The British government has proposed a new law that would force websites to automatically reveal the identity of commenters when faced with a complaint.
If recent events are any indication, the age of the Internet troll (website commenters who post negative and potentially damaging statements about others) may soon come to an end. According to the BBC, a new proposal by the British government would force websites to reveal the identity of commenters when requested by a complainant.
The new dictate has been added to the country's Defamation Bill, a legal framework outlining the rules governing defamation lawsuits that has been in the works since 2009.
"Website operators are in principle liable as publishers for everything that appears on their sites, even though the content is often determined by users," said U.K. Justice Secretary Ken Clarke. "Our proposed approach will mean that website operators have a defense against libel as long as they identify the authors of allegedly defamatory material when requested to do so by a complainant."
The issue made headlines in the U.K. after the High Court in London forced Facebook to reveal the IP addresses of a group that had been taunting Web user Nicola Brookes after she dared to criticize a singer on local television. Other cases in the country have actually resulted in jail time for the Internet abusers.
And while some U.S. Internet users may view the events across the pond as heavy-handed examples of a surveillance-centric state, a similar bill has been in the works for New York Internet users. The bill would ban all anonymous comments from New York websites, essentially forcing anyone interested in leaving a comment to verify their identity first. The bill would require website owners to, "remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post." While the legality of such a bill—as well as its chances of actually being passed—remain unclear, these events all point to a trend of governments pushing for an end to Internet anonymity.
For years American journalists and whistleblowers alike have relied on anonymous messages in the service of vital information making its way to the public. However, if Internet anonymity is eventually quashed by legal means, it could have broad repercussions on the future of free speech online. Nevertheless, Justice Clarke claims the measures in the U.K. will continue to protect such anonymous speech.
"It will be very important to ensure that these measures do not inadvertently expose genuine whistleblowers, and we are committed to getting the detail right to minimize this risk," Clarke told the BBC.
One of the zero-day flaws patched by Microsoft on Tuesday had been used for some time by a group with suspected Chinese government ties that targets technology companies, CrowdStrike’s chief executive said Tuesday.
CEO Dmitri Alperovitch said his CrowdStrike has been battling with the group, which the company dubbed “Hurricane Panda,” on a daily basis since earlier this year.
“They’ve been very persistent actors,” Alperovitch said in a phone interview Tuesday. “We believe with confidence they’re indeed tied to the Chinese government in their objectives.”
Hurricane Panda has targeted technology infrastructure companies, Alperovitch said. He said he could not identify the companies, which use CrowdStrike’s services.
“We are able to literally record every command they try and understand immediately what they’re doing,” he said.
For example, the analysts will often see hackers mistype commands, such as “hsotname” instead of “hostname” and “romote” for “remote,” as they hastily try to maintain their access.
Hurricane Panda is noteworthy for using tightly written exploit code, “win64.exe,” that allowed the group to move through network systems once a computer had been hacked. That tool would be uploaded using a webshell nicknamed “ChinaChopper” that the attackers had placed on a company’s servers, Alperovitch said.
Win64.exe, which runs on 64-bit Windows systems, takes advantage of a privilege escalation vulnerability, which can allow attackers to gain administrative rights to other programs from the account of a user who doesn’t have those permissions.
Privilege escalation flaws aren’t rare, but it is uncommon to see one used for so long by a group, which indicates that the attackers have “knowledge about non-public exploitable security bugs, which usually means the exploit was either bought from a supplier or developed in-house,” Alperovitch wrote in a post on the company’s blog.
Win64.exe contained an interesting embedded string of characters, “woqunimalegebi,” which translates to a Chinese swear word, Alperovitch said. The word is often misspelled in Chinese to avoid being blocked by the country’s filtering equipment, and that intentional error changes the meaning of the vulgarity to “fertile grass mud horse in the Mahler Gobi Desert,” according to CrowdStrike.
Alperovitch said it’s hard to say why programmers insert such messages, but “perhaps they were trying to send a message to anyone that is reverse engineering the code.”
The document was filed as an exhibit on May 17, 2013 in another class action suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division over hiring practices. The tech workers who filed that suit alleged that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe Systems, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar put each other’s employees off-limits to other companies by introducing measures such as “do-not-cold-call” lists.
Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel appealed in September District Judge Lucy Koh’s rejection of a proposed settlement of US$324.5 million with the tech workers, which she found was too low. Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar had previously settled for about $20 million.
A key defense the companies may adopt is that the DOJ did not see it fit to prosecute them before 2010. “Oracle was deliberately excluded from all prior litigation filed in this matter because all the parties investigating the issue concluded there was absolutely no evidence that Oracle was involved,” Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger wrote in an email after the suit against the company was filed.
In the class-action suit filed against IAC/InterActiveCorp, the parent of Ask.com, former employee Robert Arriaga alleges a conspiracy by Ask.com, Google and other companies to fix and suppress the compensation of their employees by way of “Sensitive Company Agreements,” which first came to light on May 17 last year.
As an active geophysicist, Seppo managed the national regional gravity measurements by the Geological Survey of Finland and developed his own software for processing and modelling the results of gravity measurements. He is also an experienced user of Grablox software developed by Markku Pirttijärvi at Oulu University for modelling and inversion of gravity and gravity gradients using a 3D voxel model ( see https://wiki.oulu.fi/display/~mpi/Gravity+inversion+using+block+model+2 ), and ModelVision software, an advanced general purpose model-based interpretation system for gravity and magnetic fields, developed by Tensor Research (see ModelVision from Tensor Research ).
The idea of geophysical potential field modelling is to take the gravity or magnetic survey data and invert it into geological bodies or full 3D distributions of density or magnetic parameters by applying numerical methods.
Currently, Seppo is also involved in research where multi-frequency electromagnetic measurements and models are visualized in 3D.