Category Archives: Internet / Online

The Mating Call of the Noob

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This is one of the most often heard calls when playing Battlefield 2, it is often cried out by dirty little pre-teen stains in their fathers pants. It can consist of words like, Cheater, Hacker, Haxor etc. or usually a statement about how they think that someone is cheating when that person is clearly not. For example being a commander and some noob saying, “Player X is getting score, he’s doing nothing but he’s earning points”. Also the noob will often use leet-speak (poorly, and excessively). Persoanlly I think leet-speak is lame.

Live Journal, Fascists?

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Live Journal to make its site less attractive to sex pests seems to have backfired as the administrators purge the site of hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups.

Users are incandescent with rage after they found literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter purged in an effort to protect children. Live Journal deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better “protecting children” following requests by activist groups.

While some journals were clearly dodgy the online journal burners seem to have demanded the removal of science fiction, fantasy or user-written “fandom” stories.

Live Journal’s sex pest purge backfires

V-Tech (Virginia Tech) Rampage Game Insanity

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So main stream media appear to have picked this one up, and what a varied reaction it has prompted. V-Tech Rampage, Virginia Tech Rampage for those with no clue, is a game created based on the shooting events at Virginia Tech University in April. A 21-year-old Sydney man (aka PiGPEN) created this charming little number. While some may find it distasteful, others have enjoyed it. Schadenfreude, I think yes. But also a good exercise in marketing for his site as well (googumproduce.com)

Telstra has Sook over own Poll Results

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It appears as though after Telstra placed a poll on its site (nowwearetalking.com.au) that the truth has now been shoved down their throats. The poll asked openly and plainly “Who do you think is blocking high-speed broadband for Australia?” after results clearly were pushed to 97.1% saying that it was Telstra’s fault that they pulled the poll. While at the time of writing this the poll is sitting in the poll archive I suspect that it will soon disappear from the site. Interestingly enough it was replaced with a poll asking “Have you ever tried to rig an online poll?”
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The Dirty Dozen

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Sophos has revealed a lovely list of the top 12 countries when it comes to sending spam. While some of the entrants are no surprise the top placed United States is believed to be at this position because of the emergence of over 300 strains of the mass-spammed Stratio worm.

“Most unsolicited emails are now sent from zombie PCs – computers infected with Trojans, worms and viruses that turn them into spam-spewing bots. In the past hackers were very reliant on operating system vulnerabilities to convert an innocent computer into a zombie – now they are turning back to malware to trick users into running their malicious code, and opening the backdoor to hackers,” said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos. “Hundreds of new versions of the Stratio worm have helped steadily increase the volume of spam seen travelling across the net.”

Sophos reveals “Dirty Dozen” spam producing countries

Torpark

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What is Torpark? Basically it’s a modified version of the Firefox browser that uses the TOR network.

Download Torpark and put it on a USB Flash keychain. Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, or public. Run Torpark.exe and it will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously.

I must give you a little warning though.

German police seize ‘anonymizing’ Tor servers
Police block an undisclosed number of servers during a crackdown on Internet pornography, By John Blau, IDG News Service, September 11, 2006 – Infoworld

In a crackdown on Internet child pornography, German police detected several servers running a copy of Tor, a software designed to anonymize Internet usage.

“We seized or blocked an undisclosed number of servers during a raid, which is still underway,” Jens Gruhl, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office of Konstanz, Germany, said Monday. “A few of these computers had installed copies of Tor.”

Users of Tor software in the country, worried about an unexpected visit by the police, have decried the move in a flurry of blogs.

“This situation is disturbing, really disturbing,” wrote Alexander Janssen, from Düsseldorf, Germany, in a blog post. “I run a Tor server myself and the last thing I want to experience is the police kicking down my door [and] seizing my computer.”

Gruhl said German crime officials are not specifically searching for servers running Tor but for servers distributing child porn. “That fact that police discovered copies of Tor is coincidental, not intentional.”

In his blog, Janssen reckoned that the seized servers were configured to be so-called Tor “exit nodes,” allowing their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to show up in the server logfiles in question.

Tor was created to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships and state security,” according to the Web site www.torproject.org.

The software bounces communications around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers, protecting users from Web sites that build profiles of their interests, local eavesdroppers that read data or learn what sites they visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

So in reality privacy comes at a cost.