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Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Cheap trick for locking cyber doors

If you are one of those who chooses simple words, such as "password" for your cyber access, you are as silly as someone who leaves the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition in a bad neighborhood.

I recently lost my cellphone, and was horrified to remember that I had saved all my clever passwords in the "my folder" component.

After recovering the phone (whew!), I altered all the passwords with a form of mild encryption that I could remember, but that would perplex a typical thief (though not a professional cryptanalyst).

I won't tell you my routine. But here is a simple alternative: ADD three or four rendom digits to every password (fore or aft). You don't need to remember them. You just need to remember to ignore the first three or last three digits on every number.

Do this with all your lists of passwords, so that you can keep copies as needed. (But don't keep them in your computer!)

How'd this happen? Poor password, I'll bet.
http://www.cleveland.com/consumeraffairs/index.ssf/2010/08/amazon_account_hijack_leaves_c.html

Army seizes Wikileaks researcher's cell phones.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20012253-245.html

Is Wikileaks a spook dupe?
http://www.opednews.com/articles/WikiLeaks-documents--disi-by-Andrew-Steele-100728-499.html 

FBI outlines cyber vulnerabilities.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/64266

Charged as Mariposa Botnet malware king.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h1GekN0Al-s5kjF5NMnAfhmomGkg

FBI concerned by Defcon hackfest
.
http://www.businessweek.com/idg/2010-07-30/fbi-rings-organizers-over-defcon-contest.html

Industrial cyber security weaknesses.
Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News has this item:

"The vulnerabilities of critical energy infrastructure installations to
potential cyber attack are normally treated as restricted information and
are exempt from public disclosure. But a recent Department of Energy
report was able to openly catalog and describe the typical vulnerabilities
of energy infrastructure facilities because it did not reveal the
particular locations where they were discovered.

"'Although information found in individual... vulnerability assessment reports is protected from disclosure, the security of the nation's energy infrastructure as a whole can be improved by sharing information on common security problems,' the DOE report said. 'For this reason, vulnerability information was collected, analyzed, and organized to allow the most prevalent issues to be identified and mitigated by those responsible for individual systems without disclosing the identity of the associated... product.'

"The specific vulnerabilities that were found are no big surprise -- open
ports, unsecure coding practices, and poor patch management. But by
describing the issues in some detail, the new report may help to demystify
the cyber security problem and to provide a common vocabulary for publicly
addressing it. See 'NSTB Assessments Summary Report: Common Industrial
Control System Cyber Security Weaknesses," Idaho National Laboratory, May
2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/nstb.pdf

More Facebook censorship found.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/facebook-filter-blocks-creating-pages-with-palestinian-in-the-title/ 

3 Uighurs get stiff terms.
http://info.ifex.org/View.aspx?id=217902&q=225552382&qz=ab2176

Threatened reporter found dead.
http://www.ifex.org/indonesia/2010/08/03/matra_dead/

Journalist dies in military clash.
http://www.ifex.org/lebanon/2010/08/03/assaf_bou_rahal_killed/

Palestinians seize journalist.
http://www.ifex.org/palestine/2010/08/03/amer_abu_arfa_sentenced/

Iran blamed in shutdown of Afghan TV station.
http://info.ifex.org/View.aspx?id=217833&q=225480749&qz=47960e

China reporter on 'most wanted list.'
http://info.ifex.org/View.aspx?id=217768&q=225338585&qz=6bf623

Net nanny backer gets thumbs down.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/conroy-dubbed-dumbest-pollie-in-survey-20100801-11196.html
 
The Socialist International tried not to be too hard on Comrade Hugo Chavez, but couldn't refrain from a few mild negatives in a special report it issued. Among report comments:

A 'notable fact was the consensus amongst remarks made by different social actors heard by the Mission: the feared instruments of an authoritarian mechanism of a new type, of a modern democradura (a government of democratic origin which is in reality authoritarian), were described in a recurring and convergent manner throughout the meetings and interviews carried out by the members of the Mission. Expressions such as “authoritarian routine”, “criminalisation of dissent”, “revolutionary constitutionalism”, “insecurity and impunity” and “terror and corruption” reappear frequently in the statements.

'Within the systematic splitting of administrative and social structures, the authorities tolerate certain areas of freedom, reduced in number and reach, and above all limited to sectors that do not affect the public at large, the popular masses, or the poorest sectors of society. In this way, the written press, which is essentially targeted at intellectuals and a limited section of the middle class, shows an astonishing freedom of expression, in spite of being closely monitored and always threatened with disruption of its paper supply, the distribution of which has been appropriated by the government (along with a whole series of strategic products and services, such as oil, electricity, steel, construction, agro-industry, telecommunications and the banking sector).

'Whilst the activities of civil society and the political opposition are not formally banned, they are controlled and limited, in particular as the result of a form of selfcensorship that exists under the permanent threat of verbal attacks from the President and representatives of the authorities, and physical attacks' from the ultraleft.

See AIM's view at
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/giving-socialism-a-bad-name/

I don't know whether Howard Zinn was a communist. The fact that FBI informants identified him doesn't prove he was. One needs to review more evidence in order to feel safe in such a claim.

Zinn seemed much more open to views of 9/11 skeptics, thus balking the hard-left line on 9/11, which is to ignore and-or scorn 9/11 doubters.

At any rate, this seems like a good opportunity to offer a bit of criticism to M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History: the untold story of Joe McCarthy and his fight against America's enemies (Random House, 2007). While in general I applaud Evans for doing a lot to set the record straight concerning the seriousness of McCarthy's charges and the dirty tricks used against him, I do not like his adoption of a phrase used by the red-hunting committees of the 1950s: identified communist.

A typical reader gets the impression that this means there is strong evidence against someone called an "identified communist." But, it simply means the individual was named as a communist by someone or other, without giving any background on the accuser's credibility or  whether the individual was named by several witnesses or other corroroborating evidence. In other words, as a journalist I would tend to steer away from such a phrase.

Chris Hedges at Truthout:
"The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn’s activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section A,” a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has changed."

J. Robert Oppenheimer also made that FBI list before being hired to run the atomic bomb project.

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