Новости за 21.10.2016

A few weeks back, we wrote about the arrest of Harold Martin, an NSA contractor working at Booz Allen, for apparently taking "highly classified information" from the NSA and storing it electronically and physically in his home. There were a lot of questions about whether or not Martin was connected to the Shadow Brokers release of NSA hacking tools, though as more info comes out, it sounds like perhaps Martin was just found because of an investigation into Shadow Brokers, but not because he was connected to them. Читать дальше...

Welp, it looks like another bad day for Team Prenda. The law firm that went around uploading its own porn films and then shaking down people on the internet has had a bad few years in terms of courts blasting them for abusing the court system and ordering them to pay up for all sorts of awful things. Every few weeks it seems like we read about another loss for John Steele and Paul Hansmeier (the third "partner" in this mess, Paul Duffy, passed away). The latest is not only a pretty big hit, it's also a complete "own goal" by Team Prenda. Читать дальше...

Last month, we wrote about Bruce Schneier's warning that certain unknown parties were carefully testing ways to take down the internet. They were doing carefully configured DDoS attacks, testing core internet infrastructure, focusing on key DNS servers. And, of course, we've also been talking about the rise of truly massive DDoS attacks, thanks to poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and ancient, unpatched bugs.

That all came to a head this morning when large chunks of the internet went down for about two hours... Читать дальше...

Clean up your work space with the $38 Spacebar Monitor Stand and 6-Port USB Hub. There are our USB 3.0 ports for high-speed syncing and two high-power USB charging ports to juice up your gadgets in a flash. Elevate your monitor and slide whatever you don't need at the moment under the stand to help declutter and organize your stuff.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured... Читать дальше...

See the update at the end...

Actor James Woods is an asshole. Let's just put that front and center. As you may recall, a little over a year ago, Woods sued a random Twitter user who went by the pseudonym "Abe List." "List" frequently mocked Woods, including calling him "clown-boy" and a "cocaine addict." Woods then sued for defamation, demanding $10 million, and tried to unmask List. This was ridiculous for any number of reasons, not the least of which is calling much more attention to what... Читать дальше...

And it's time for yet another story of copyright being used for out and out censorship. Remember Geofeedia? That's the creepy company that was selling its services to law enforcement agencies and school districts promising to spy on social media feeds to let law enforcement/schools know when people are planning bad stuff. After a big ACLU investigative report, basically all the major social media companies cut ties with Geofeedia, claiming that it was violating their terms of service. I'd imagine... Читать дальше...

AT&T stopped selling unlimited wireless data plans back in 2011, and instead started pushing more expensive capped and metered plans. Existing unlimited users at the time were "grandfathered," but AT&T went out of its way to make life as unpleasant as possible for these users, ranging from blocking them from using Facetime unless they subscribed to metered plans, to throttling these "unlimited" users after only consuming a few gigabytes of data. Ultimately AT&T faced a $100 million fine... Читать дальше...

FBI Director James Comey didn't dig into his bag of "Ferguson Effect" rhetorical devices during his comments to a law enforcement conference on Sunday, but he came close. Under that theory, the possibility of being held accountable by citizens and their recording devices has apparently been holding officers back from enforcing laws, making arrests, or otherwise earning their paychecks.

Techdirt has written a number of articles tracking how China is moving beyond its traditional counterfeit imitation culture to one of collaborative innovation, as exemplified by "gongkai". An article on the Quartz site provides a useful update on this world, concentrating on developments in Shenzhen, generally regarded as China's hardware equivalent of Silicon Valley. Things have now progressed from simply copying top-selling products, to spotting future winners on the Web: Thanks to the internet... Читать дальше...

Going back nearly a decade, we've been talking about the ridiculousness of Congress refusing to publicly release reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). As we've discussed many times, CRS is an in-house think tank for Congress that is both famously non-partisan and actually really good at what they do. CRS reports tend to be really useful and highly credible (which is part of the reason why Congress isn't a fan of letting them out into the public). Of course, as works of the federal government... Читать дальше...

The CIA is still causing problems for Jeffrey Scudder. Scudder used to work for the CIA. He was forced out of the agency after making a FOIA request for "historical documents of long-dormant conflicts and operations" while still employed there. Perhaps the agency thought only citizens outside of the agency should be making FOIA requests. Or maybe it thought Scudder was engaged in a particularly labyrinthine plot to exfiltrate declassified documents out of the agency. Whatever its thought process... Читать дальше...