Here’s a trailer for an unusual movie called “Lock-Out,” about a prison revolt in space and, of course, the need to rescue the daughter of the President of the United States.

It’s full of all kinds of special effects, naturally.

Enjoy:

AllThingsD.com

Yet now that the attacks have subsided, it’s time to see them for what they are: Nothing more than a blunt instrument that accomplishes nothing constructive.

As of today, only one of the Web sites attacked by the hacker troupe Anonymous is still apparently affected, and that belongs to the Universal Music Group recording label. It currently displays only a message saying “The Site is under maintenance. Please expect it to be back shortly.” Others that had been attacked yesterday, including the sites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America all seemed to be operating normally.

Thursday’s attacks, which have been described as the biggest action yet organized by Anonymous, were launched in apparent revenge for the FBI’s arrest of several people associated with the file-sharing site Megaupload.com over suspicions of online piracy. Taking place against the backdrop of a wider, more civil protest against anti-piracy legislation currently before the U.S. Congress, the atmosphere around the attacks has been politically charged.

As Molly Wood of CNET put it, the #OpMegaUpload attacks — coming as they did on the heels of Wednesday’s peaceful anti-SOPA protest — seem like an “unsettling wave of car-burning hooligans that sweep in and incite the riot portion of the play,” spurring equally unsettling reactions from the powers that be.

Many outlets have portrayed the attacks as “hacks,” implying that someone had picked a lock in order to commit some kind of sabotage. But the tactic used — a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — is more aptly compared to a blunt instrument, requiring neither skill nor knowledge, only large numbers of willing participants who team up to swarm a site with more requests than it can accommodate and thus overwhelm its ability to function normally.

The adjective “willing” is debatable, and perhaps inaccurate. Anonymous was able to generate such impressive numbers with the operation — it claimed more than 5,000 participants — by spamming a link in chat rooms and via Twitter that, when clicked, triggered a tool used to launch the attack. People tricked into following the link are given no context or information, and so may or may not have any idea that they’re participating in the execution of a crime.

For the record, it is illegal in the U.S., the U.K., Sweden and other countries to launch and participate in a DDoS attack like the one Anonymous organized. As anyone who has observed the evolution of Anonymous (and its various affiliates using the names LulzSec and AntiSec) should know, the FBI arrested 16 people last July, many of them charged with participating in a DDoS attack against PayPal in protest of its shutting down an account used by WikiLeaks.

In 2009, a New Jersey man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for launching a DDoS attack against the Church of Scientology. And in 2010, a 23-year-old Ohio man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for launching DDoS attacks against several prominent U.S. conservatives, including the author Ann Coulter, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly.

Records like that suggest to me that DDoS attacks never accomplish anything that the people who organize and carry them out attempt to do. At most, they inconvenience the people who visit and operate the targeted sites for a few hours, until the attention spans of the attackers shift elsewhere. They also generate headlines that are forgotten by nearly everyone except the targets, and sometimes law enforcement.

And so it will be this time. Mark your calendars, because the Megaupload revenge attacks will spur a series of arrests later this year. Some of those arrested will be people who didn’t know they were committing a crime. And that certainly won’t help Anonymous’ image. Nor will it further a single bit of what passes for the Anonymous agenda.

Prison inmates have been using their Facebook accounts, often via contraband cellphones, to threaten their victims and harass others, says the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

In one instance, a child molester who had been in prison for seven years sketched pictures of his then-17-year-old victim based on her current Myspace and Facebook pages and sent them to her family.

Other inmates are simply updating their status messages while incarcerated — as in the pictured Facebook profile above, where an inmate talks about running and playing handball in the prison yard. In order to post updates, it appears he was using a cellphone, which inmates are not allowed to have, but often do. The CDCR said 7,284 cellphones were confiscated in the first half of 2011, compared to 261 in all of 2006.

CDCR’s solution is to engage Facebook’s security team to remove any accounts set up or monitored on behalf of inmates while they’re incarcerated. It put out a press release this week saying Facebook had agreed to do so and encouraging citizens to report state inmates’ Facebook accounts.

That wouldn’t necessarily stop inmates from illicitly viewing Facebook, as in the case above, but it might stop them from actively participating.

Facebook told the Sacramento Bee it makes a practice of cooperating with law enforcement requests, though the CDCR said that prior to this pact it has only been able to get Facebook to take down a single account.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

I’ve never logged onto Facebook before but I hear it’s nice. In terms of e-mail, Facebook has it built in.

Former “spam king” Robert Soloway, who has spent the last three years and eight months away from his computer while serving a federal prison sentence. Soloway, who was released last week, sent out 10 trillion emails during a 10-year spam career. Probation officers will monitor his computer use for the next three years.

Responding to a petition posted on the Web site for Number 10 Downing Street, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown late Thursday apologized for what he characterized as the “appalling” treatment of Turing 55 years earlier by British officials. Turing, who was gay, was convicted in 1952 of gross indecency and given two choices, prison or “chemical castration” by a series of injections of female hormones. Two years after choosing the latter punishment, he committed suicide.

Turing had helped lead the team of British codebreakers at Bletchley Park whose work gave the Allies crucial advantages against German forces during the war, and formed a basis for later generations of computers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But for now, things don’t look so good. His fall is about to begin. On Monday, the Tenth Circuit denied his request for bail pending the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to take up his case. Barring an eleventh-hour reprieve Tuesday morning from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who oversees the Tenth Circuit, Nacchio will report to prison later today.

Read the rest of this post

THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this … ever got to the FBI I was f–ked.”

– Excerpt from a message posted to 4chan.org by someone claiming to have hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account

Five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release. That’s the maximum sentence facing the Tennessee college student who was indicted today on charges that he broke into Gov. Sarah Palin’s private email account last month. According to a statement from the FBI, David C. Kernell–an economics major at the University of Tennessee and the son of Tennessee state legislator Mike Kernell–was indicted by a federal grand jury for “gaining unlawful access to stored communications and obtaining information from a protected computer via interstate communication,” or as the McCain campaign described it, “a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of the law.”

Kernell entered the not guilty plea at the hearing and was released on bond with the following conditions:

• He may not leave the Eastern District of Tennessee without court permission.
• He may not possess a computer.
• He may use the Internet for classwork only.
• He may not have any contact with Gov. Sarah Palin or her family.

A trial date has been set for Dec. 16.

Kumar alleges they were all aware of the infamous “35-day month” ploy for which he and eight other former CA (CA) officials took the fall. “Wang was not only aware of the accounting improprieties, such as the 35-Day Month, he also actively participated in concealing those improper accounting practices. … Wang knew that CA’s quarters were ‘open’ for five days into the next month per his directive, and he sometimes instructed CA to keep CA’s books ‘open’ after the usual ‘five days’ to execute license agreements and recognize revenue from those agreements in the previously ended quarters.”

Damning allegations and ones Wang, D’Amato, et al., vigorously deny.
Said a spokesman for Ranieri and D’Amato: “[Kumar] from jail continues to be a stranger to the truth.”

So if not Facebook, then who? Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders suspects Mourtada’s ISP, Maroc Telecom. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”

So if not Facebook, then who? Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders suspects Mourtada’s ISP, Maroc Telecom. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”