Cybersecurity

Looks like Bakiev’s government is out in Kyrgyzstan. Opposition Claims Control in Kyrgyzstan – NYTimes.com. This is wild and unexpected – your humble blogger spent a summer over there working with Internews, an independent free media advocate. It’s 5 years since they overthrew their last autocrat, but turned out to be a bummer of a […]

A bill by Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and co-sponsored by Olympia Snowe (R-ME) called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (yes, I know, but remember the Senate is, well, a bit slow) just dropped out of committee and may see floor action soon.* It’s an interesting piece of work, and only 50 pages, so I’m actually going […]

The US isn’t the only target of Chinese hackers that-of-course-aren’t-government-sponsored-though-the-PLA-does-fund-hacking-research-in-their-school groups. That other rising Asian great power – the one that fought a couple of wars with China and is harboring their archnemisis – got pwned in a bad way. The NY Times has a story on it that makes for interesting reading. At the […]

Social networking makes for really, really targeted marketing possibilities. A bunch of advocacy groups dealing with Sudan are putting up Facebook ads aimed at people who work in Congress. Your employer is part of your Facebook profile. So if it happens to be Congress, bing! (erm, not that Bing™) there you go. They can also key […]

The Marines are onboard with this whole Social Networking thing, following along with guidelines from On High. From Wired’s Danger Room It’s a remarkable about-face. A Marine Corps order last summer described such sites as “a proven haven for malicious actors and content.” And it warned that adversaries were using SNS [social network sites] as an “attack […]

Bloomberg (home to belovedly hard-to-use finance info terminals, as well as actual news) notes that the Taliban systematically destroys the mobile phone infrastructure of the (shrinking?) chunks of Afghanistan they control. Why? Afghanistan, with 29 million people, had as many as 12 million cellular-service subscribers in December, according to the Afghan government. Fifty-two percent of the population […]

GoDaddy, home of lousy Internet hosting and scandalous Super Bowl ads, has inexplicably been a success with their cut-rate domain registration and hosting. Meanwhile, in the Middle Kingdom the Chinese government continues grasp as many levers of control over Internet users as possible. To register your own web name in the Chinese domain name space (eg, […]

Game’s up. Google has shut down its web search on the mainland. Google blog post; NYT story. The company is attempting to route Chinese users to a simplified Chinese* Hong Kong site, where local legislation does not require them to censor their results. A clever attempt at an elegant face-saving solution, considering the fulmination about the necessity […]

Iran is playing for keeps on Internet censorship. More details have emerged on the activists arrested in conjunction with the hacking of US servers that took place last week. Via InsideIran: [T]he group arrested by Iranian authorities was the committee against censorship in Iran that goes by the name Iran Proxy. This group is composed […]

There’s a new Global Internet Freedom caucus in Congress. This is not necessarily a big deal – there are a lot of caucuses. Some are extremely active, and others, not so much. (Congressional Ski and Snowboard Caucus?) Considering their name, this one will likely be focused on issues raised by the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, […]

The unstoppable force and immovable object may have begun their tango: it looks like China and Google are heading for a collision. Reports from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal (sorry, lame-o subscription) say that talks between the Chinese government and the search giant are at an impasse. The Chinese, meanwhile, have insisted […]

Bombshell from Iran, on a couple of metaphorical levels: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, everyone’s favorite bad guys these days,  hacked a couple dozen web sites of human rights activists working in Iran, claiming they were agents for American intelligence services. In Farsi, “rights defender” apparently translates as “American spy”. Then the regime’s increasingly brazen goons arrested 30 […]