Anonymous is back, and this time they have launched a pair of operations. The first is in response to the takedown of the Megaupload.com site by the FBI and other authorities. The second operation is to continue to support the protest for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). However, their operation is targeting the members of Congress that support it. So far, the sites of the Justice Department, Universal Music Group, and several congressional sites have been affected.

The attacks began as Anonymous’ Sabu called for people to boycott paid media in all forms and to promote torrent and file sharing sites. “This new, massive operation, will target on SOPA/PIPA in a way that the government was not expecting,” he posted on Twitter. “We are going to starve the beast.” In response to the arrest of Megaupload.com’s founders, he said, “This is the governments way of saying: ‘How nice of you to protest SOPA/PIPA. But we still are in control.’ Fuck this.”

The Department of Justice and Universal Music sites were both made unavailable by denial of service attacks. Anonymous’ Barrett Brown told RT.com that “It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org.” Both sites remained down for quite some time and attacks were being mounted for a few days. Anonymous members have also targeted the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America and the White House, as well as other government sites.

In a wave of attacks labelled “OpDonkeyPunch” by Barrett Brown, the frequent spokesperson for Anonymous, the group is targeting Democrats in Congress who support SOPA. OpDonkeyPunch is directly targeting those people’s websites. Brown also published the fax machine phone number for Republic Rep. Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA.

In an e-mail, Brown stated that the intention of OpDonkeyPunch “is to show Democrats that they can’t just slide through on this and escape notice, that we can do more damage to their fundraising ability than they realize.” The efforts of Anonymous have extended and expanded to Facebook and Twitter accounts of SOPA supporters. However, they are not hacking these accounts, as they don’t want these sites shut down at all. No, Anonymous is spamming messages to the supporters messages, walls, and feeds.

Source: Ars Technica

Google CEO Larry Page gave a statistic that surprised many people during last week’s quarterly earnings call. He stated that Google+ now has 90 million users, which is double what it had three months ago. But going even further, he claimed that 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.
 
After being analyzed, it was noted that these users aren’t necessarily engaging with Google+, but any Google service when signed in to their Google+ account. They could just have went to Google.com to use Google Search and have gotten included in the engaging users. Facebook currently has 800 million active users, and 50 percent of them log in each day. Google+ isn’t revealing that kind of information and has stated many times that that type of information doesn’t matter.
 
“If you try to create a Google account from Google’s homepage, you’ll notice that Google redesigned the page, but that’s not all. You’ll now have to create a Gmail account, a Google Profile and you’ll automatically join Google+,” the Google Operating System blog states. “Until now, creating a Google account was quite simple. You could either use an existing e-mail address or create a Gmail account. The redesigned form includes new fields: name, gender (required for Google+) and mobile phone number (not required).”
 
The only exception to this statement is that a Google+ account is not automatically created for users who are under 18 years of age. Otherwise, that is definitely the truth.
 
We understand that Google+ is a lot newer than Facebook so it isn’t quite ready to be a competitor for the popularity of social networking. However, Google’s method for expanding membership captures a large number of “users” who barely ever visit the site. Facebook accounts are only created when the person tries to do so. Google has also had a past reputation of presenting statistics about Google+ usage in a misleading way during its quarterly earnings calls.
 
All in all, Google+ is a great platform which seems to attract more tech-savvy professionals than not. It would be interesting to see the real statistics instead of Google’s misguided ones, but I’m afraid that will likely not happen for quite some time.
 

Ambassador Conversation via MSN Messenger

I’m very excited to say that I have been accepted to the Xbox Ambassador team. While I cannot call myself a direct employee of Microsoft and am not to advertise as such, I am officially volunteering my time for Xbox and Xbox Live. Above isn’t the best image in the world, so feel free to click on the image and it will expand.

As of now, what I do is take questions via MSN Messenger, though the user doesn’t know that I’m on the messenger. I can hit “y” to accept a question or “n” to deny it and let someone else take it who might be able to help more. I’ve taken quite a few and found myself getting along with the users great, so perhaps I have a future in this, I’m not sure.

To be accepted, the Xbox Live Enforcement team basically ran a background check on me and liked how I play and what I do. As of now I am an Xbox Ambassador, but hopefully I can work my way up to the XBLPET (Xbox Live Protection and Enforcement Team). I love helping people and being able to do so on the Xbox 360 is just perfect for me. I love the interactions I’ve had and haven’t had to let anyone go yet without solving their issue. I just have a knack for knowing what I’m doing, I guess.

If you have any questions about this position, me, or whatever else, feel free to comment here or message me on Xbox Live at TylerW507.

 
“We’re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it.”
 
reddit community members have been using /r/sopa to organize, posting custom signs, various pieces of Internet anti-SOPA artwork, such as the image at the top targeting SOPA backer Representative Lamar Smith, and suggestions for making their collective voice be heard around the world. One of the bigger ideas that I’ve seen included trying to convince Google to join the blackout, which more than likely won’t happen, but it sure would be powerful.
 
Source: Ars Technica

A former US Marine born in Flagstaff, Arizona has 20 days to appeal the verdict of being sentenced to death or the decision will be final. The Iranian-American citizen, Amir Mizra Hekmati, was arrested for and convicted of espionage on a trip to visit family in Iran last August. His family has hired a lawyer with quite a bit of experience in negotiating with the government of Iran, and he is currently attempting to meet with Iranian officials.

Why was he charged with espionage? Hemkati developed a video game critical of Iran. He is accused of developing games to influence public opinion on US operations in the Middle East, and specifically Iran. Hekmati was a developer for Kuma Games, which has released a number of free, war-themed first-person shooters including Kuma/War, which features both real-world and plausibly fictional scenarios.

In one of the missions in the game, called “Assault on Iran,” the player infiltrates an Iranian nuclear facility in order to find proof that Iran is producing nuclear weapons. Other episodes include “The Fall of Sirte,” where players engage in the battle that culminated Gaddafi’s death, as well as “The Death of Osama Bin Laden.”

“After (working for DARPA), I went to Kuma (Games Company),” the confession read in part. “This computer company was receiving money from the CIA to (produce) and design and distribute for free special movies and games with the aim of manipulating public opinion in the Middle East. The goal of the company in question was to convince the people of Iran and the people of the entire world that whatever the U.S. does in other countries is a good measure.”

“The Iranian authorities are denying that Amir is a United States citizen, despite the fact he was born in Flagstaff, Arizona,” Hekmati’s parents said in a statement released yesterday. “Amir did not engage in any acts of spying, or ‘fighting against God,’ as the convicting judge has claimed in his sentence. Amir is not a criminal. His very life is being exploited for political gain.”

Hekmati’s lawyer is Pierre Prosper, who previously served as ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues under the Bush administration. Hekmati’s trial took place a few months after the initial arrest, lasted half a day, and a verdict of death was handed down just a few weeks later. ”We also are troubled by the fact there’s been no transparency,” he told CNN, “so it is really hard to see what happened.”

The US State Department has denied that Hekmati was a CIA spy and has urged the Iranian government to release him “without delay.”

Source: Ars Technica

A flaw has been found in WiFi Protected Setup that indicates that most home and small business routers could be giving away free WiFi.

On December 27th, the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (what a mouthful, or handful if you’re typing ) issued a warning about a vulnerability. This vulnerability was in wireless routers that use WPS, or WiFi Protected Setup, to allow new devices to be connected to them. Researchers at a Maryland-based computer security firm developed a tool that exploits that vulnerability just a day after the warning was issued, and went so far as to make a version available as open source.

WPS is designed for home and small business users of wireless networking so that they have the ability to easily configure devices without having to enter a long password. Basically, the process of authorization is done automatically as to save time. A lot of times, WPS-capable routers will use a personal identification number, which is printed on the router, to authenticate the device.

However, Stefan Veihbock, a security researcher, found out that the PIN implementation is susceptible to “brute-force” attacks because of the way routers respond to bad requests and the nature of the PIN itself. Saving you the trouble of exactly how it works, an attacker can get a PIN number within 11,000 guesses, and when done with a tool that does this “guessing” process over and over by itself, it becomes maybe an hour’s work. Veihbock demonstrated the vulnerability with a proof-of-concept tool he wrote in Python, available for download from his site.

Why is that bad? Well, if you have a WPS-enabled router, changing the password or service set identifier (SSID) won’t keep these attackers out, since they are already connected and can connect via your PIN, which cannot be changed. Hell, if you’re using multiple SSIDs with different passwords, the PIN can provide access to all of them.

The routers most vulnerable to these attacks—the ones without PIN features that stop the user after a number of bad requests, a.k.a. PIN Lockout features—include products from Cisco’s Linksys division, Belkin, Buffalo, Netgear, TP-Link, ZyXEL, and Technicolor. None of the vendors has issued a statement on the vulnerability, or replied to inquiries from Veihbock.

Source: Ars Technica