enhancing cyber security. The problems arise from the definitions
of these terms, especially when it comes to companies sharing data with the
feds,” reads the Stop CISPA petition that must soon bemet with a response
from the White House.
Last month, Pres. Obama signed an executive
order that will set up the frameworkfor a cyber-protection system that will
serve as a starting-pointfor any eventually CISPA or CISPA-like laws. In doing
so, though,he urged Congress to consider Rogers’ and Ruppersberger’ bill. “I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by
increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national
security, our jobs and our privacy. Now, Congress must act as well, by passing
legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks
and deter attacks,” the president said.
CISPA has been condemned by the Electronic Frontier Foundation,software
developers Mozilla and
former Rep. Ron Paul, who called the act
“essentially an Internet monitoring bill that permits both the federal
government and private companies to view your private online communications with
no judicial oversight, provided, of course, that they do so in the name of cyber
security.”Hmmm.....He might say well now you need 500,000 signatures.Read the full story here.
Test if your site is banned in Iran.HT: MarkHumphrys
If you're not censored in Iran you're doing it wrong. We're banned, are you? You can test whether or not you're banned in Iran by following the link here.
Net Neutrality? Google Prods Users to Fight Copyright Law.(Spiegel).By Sven Becker and Marcel Rosenbach.
Google is increasingly throwing around its power to improve its bottom line. The latest incident is a draft law in Germany that would force the company to share some revenues with newspaper publishers. Meddling in politics is certainly not illegal, but it could be risky.
At its core, the proposal concerns the headlines and short teaser texts indexed by search engines -- the so-called snippets. The bill aims to protect copyrights that belong to newspapers and their publishers. When search engines display those snippets "for commercial purposes," the proposed law would allow the publishing houses to charge a fee. Bloggers, clubs, associations and even company press reviews would not be affected by the current draft version of the law.
Until last week, this somewhat arcane issue in copyright law caused little more than a ripple in the public consciousness. But all that changed on Tuesday. That's when Google declared the skirmish over the info snippet as a major battleground in the big war -- namely the fight for freedom on the Web. Consequently, the roughly 15.6 million users who bombard Google Germany with search queries every day were presented with a link under the usual search mask that led them directly to a campaign website -- where the search engine giant called for resistance: "Defend Your Net." According to Google, the law would "make it significantly more difficult to find the information you are searching for on the Internet." Read the full story here.
Take action at http://www.whatistheITU.org
Fight for the Future and Access collaborated on this short, informative video about a serious threat to the free and open internet that could have devastating effects for human rights and free expression around the globe.
Showdown set on bid to give U.N. control of Internet.(AP).It is expected to be the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles.
When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure U.N. agency meeting, fighting is expected to be intense over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet.
Russia, China and other countries back a move to place the Internet under the authority of the International Telecommunications Union, a U.N. agency that sets technical standards for global phone calls.
U.S. officials say placing the Internet under U.N. control would undermine the freewheeling nature of cyberspace, which promotes open commerce and free expression, and could give a green light for some countries to crackdown on dissidents.
Observers say a number of authoritarian states will back the move, and that the major Western nations will oppose it, meaning the developing world could make a difference.
“The most likely outcome is a tie, and if that happens there won’t be any dramatic changes, although that could change if the developing countries make a big push,” said James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“But there is a lot of discontent with how the Internet is governed and the U.S. will have to deal with that at some point.”
Lewis said there was still an overwhelming perception that the U.S. owns and manages the Internet. Opponents have a “powerful argument” to create a global authority to manage the Internet, Lewis said, but “we need to find some way to accommodate national laws in a way that doesn't sacrifice human rights.”
Terry Kramer, the special U.S. envoy for the talks, has expressed Washington’s position opposing proposals by Russia, China and others to expand the ITU’s authority to regulate the Internet.
“The Internet has grown precisely because it has not been micro-managed or owned by any government or multinational organization,” Kramer told a recent forum.
“There is no Internet central office. Its openness and decentralization are its strengths.”
The head of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, said his agency has “the depth of experience that comes from being the world's longest established intergovernmental organization.”
Toure wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian that any change in regulation should “express the common will of ITU’s major stakeholders” and “find win-win solutions that will act as a positive catalyst.”
But Harold Feld of the U.S.-based non-government group Public Knowledge said any new rules could have devastating consequences.
“These proposals, from the Russian Federation and several Arab states, would for the first time explicitly embrace the concept that governments have a right to control online communications and disrupt Internet access services,” Feld said on a blog post.
“This would reverse the trend of the last few years increasingly finding that such actions violate fundamental human rights.”
Paul Rohmeyer, who follows cyber-security at the Stevens Institute of Technology, pointed to a “sense of anxiety” about the meeting in part because of a lack of transparency.
He said it was unclear why the ITU is being considered for a role in the Internet. “The ITU historically has been a standards-setting body and its roots are in the telecom industry. I'm not familiar with anything they've done that's had an impact on the Internet today,” Rohmeyer told AFP.
And the analyst noted that the significance of extending “governance” of the Internet to the ITU remains unclear.
Some observers point out that the ITU hired a Russian security firm to investigate the Flame virus, which sparked concerns about the dangers in cyberspace and the need for better cyber-security cooperation.
Rohmeyer said it was unclear whether a conspiracy was at hand, but that “the suggestion that the Internet is a dangerous place could be used to justify greater controls.”
Observers are also troubled by a proposal by European telecom operators seeking to shift the cost of communication from the receiving party to the sender. This could mean huge costs for U.S. Internet giants like Facebook and Google.
“This would create a new revenue stream for corrupt, autocratic regimes and raise the cost of accessing international websites and information on the Internet,” said Eli Dourado of George Mason University.
Milton Mueller, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University who specializes in Internet governance, said most of the concerns are being blown out of proportion.
Mueller said the ITU “already recognizes the sovereign right of nations to restrict communications into and out of the country.”
“What gets lost in the confusion over content regulation is that the real motive of most of the reactionary governments is to protect themselves from economic competition caused by telecom liberalization and deregulation, of which the Internet is only one part,” he said.Read the full story here.
Video - Kim Dotcom attacks Obama with new song "Mr. President".(RT).Megaupload's Kim Dotcom — the man behind one of the most well-known file sharing sites — has a message for US President Barack Obama: where is your promise to keep the Internet free?
Dotcom, the 38-year-old founder of Megaupload.com, has come forth with his latest attempt to make a splash in the same industry that has employed every tactic in the book to put him behind bars. Even after being targeted by an international witch-hunt spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and selected members of the US Congress, Dotcom has dropped a new musical number of his own.
And, of course, Dotcom has made the song available free of charge all over the Internet.
“Mr. President,” a bouncy, 4-minute-long request meant for Washington, was released on Friday, and Dotcom doesn’t hold back in his appeal for Internet freedoms. Dotcom may have been made the poster boy of online piracy thanks to an array of enemies in the RIAA, Hollywood and Capitol Hill, but in his latest number he embraces that allegations that he has facilitated copyright infringement and asks for his fans to demand a chance with the ways the Web is governed. “The war for the Internet has begun,” Dotcom declares over a simplistic synthesizer lead. “Hollywood is in control of politics / The Government is killing innovation / Don't let them get away with that.”
Dotcom has been a central figure in Washington’s war on online piracy for years now, but a highly publicized raid of his New Zealand mansion on January 20 has propelled him to near-iconic status. The FBI alleges that, by masterminding the operations of Megaupload, Dotcom cost Hollywood upwards of half a billion dollars in lost revenue. Since those allegations were delivered, though, Dotcom has spent six months mostly hulled up in his home, yet still jumping on just about every opportunity to attack America and its justice system.
Only days before “Mr. President” was released, Dotcom’s attorneys filed a rebuttal against the federal prosecutors involved in the copyright case that calls out America’s attorneys for inventing their own rules to try to build up charges against Megaupload, a hugely popular file-storage site that was shut down by the FBI in conjunction with January’s raid.
In his latest tune, Dotcom declares over a redundant German dance beat that, “[I]f we don’t do anything. . . they will just blame it on the copyright,” and that advocates for a free and open Internet need to “Keep this movement going,” “Keep this movement tweeting” and “Keep this movement moving” in order to erode attempts from Congress and other legislative bodies across the world that are running a campaign against online freedoms.
During the course of the song, Dotcom’s compliments the tune’s repetitive dance phrases by combining it with images of protesters from across the globe, frequently donned in the Guy Fawkes mask adopted by the Anonymous movement, to showcase how other advocates have successfully killed ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that aimed to establish new standards for governing intellectual property rights in countries around the globe, including the US, New Zealand, Canada and the European Union. Thanks in part to a massive social media campaign — to which Dotcom encouraged — ACTA was killed just weeks ago.
In a tweet sent earlier this month, Dotcom celebrated the end of ACTA and similar American legislation aimed at regulating the Internet by writing to his followers, “SOPA is dead. PIPA is dead. ACTA is dead. MEGA will return. Bigger. Better. Faster. Free of charge & shielded from attacks. Evolution!”
Elsewhere in the number, Dotcom reaches out directly to President Obama, insisting that the “change” that was promised during his 2008 campaign for the White House turned out to be nothing more than an attempt to bring difference to the Web by way of regulation. “What about free speech, Mr. President?” Dotcom asks. “What happened to change, Mr. President? Are you pleading the fifth, Mr. President? Are you going to fix this, Mr. President?”
Dotcom then deters his lyrical attacks to take aim at the entertainment industry representatives who have largely pushed for SOPA and PIPA, whose clout on Capitol Hill almost cost the rest of the country their Internet freedoms. “Hollywood marionettes [are] taking over our Internet,” he sings. “Don't let them get away with that.”
Before the song concludes, Dotcom asks his listeners to “Keep sharing this song.” “If you can't blog – tweet. If you can't tweet – like. But by all means – keep sharing.”
F.B.I. warning :"You may not be able to connect to the internet after July 9". HT: IsraelMatzav.On July 9, 2012, there is a chance that many computers will cease to be able to surf the web because of malware that proliferated among millions of computers starting in 2007. You can find out if your computer is among them.
Starting in 2007, an Internet fraud ring running out of Estonia infected millions of computers worldwide with a virus to manipulate internet advertising. The way they did this was by redirecting users to rogue DNS servers which gave the cyber thieves the ability to manipulate users’ web activity by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones.
US authorities seized the rogue servers and replaced them with legitimate ones in order not to disrupt victims’ access to the web. However, those servers have been funded by US taxpayer dollars since November 2011, and of course this cannot go on indefinitely. The planned date for turning off the servers is July 9, which means that computers that have been accessing the web via these rogue-turned-legit servers, will lose that ability.
How to check if your computer is using rogue DNS servers
To find out if your computer is clean, or is using the rogue DNS servers, take the following steps:
Find out what your computer’s IP address is. You can do this by visiting this site: WhatIsMyIP. Your IP address is the 10 digit number that looks like this: 12.123.12.123. Copy it down somewhere.
Click on Check Your DNS. If your computer is clean, you’ll see the message: “Your IP is not configured to use the rogue DNS servers,” and you can breathe a sigh of relief.
If your computer is not clean, then you’ve got quite a job ahead of you. Visit this page on the DNS Changer Working Group site to see the steps you should take to clean your computer.
The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security
partner,http://www.dcwg.org,
that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the
problem. After July 9, infected
users won't be able to connect to the Internet. Will : I've posted on April 21 - 2012. a story on this before.
It can be read here.
RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1.(CNet).Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry's chief lobbyist.The country's largest Internet service providers haven't given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops. CNET broke the news last June that the RIAA and counterparts at the trade group for the big film studios, had managed to get the deal through--with the help of the White House.
Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.
But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers here today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 1. "Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion." The program, commonly referred to as "graduated response," requires that ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, the ISP is then asked to send out "confirmation notices" asking that they confirm they have received notice. At that time, the accused customers will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don't stop pirating material. If the customer is flagged for pirating again, the ISP can then ratchet up the pressure. Participating ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls "mitigation measures," which include throttling down the customer's connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating. Read the full story here.
Google Warns Million Users Could Lose Internet Access in July.(Matzav).Google has warned that hundreds of thousands of internet users may be unable to access the web on July 9 if they do not get rid of malicious software, also known as malware, from their computers.
Google has been alerting users to the threat of DNSChanger with the message “your computer appears to be infected” on machines infected by the software. The company had successfully alerted a million users last summer to a different type of malware.
This time the method has been repeated with Google showing a special message appearing at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected devices.
Google has warned that as many as one million computers may be infected with malware.
The Domain Name System (DNS) converts web address names like google.com into numericals that enable computers to send traffic to the right place.
DNSChanger changes the DNS settings and forces users to use malicious servers that redirect them to fake and other harmful sites. The malware also alters the settings on home routers and can infect other computers and mobile devices.A really good freeware Anti-spyware program can be found here @ Emisoft.Read the full story here.
