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GamesPosts Tagged: ‘hackers’
This morning, I read an Associated Press report about hackers associated with the group Anonymous posting information about current and retired police chiefs in West Virginia. According to the report, the hackers released this information in response to cases of police brutality. They also posted a message saying that police chiefs are victimizing the people who pay their “exorbitant salaries.”
What a night. Nothing really illustrates the power of the Internet like a massive, semi-coordinated series of attacks on dozens of Web sites over the course of a few hours. That’s what’s going on as I write this blog post and it all stems from seven people targeted by the Department of Justice and the FBI. Those seven people were named in an indictment that charges them with crimes ranging from copyright violation to money laundering. According to CNET, if found guilty they could receive a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Wow, it’s true. If you type a word often enough, it starts to lose its meaning. But before I start to use the word hack as a koan in a meditation session, I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick news roundup of some hacking stories. Not all hacks are created equal the use of the words hack, hackers and hacking can sometimes be misleading.
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many news roundups of what’s going on in the tech world today. Below are some of the interesting stories developing in technology, accompanied by a little unbiased, objective and mature commentary from yours truly. Let’s get to it!
I read over at NPR that Sony is facing a $3.2 billion-dollar loss this year. That’s bad news for the company, which had projected to climb out of a recent series of losses to return to profitability. And there are two big reasons why Sony won’t be seeing profits this year. One is due to the tsunami that hit Japan. The other is the recent attacks on the PlayStation Network (PSN). Together, these events cost the company billions of dollars.
PlayStation owners will have to wait a while longer before regaining access to the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. According to an official blog post on the PlayStation blog, the company began internal testing of the network last week. But until Sony is satisfied that the new security measures are working properly, the company won’t restore partial network service to the public. And Bloomberg reports that Sony executives are assuring users that full service to the network will return by May 31st. A blog post from April 27th said that Sony hoped to restore service within a week. But that was before Sony was fully aware of the extent of the security breach.
This video (once you get past the introduction) is fascinating. A high-level hacker named Samy Kamkar takes you through his thinking, and his techniques, for breaking the 160-bit session cookie used on Facebook. He calls it the “discovery and execution of entirely new web classes of attacks.” This allows him to impersonate someone else on [...]
While controversy and allegations swirl around Julian Assange and Wikileaks, virtual warriors either siding with Wikileaks or opposing it are squaring off with their armies of infected computers around the world. They wage war against targets they’ve identified as possessing a conflicting philosophy from their own. Some people call such actions hactivism — using hacking tactics to push forward a particular agenda. Others just call it cyberwar.
On November 29, 2010, Microsoft announced it had sold 2.5 million units of its Kinect control system for the Xbox 360 within the first 25 days of the peripheral hitting the market. The device is selling well despite the reports that you need a large room with sufficient lighting to take advantage of the Kinect controller. Compared to the overall Xbox 360 video game library, there are only a few titles that take advantage of the Kinect’s capabilities. But that hasn’t stopped some enterprising hackers from tweaking the Kinect.
Secrets, Leaks and Denials of Service – The WikiLeaks Problem
by Jonathan Strickland | November 29, 2010
Writer Stewart Brand coined the phrase “information wants to be free.” Since he uttered those words more than 25 years ago, people have interpreted them in different ways. One way is to say that we’re living in a world in which it’s getting difficult to keep secrets. Whether it’s your personal information on Facebook or classified government information, data finds a way to creep out into the public.
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