Kelly's Tech Nexus

Good words from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Full article at the link after this citation.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

via Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Scientific American.

According to the New York Times, the Obama Administration is drafting legislation that would require  a “backdoor” entryway into all communications systems, and one would have to be written into all cryptographic and “peer to peer” software like Skype. This would enable said government entities unfettered access to pretty much anything we do online, on our cell phones, or anything that is transmitted over commercial communication media, all under the guise of prosecuting criminal activity. Even if it was transmitted using a “secure” connection. Sorry, when one can’t trust the integrity of an encrypted communication due to this backdoor, even the best encryption is rendered useless. Look, the U.S. has enough trouble securing its networks the way they are now! And then to add a new built-in “backdoor”? Our government hasn’t shown any particular aptitude for security. The Chinese have been known to download gigabytes of data months or years before the breach was even discovered. If our government has the ability to eavesdrop, that could and probably would be hijacked by foreign countries to gain intelligence on us, just like what happened to Google a few months back.

Edit: More proof of this possibility from this story here. Specifically:

Among traffic rerouted via China during the 18 minutes was that destined for the websites of the US Senate, the Office of the Secretary of Defence, Nasa and the Commerce Department, the report said.

The one possible exception to this would be data gathered from Facebook; there’s not much intelligence going on there. One would hope the American people stand up and assert themselves on this one. Isn’t it enough we (via the government) just handed trillions of dollars to the crooks on Wall Street? And now this. More from the Electronic Frontier Foundation here.

According to anti-virus software vendor AVG, web sites are now actively exploiting the Java vulnerability Web Start disclosed at the end of last week, to infect Windows PCs. These include the popular songlyrics.com platform, from which users can download lyrics for the latest hits. The web site appears to have been hacked by criminals who have embedded a program to download malicious code from a Russian web server.

The vulnerability is the result of insufficient filtering of URLs, allowing them to be used to pass arguments to Java Web Start, which in turn can be used to launch local applications. Web Start can be exploited to download and run malicious code from the web. The vulnerability is not a problem in Windows alone – Unix is also affected although Java for Mac OS X is apparently not affected.

via Java vulnerability – when lyric sites attack – Update – The H Security: News and Features.

Up to 88% of Fortune 500 companies may have been affected by the Zeus trojan, according to research by RSA’s FraudAction Anti-Trojan division, part of EMC. The trojan installs keystroke loggers to steal login credentials to banking, social networking, and e-mail accounts.

via Almost all Fortune 500 companies show Zeus botnet activity.

This is an excellent question, and it’s a good time to think about putting a home server to work for you. The benefits are many and immediate; for one, all your files would be stored off of your main computers, so they’re safe from harm if, say, Windows goes belly-up on you. Nah, that never happens!

Another benefit is that more storage may be added as needed, and it’s usually easier and safer than operating on your daily driver computer.

iTWire – Is it time for a Windows or Linux server in your home?.

Frankly, a little (forced) transparency would be refreshing:

To the horror of Latvia’s political establishment, a mysterious group of computer hackers is threatening to expose the incomes of top officials after stealing millions of government tax records. The group, calling itself the People’s Army of the Fourth Awakening, claimed to have downloaded more than 7.5 million documents, including VAT receipts and income tax returns, from the State Revenue Service (SRS) after exploiting a security loophole on its website.

via [ISN] Latvia in turmoil after hacker exposes establishment salaries.