Displaying items by tag: SOPA

A while ago we wrote a piece that talked (in simple terms) about how Anonymous could kill the internet through attacking the root DNS servers. The article was written with the intent to give a background on the system in place and how it works. We did not then, nor do we now believe that Anonymous would take down the internet. As with all of the threats to take down twitter, Facebook and other forms of communication it would be exceptionally counterproductive. If Anonymous were to take down the internet and prevent connecting to servers via DNS it would lose many of their followers and supporters for at least the length of the hack.

Today is a busy day on the Internet (it usually is on a Monday morning). There are multiple articles and comments that are all related to the freedom of the Internet and how the world is evolving to embrace it while some in power are de-evolving to tray and restrict it. At this point there is no clear winner, but the sides are being firmly drawn in the sand and it is clear that things will get worse before they get better.

In what has to be one of the most unusual “Get-The-Vote-Out” campaigns that I have personally seen it appears that Anonymous and the Occupy group are urging people to hold politicians accountable for their actions by voting them out of office.  While some in the media are calling this a first it is not the in reality. In multiple messages Anonymous has called on the public to hold their political leaders accountable. Their methods might be different at times, but this is also the beginning of the voting season in the US so the move really comes as no surprise.

The news has been buzzing with talk of Google’s new combined privacy policies and the impact they will have on the user’s personal information. This is due to the way that Google is moving to a combined user format and will allow for the sharing of user information between different platforms and services. Now, we agree that this is not a good thing and is something that Google needs to reverse their decision on, but there is something else at stake here. This is something that most publications have missed the boat on and one that I think even Google has not considered…

After both SOPA and PIPA were publicly shelved the US government did what it always does. It finds a way to do what it wants, but by hiding it in other bills or (as is becoming more common) using trade agreements to by-pass laws altogether. This is exactly what we are seeing with ACTA and TPP. These two trade agreements are probably some of the most dangerous bits of work that we have read about in a very long time.

Anonymous had a rather big weekend starting off with taking down the CIA’s public website cia.gov. This was done through an interesting trick that appeared to be a combination of a DDoS and some DNS tinkering. On the day of the outage the CIA’s website resolved to 192.81.129.107 which when looked up showed as an address belonging to an IP pool in the UK. Once the attack was completed the site resolved to 192.81.129.130 which is undeniably part of the same range, but now shows as a US IP range.  Looking at the evidence this could possibly be a new form of attack from the collective. Unfortunately we just do not have enough information on the subject to be sure and the CIA is not releasing any new information.

I love old sayings. One reason is that some are just plain funny, but another is that so many are true. In this case the old saying is “If you squeeze something too tight it will slip out between your fingers”. This is exactly what is happening with the tight internet controls that are being worked on right now.  As Google, Twitter and others are working on hiding dissenting topics and tweets that governments do not want visible in their countries people like the TOR (The Onion Router) Project are working to get around those restrictions.

Lately there has been a large focus on the Internet and that it is becoming less of the open communications community that people believe that it should be. We have watched as laws like SOPA, PIPA, Open, ACTA and others have been proposed on the basis of protecting Intellectual Property. Because of the push to protect corporate interests it is often felt that the big entertainment companies are behind these laws. If the truth be told many of them are behind these laws, however we cannot remove responsibility from the government in these cases.

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few months you know that the big media companies have been pushing the copyright laws quite heavily. A pair of very dangerous laws call the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) were just dropped (for now) on after a very large Internet protest that ended up with many major sites blacking out for the day. We were also involved in that protest as the vague wording of the law was terrifying to say the least.

One thing we have always prided ourselves on here at DecryptedTech is to look through the surface of issues at hand. Anything can be miss-read on the surface and taken the wrong way. We all are guilty of it, how many times have you gotten a question on a test wrong because you did not read it properly? I have done that more times that I care to count. However, it was this type of issue that has taught me to read between the lines and look beneath the PR and marketing that is shoved in the public’s faces every day.