Surveillance

215 results arranged by date

Protecting journalists from Firesheep

There’s been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby…

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Internet blotter

Computers belonging to South Korean government officials have been infiltrated by targeted malware in email. Chinese hackers are suspected. Contrary to what this article says, I’m betting that the attachments were PDFs, which are currently the document of choice when attempting to infect journalists’ machines. Another intriguing academic paper, this time on the structure of…

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Petition highlights Nokia sales to Iran

Access, a global Internet freedom advocacy group, has launched a “No To Nokia” petition as part of a campaign supporting Iranian journalist Issa Saharkiz’s lawsuit against Nokia Siemens. The Saharkiz lawsuit claims that Nokia Siemen’s sales of mobile tracking technology to Iran was instrumental in allowing the Iranian government to locate the journalist when he…

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NYT: On the UK phone-hacking scandal

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the…

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More on certificate authority proliferation

Cryptographer Bruce Schneier linked to my Slate piece on rogue certificate authorities (CAs), which could allow governments like the UAE to monitor even the supposedly secure communications of journalists and others. The smart comments include a link to this fascinating discussion at Mozilla that shows the procedures that browser-makers use when deciding which certificates to…

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