A Peculiar Blog

Recently Viacom got themselves a court order requiring Google to hand over a complete list of (get this) Every video watched by YouTube users. The logs in question include the login names an IP addresses of those users.

Just in case you thought China was the only country doing stuff like this, they’re not. The Iranian government is working on a law that’s going to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society” (translation: give the government more license to kill people that openly disagree with it.) They’re already blocking websites that either have sexual content, anything religious that does not agree with Islamic doctrines, and of course, anything that doesn’t agree with government approved politics.

Lawrence Roberts is one of those names that most people using the Internet have probably never heard or read before. He’s one of the people that were involved in developing what has come to be the Internet that we all use today. Specifically, He did a lot of the groundbreaking work in “networking through data packets”

According to an article on PC Pro, media giant Rupert Murdoch was provoked into an “angry outburst” over the fact that somehow, Facebook has managed to overtake MySpace.
Thing is, I’ve got accounts on both sites and I have to say that without doubt, Facebook is the slower, more aggravating site to use. And I’m [...]

I recently wrote about a Ransomware attack called GPcode that encrypts files on the victim’s computer and then offers to sell them a decryption key to get them back.
According to Kaspersky Labs, When GPcode does it’s thing, it first creates a copy of the file it’s going to encrypt. Once that encryption is done, [...]

It’s possible to do a lot of blogging without the use of links but sooner or later you’re going to want to include a link to some page you want to share or that is somehow relevant to something that you are writing about. I’ll also grant that by and large I think that [...]

Ok, this is happening in the UK but this particular flavor of censorship could easily be adopted by American ISP’s. There’s a joint venture between Virgin Media and BPI (the British Phonographic Industry), which represents the major record labels. (I believe it’s their version of the RIAA)
Here’s the part where you give everyone [...]

[update: Since this was written there's been at least one solution to fix Gpcode problems
The folks at Kaspersky Labs have run into a new variant of a nasty little bugger known as Gpcode. This virus encrypts files on the infected computer and then demands payment for a key that will allow the victim [...]

A while back Simply Stating The Obvious held a contest. I entered on May 20th because, well, who wouldn’t want a prize package that included prizes like
a The Andromeda Strain t-shirt
The Andromeda Strain DVD Collection featuring both the 2008 A&E miniseries
and the Oscar-nominated 1971 film
The Andromeda Strain novel by Michael Crichton
Then on May [...]

Revision3, an “Internet television” company was attacked over the weekend in the form of a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack. It turns out that the attack came from MediaDefender, a name many will recognize as an outfit doing a lot of dirty work for the RIAA, MPAA and various “Big Content” providers.
The attack consisted [...]