It is not unusual to find video posted online depicting police or military officials committing serious human rights violations but a recent video shows that the police don’t have it all their own way.
A woman who ran a red light and refused to stop for a police officer found her attempts to get away recorded by the camera in the police officer’s helmet as he clung to the bonnet of the speeding car.
In Mark Twains’ classic book “Tom Sawyer” set in the mid 1800s the main character, a young boy, convinces his friends to not only do an arduous chore for him but to actually pay him for the privilege – move forward a century or so and few leaps in technology and the same scam still works.
A Verizon computer programmer who decided he would rather watch online cat videos, shop on ebay and catch up social media but wanted to keep his salary and benefits simply subcontracted his work out to a Chinese Consulting firm.
The result – he kept earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the programming was excellent and always on deadline earning him top job appraisal rankings and lots of sensitive information was handed over to well no one is entirely sure.
For all the online security features that can be installed in a network, firewalls, passwords, encryption etc none of it is of any use when it comes to someone willingly let others into the system. In this case there was no suggestion it was motivated by anything other than laziness but the results could have been catastrophic.
It is a timely reminder not to on to “auto pilot” when it comes to online security and assume the systems will take care of themselves. The human dimension is a major factor in information spillage. Unlike the movies where huge sums of money are offered or gorgeous temptresses and suave hunks seduce the information from employees the more prosaic reality is that the risks seem to be greater from a few acrobatic cats and a bargains from an online auction. Continue reading »
The Beijing authorities public reaction to the city’s lethal pollution is not unlike the captain of the Titanic making an announcement saying “there is no need to panic we are just stopping to take on a little ice.”
“A truth suppressed is a falsehood spread”. And this sums up the coverage of the record pollution levels in China’s capital.
But although the authorities have forced the media to play down the issue netizens are getting the word out. The authorities position is ludicrous. It is possible to reasonably successfully lie about or suppress the facts over, say, protests or unrest in other parts of the country but it is bit hard to hide the fact every breath is like having your head down the chimney from a steam locomotive.
People do tend to notice when they have trouble breathing despite the hearty reassurances of the people in power it is nothing to worry about. It is hardly surprising that people are tending to believe the empirical evidence rather than the official nonsense. Again censorship actions such as these are more likely to trigger the social upheaval the Chinese leaders so fear rather than prevent them. Continue reading »
Ezine PC World says the changes could prove a threat to companies doing business in China: “some observers say this may not only be an effort to stop citizens from reading or viewing Western information, but also to spy on international corporations doing business in the country who encrypt their internal communications.
The Guardian reported recently that the Chinese government is blocking internet services that have been able to “burrow secretly through what is known as the ‘Great Firewall’ …”
“A number of companies providing virtual private network (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to ‘learn, discover and block’ the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems,” the report said. Continue reading »
Chines based hackers penetrated the web group of the New York based Council on Foreign Relations last week and used their access to attack members and visitors to the website.
The sophisticated attack utilized a recently developed method known as “drive-by” cyber attacks which targets anyone visiting the compromised site.
The Washington Free Beacon a conservative online publication, reported “computer hackers traced to China carried out an advanced cyberespionage attack against one of America’s most elite foreign policy web groups – the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
According to private computer-security forensic specialists, the hacking incident involved a relatively new type of ploy called a “drive-by” website cyber attack that was detected around 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday.
In the internet age it is not wise to flaunt expensive personal items that cost more than your annual salary. Lanzhou mayor, Yuan Zhanting, found this out recently when he made the mistake of being photographed on a number of occasions and each time he was wearing a different expensive wrist watch.
Two university students who noticed the mayor’s taste for pricey timepieces wondered how he could afford them on an official’s salary.
He is now being investigated. It was either the height of arrogance or stupidity because earlier this year another official Xian bureau chief Yang Dacai was similarly caught with high end watches. At the time Yang said “over the past ten years or so I have indeed bought five watches. I purchased them at different times, using my legitimate income to buy them”.
However his superiors were not buying the “if you put a little away each day how soon it builds up” line of argument. He was later fired.
Zhanting may be joining Yang at the local employment office soon in another triumph for the “human flesh engine search” – a remarkably effective form of internet vigilantism where netizens trawl the web for evidence of wrong doing, particularly corruption and then post the findings.
One of the few lessons I remember from journalism school (many years ago) was always ignore the clothes and check out the watch, pen and shoes. These three items are often a good indication of a persons character and integrity. A low paid government official who is sporting a $10,000 Rolex, Gucci shoes and a Mont Blanc pen at the same time as claiming to be poor is probably not the most trustworthy of people.
Business suits can be rented or borrowed but not watches, pens or shoes.
During his civil lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China, Brian Milburn says he never once saw one of the country’s lawyers. He read no court documents from China’s attorneys because they filed none. The voluminous case record at the US District courthouse in Santa Ana, California, contains a single communication from China: a curt letter to the US State Department, urging that the suit be dismissed.
That doesn’t mean Milburn’s adversary had no contact with him.
For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software, Milburn’s family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company’s parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a US$2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April.
So how open was the Chinese Communist Party’s Congress. For netizens the answer would be “not even a little bit”.
In a demonstration that the old idea of say nothing and make sure no-one else does either the congress was marked by censorship, widespread internet outages and other attempts to suppress free speech. Any thought that things may be easing for China’s netizens were quickly dismissed.
The best account of what went on during the Congress comes from free speech advocacy group Global Voices.
As China’s new generation of leaders were officially presented to the world this week at the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, Chinese netizens experienced severe Internet interruptions. As the longtime Beijing-based blogger and businessman Bill Bishop described it, “these have been the most draconian few days of Internet restrictions I have experienced.”
Several weeks before the Congress, netizens began to report frequent disruptions when accessing Google services, foreign websites and virtual private networks (VPNs) – important tools for Internet users to circumvent the “Great Firewall.” Interruptions to Internet access then cranked into high gear on November 9, one day after the start of the Congress, when Google services were reported to be fully blocked in China, and their domain name systems were deliberately redirected to unknown IP addresses in Korea. Please see Greatfire.org for more detailed reports and analysis.
China’s 18th Communist National Party Congress opened in Beijing this week at the same time Twitter accounts have been hacked and there have been reports of problems gaining internet access in the country noted for its draconian censorship and intrusive online surveillance.
The ten yearly Congress formally endorses key leadership positions and sets the country’s agenda for the decade.
The decisions on appointments , including that of president and prime minister have already been settled as have those for other high ranking position in negotiations in the lead up to the congress.
But there is little input from the average citizen. And the Government is keen that netizens only get to hear what they want them to. Not that there anything unusual in that.
Officials have denied the Government ordered or was behind the hacking or loss of internet service but it is a mighty bid coincidence.
Ezine PolicyMic reports that Twitter notified a number of users today that their accounts may have been hacked.
Research by the University of Toronto Citizen Lab shows that computer back doors are a permanent security risk to users through out the world.
Their research based on events in the middle east demonstrates readily available commercial software is being used by governments to infiltrate computers used by critics and dissidents.
Bloomberg news reported the case of Ahmed Mansoor who was sitting in “his study in Dubai and made the mistake of clicking on a Microsoft Word attachment that arrived in an e-mail, labeled “very important” in Arabic, from a sender he thought he recognized.
“With that click, the pro-democracy activist unwittingly downloaded spyware that seized on a flaw in the Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) program to take over his computer and record every keystroke. The hackers infiltrated his digital life so deeply they still accessed his personal e-mail even after he changed his password.
Since then, Mansoor, 42, an electrical engineer and father of four, says he has suffered two beatings by thugs in September during his campaign for citizens’ civil rights in the Persian Gulf federation of the United Arab Emirates. While those assailants remain unknown, researchers say they’ve figured out what was behind the virtual assault.