Congress is about to consider an entertainment industry proposal that would authorize copyright holders to
disable PCs used for illicit file trading. "The measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place."
posted by mathowie
on Jul 23, 2002 -
40 comments
Western Union's site is down, as
hackers have accessed their "secure" database. Western Union's only suggestion so far is to tell all customers to cancel their credit card accounts. Is anything
really secure on the internet? Do you trust amazon to hold your credit card numbers, Wells Fargo to keep your checking account private, and Kozmo employees not to pilfer your credit card numbers for fun?
posted by mathowie
on Sep 10, 2000 -
8 comments
Last night
Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is
quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
1 comment
If you had problems reaching MetaFilter over the weekend,
this is why. Some script kiddies launched some gnarly smurf attacks against the regional ISP that provides bandwidth for this site. Oh well, it gave me time to code. I've added lots of little enhancements (like user pages, a working search engine), but still have to get the archives working and expand the preferences page.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 19, 2000 -
0 comments
So the DVD copy protection was cracked, and it's interesting to hear the comments from the industry. The DVD Forum's release makes the hackers sound awful. The DVD folks feel like they've been ripped off. Can't these motion picture and DVD industry folks see this as a good thing? A couple hackers decrypted what was supposed to be a secure format and they're horrified? They should be horrified at the idiots that created the weak 'protection' in the first place. These hackers just did the industry a great service. They found a gaping security hole before good recordable DVDs ever came out! I'm surprised hackers are vilified instead of being offered lucrative positions as security experts.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 3, 1999 -
0 comments
