Cody Taylor

narramissic writes “A report released Friday by a group of cyber-security experts from greylogic finds it is very likely that the Foreign Military Intelligence agency (the GRU) and Federal Security Service (the FSB) directed cyber attacks on Georgian government servers in July and August of 2008. ‘Following a complex web of connections, the report claims that an Internet service provider connected with the Stopgeorgia.ru web site, which coordinated the Georgian attacks, is located next door to a Russian Ministry of Defense Research Institute called the Center for Research of Military Strength of Foreign Countries, and a few doors down from GRU headquarters.’ But Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro who has reviewed the report, says it’s a ‘bit of a stretch’ to conclude that the Georgia attacks were state-sponsored. ‘You can connect dots to infer things, but inferring things does not make them so,’ he said. One other interesting allegation in the report is that a member of the Whackerz Pakistan hacking group, which claimed responsibility for defacing the Indian Eastern Railway Web site on Dec. 24, 2008, is employed by a North American wireless communications company and presents an ‘insider threat’ for his employer.”

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Douglas Bowman, Google’s visual design leader, is leaving the company after finding the company’s reliance on detailed Web page performance data too confining.

darthcamaro writes “For nearly three years, Oracle has had its own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, claiming the two versions are essentially the same thing. But are they really? As it turns out, there are a few things on which Oracle and Red Hat do not see eye-to-eye, including file systems and virtualization. The article quotes Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s director of Linux engineering, saying, ‘A lot of people think Oracle is doing Enterprise Linux as just basically a rip off of Red Hat but that’s not what this is about. … This is about a support program, and wanting to offer quality Linux OS support to customers that need it. The Linux distribution part is there just to make sure people can get a freely available Linux operating system that is fully supported.'”

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Ian Lamont writes “As the Tiffany vs. eBay lawsuit winds its way through a federal appeals court, eBay has trotted out some numbers that show how many sellers attempt to sell fake goods on the auction site. Millions of auctions were delisted last year, and tens of thousands of accounts were suspended after reports were made to eBay’s Verified Rights Owner program, which lets trademark owners notify eBay of fake goods being sold on the site. eBay says 100% of reported listings were removed from the site last year, most within 12 hours, and the company uses sellers’ background information to make sure that they don’t create new accounts to sell delisted items. Tiffany brought the suit against eBay in 2004, alleging that eBay was turning a blind eye to counterfeit luxury goods and demanding that eBay police its listings for bogus goods. Tiffany lost the case last July and will shortly present its arguments to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. A similar case in France cost eBay million.”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The Free Software Foundation has requested permission to file an amicus curiae brief in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, defending the defendant’s Due Process defense to the RIAA’s claim for statutory damages. In the brief [PDF], FSF cites some of the leading authorities for the defense, including the 2003 decision of the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Parker v. Time Warner, which held that excessive statutory damages are subject to the same due process test applicable to punitive damage awards by juries. Additionally, the brief cites three district court decisions, including UMG v. Lindor, and two law review articles — all of which deal specifically with Copyright Act statutory damages applicable to infringement of an MP3 file — to like effect.”

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After all of the uproar surrounding some of the Obama administration’s recent decisions, trade officials have promised a thorough review of the USTR policies regarding transparency. In an effort to ensure that the review includes all possible angles, the USTR is urging groups to make other proposals as well. “KEI is very impressed with the USTR decision to undertake a review of USTR transparency efforts. They are taking this much further than simply reviewing policies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or recent controversies over the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. The review offers the possibility of more transformative changes, including pro-active measures to enhance transparency, covering all aspects of USTR operations, including multilateral, plurilateral, regional, bilateral and unilateral trade policies and negotiations. We are also grateful that USTR is offering to have a continuing dialogue on this issues. KEI will offer additional suggestions on transparency to USTR, and we encourage others to do so also.”

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Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. “The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can’t keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It’s more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.”

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meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. “The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? ‘It’s a huge can of worms,” said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. ‘I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'”

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alevy writes to mention that scientists at Fermilab have detected a new, completely untheorized particle. Seems like Fermi has been a hotbed of activity lately with the discovery of a new single top quark and narrowing the gap twice on the Higgs Boson particle. “The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab’s Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. ‘We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,’ said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. ‘This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'”

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Tom’s Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo’s all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech’s flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie’s state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5″ drives. LaCie’s drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the 0 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

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