Google wins landmark copyright case

Posted on June 24th, 2010 by Jason Caminiti

This could all still pan out, and go in any direction, but for now it is a big win.  A big win not only for google, but for all Service Providers.  It would be cost prohibitive, if not impossible, to police copyright on your systems.Sure, Google’s YouTube allows people to upload copy written content.  However, if Google is liable for copy right infringement, to me, it means that even email companies could be held liable.This reminds me of what someone told me early on in the dotcom days.  ”The Internet is one big copy machine, and there is nothing you can do to control it.”http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20008636-261.html?tag=nl.e703

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Another one bites the dust…

Posted on March 26th, 2010 by Jason Caminiti

T.J. Maxx Hacker Sentenced to 20 years in prisonhttp://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001207-38.html?tag=nl.e703

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Filed under: News

US Electrical Grid Compromised!

Posted on April 8th, 2009 by Jason Caminiti

According to a report the United States Electrical Grid is being compromised by Russian, and Chinese attackers. 

This leads me to ask two questions.

1.  Why is our electrical grid on the internet?

This question is ridiculous that I have to ask it.  But at the very least if you are going to put the computers that run the electrical grid online, you could put some security in place. 

 2.  Why do we STILL not have a national firewall? 

I’ve been harping on this since I started this blog.  Why don’t we have a national firewall?  We should be severely restricting access to our US based networks from other countries.  This makes sense for a number of reasons.  First we’d kill most spam outright.  But more importantly, we would keep attackers from breaking into computers in the US.  The estimates vary, but probably a large number of servers and home computers are compromised as part of large botnets.  Some of these are being run from countries around the world.  Then we read of things like this, where our electrical grid is compromised?!  We should be blocking a lot of the traffic coming from overseas.

 You would think by now we’d be moving away from the internet’s wild west period….

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Filed under: News, Computing, Security

Fair Use and the democratization of media

Posted on August 21st, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

Here is an interesting judgment regarding fair use. 

 There is a continuum of legality for copyright.  Somewhere along the continuum is the ability to use something in a work that you make.  For instance, a 30 second youtube video with a baby dancing to a Prince song.  Somewhere along the line is outright copyright infringement.  For instance, posting an entire Prince song on Youtube, with original video.

 Somewhere in the middle lies Youtube content.  I don’t know which way this whole thing will go.  I just hope that we don’t lose more freedoms than we already have.  I can’t tell you how many older people than I have told me how many freedoms we no longer have compared to them. 

 I think the digital revolution could be the best thing yet for democracy.  It allows people to communicate directly without having to incur a large cost.  This democratization is happening all over digital media.  From blogs, where you can post a news story within seconds of it happening, and within minutes it can be linked to and copied all over the world.  To the democratization of digital video.  This allowed me recently to film, direct, edit and produce my own Documentary Pawtucket Rising.   As I get closer to the release, I will post more about my documentary.  But, this is such a great time to be alive.  So much is changing so fast.  It must be what it felt like to live in the 60s. 

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Filed under: News, Computing, Tech Law

Spammer goes to jail

Posted on July 16th, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

In more good news on the spam front, a spammer from New York goes to jail for spamming to AOL.  He was order to pay 180k to AOL in restitution.  I don’t see that as a good enough amount, but at least he gets 30 months in the slammer.  Maybe this will make spammers think twice about their line of work. 

 Based on other information we’ve seen about spam recently, I wonder how much money he was making on spam.  I wonder if the IRS will be looking into his finances.  It seems low to only charge him 180k for his crimes.  What about all the money he must have made on this scheme?  Unless  he wasn’t very good I guess.

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Filed under: Spam, Computing

If you only install one patch this year…

Posted on July 9th, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

I don’t ordinarilly send out these types of things.  (Goes the mantra from your friends who always send you junk.)  It is true, I try not to be reactionary and alarmist.  I try not to rile people up with bug fixes they need to install NOW.  Most bug fixes can wait.  They tend to not be that important.  But, this one is big, or at least it appears to be from what I can tell from www.doxpara.com.

Recently some of the top names of the industry have come together to work on fixing a bug in DNS.  A bug that has apparently been there for a very long time.  It affects many dns systems across many platforms.  Translation:  It is huge.  The amazing part is that it was found quietly by a security researcher.  All of the biggest names in DNS including Microsoft, Cisco, Nominum, Neustar and OpenDNS got together to simultaneously release a bug fix for their platforms.  There is now a patch for all the major dns systems.  If you are using Bind8 upgrade, otherwise get to patching your systems asap.  It doesn’t appear to be only isolated to the dns servers, they want everyone to patch their pc’s as well.

Basically what the vulnerability will do is allow what is called DNS Cache poisoning, but on a grander scale than which we are accustomed.  It will allow an attacker to change the location you go to when you type in a domain name.  So for instance if you type in blog.logicalorderofchaos.com you will be sent to somewhere the hacker (known as a Phisher) sends you.  This has been used to trick unsuspecting users into giving up their credit card information, and social security numbers.  Imagine if it weren’t some tech guy’s blog, but instead was bankofAmerica.com.  You can see where this could be a problem. 

Phishing happens all the time, but usually newer browsers can tell if it is a trick or not based on the way the url is formed or domain or IP reputation, and can stop you from going there without warning.  However, this will actually allow the attacker to change the location you actually go to, when navigating to a trusted domain.  This is bad because many sites use multiple IPs for one domain Even if they have a static IP it isn’t easy to find out what it is supposed to be once the dns is poisoned.

 The short of this is, patch your system.  Patch your system now, today, before the end of the month.  You have to do it, because this could be potentially really really bad.  End of the world kind of bad, so bad in fact that…

Ok there, I was alarmist.  But for good reason.  So get to it, now!

There is a voluntary ban on speculation as to what exactly the issue is, since they don’t want the bad guys to figure it out before the good guys get to patching their systems.  I will follow up on this in a month or two when we have more information.

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Filed under: Linux, Maintenance, Web, News, General, Computing, Security

So long, and thanks for all the bugs…

Posted on July 1st, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

XP is finally leaving us.  It has been end of lifed by Microsoft.  They wanted to put a spike through its head the day Vista came out.  But, the business world wasn’t having it.  To be honest, Vista is still considered junk by businesses.  Maybe it has something to do with mission critical programs not working on it.  It does seem to have less bugs than XP did.  How soon we forget, that XP almost took the internet down with its vulnerabilities to worms like Zotob previous to Service Pack 2.  That being said, XP has become known as a pretty solid operating system after SP2.  At home, I do run Vista, but at work I’ll be running it, probably for years.  I go by the mantra, if it ain’t broke.. don’t fix it.  Why bother trying to upgrade when I don’t need the bells and whistles of XP. 

For now though, So long, and thanks for all the bugs…

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Filed under: News, Computing

Why do I get all this spam?

Posted on June 17th, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

If you have ever wondered why you get so much spam, this article will take that question away.

“Our research has revealed a smoking gun that shows that Storm and other botnet spam generates commissionable orders, which are then fulfilled by the supply chains, generating revenue in excess of $150 million per year.”

 That’s Million.  With an M.  It is a lot of money, and that is why you get spam. 

This report links canadian drug sales, or probably placebos, with the Storm virus.  These groups capture large amounts of computers running on desktops all over the country, and use them as BotNets.  This allows them to send out emails from several different locations at once, or at different times.  So, blocking specific IP addresses is useless. 

 One would have thought this would have been fixed with XP SP2.  However, it appears botnets will be with us for a while.  As long as you make it lucrative for someone to send spam, you will get spam. 

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Filed under: Spam, Computing, Security

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY IE7!?!?!?!

Posted on May 7th, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

So, I’ve been having all sorts of problems with windows and Internet Explorer lately. 

Vista would freeze when I was in the middle of anything intensive.  XP IE7 was freezing whenever I tried to type something into the address bar.  It would intermittently freeze when I was switching between windows.  Someone had me look at their PC and whenever he was using a particular component it would close his IE browser window when he moved his mouse.

 These issues have been plaguing me for a while.  What gives?  Ok, addmittedly, I installed some of them testing things out.  But some of them like Skype add-on, I didn’t want.  I wasn’t even aware that when I installed Skype it was adding this component to IE7.  IE7 has add-ons.  It seems they pretty much add these add-ons whenever you go to a site, or install a program on your computer.  I finally decided to go in and disable all add-ons to see if that was the culprit.  This fixed both the IE7 on mouse moves problem, and my address bar and intermittent freezes.  Right now, I only have Flash installed, because you really can’t get away without that on the web.  IE7 runs as smoothly as the day I installed it.  Whatever that means.  But it did clear up my issues, and it runs great now.

 Disable IE7 Add-Ons:

Open IE7
Tools->Manage Add-Ons->Enable or Disable Add-Ons

Make sure you have Add-ons currently loaded in Internet Explorer selected

Then start disabling each of them individually.  You can turn them on as you find you need them for the work you do.  Otherwise, you should probably run as little as necessary to get your job done.  I find this is what causes most computer problems.  Too much junk running that you don’t need.  I guess Multi-Tasking has its downsides too.

As for the Vista freezing issue.  This one was much more annoying to me.  I was trying to work on video editing, and every time I would move the position the whole computer would freeze up.  Everything.  Then it would get jerky for a bit, then freeze up.  Sometimes I had to reboot using the power button.   Not a good way to run your computer.   Finally, what I did was break the problem down.  I ran msconfig and turned off all of the garbage running in the startup.  There is a lot of junk that gets loaded onto your system as you go.  Same as the Add-Ons, there is a lot you probably don’t even want.  After doing this, I found that nVidia drivers were the culprit.  They were causing this whole issue for me.  I turned those off, and anything else I didn’t want, and my Vista was running happy as it was intended to be.

 Shut off startup programs:

Start->Command  (or Start->run-> cmd (ok))
msconfig

Go to the startup tab, and disable everything.  You can boot your machine nice and clean without this garbage in there.  But, make sure you take the time to look through to ensure that you don’t need any of it at boot time. 

In conclusion, I’m getting a bit tired of all the cleanup activities I need to do in order to run my computer.  Your computer should do what you want, when you want.  It should not be running tasks that you don’t need.  It is a difficult question as to what should and shouldn’t be running.  However, I think every company that makes a program thinks they are important enough to run in the background.  I’d rather have a few seconds longer to start up, than have 100 quickstarts running.  But that’s just me. 

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Filed under: Maintenance, Web, Computing

Microsoft admits to annoying users

Posted on April 11th, 2008 by Jason Caminiti

http://www.news.com/Microsoft-Vista-feature-designed-to-annoy-users/2100-1016_3-6237191.html?tag=html.alert.hed

Yeah.. that’s about right…

Cross claimed it is a myth that users just turn UAC off, saying that Microsoft had collected opt-in information from users that showed that 88 percent were running UAC. Cross said it was also a myth that users blindly accept prompts without reading them.

“It’s a myth that users click ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’” said Cross. “Seven percent of all prompts are canceled. Users are not just saying ‘yes.’”

I have to admit, I mostly just say yes.  Usually, it is when I am trying to do something that it pops up anyhow.  If I come back to my computer in the morning, and something asked me to allow it to do something…  Chances are, it isn’t something I want.  So I tell it no.  Though, I think that is just some update service running in the middle of the night.  But still, I don’t kno what it is, so I kill it.

 From what I understand, the UAC makes it so that you really cannot hit that button unless you are an allowed user.  That’s a good thing.  You have to be sitting there logged in to do it, and it is difficult, if not impossible to get around.

 I think the anecdotal evidence is in by now.  Vista is probably the most secure Operating System Microsoft has produced.  However, it isn’t very useful.  For business anyhow.  I love it at home, but it runs into enough problems that it probably isn’t worth it for business just yet.

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Filed under: General

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