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YAHOO Altering Text in Private Emails
(SECURITY WIRE DIGEST, VOL. 4, NO. 53, JULY 22, 2002)
Yahoo! admitted last week it's been changing subscribers' e-mail messages to prevent hackers from spreading viruses. A word-changing program automatically misspells or replaces certain words--such as JavaScript's "mocha" with "espresso"--in e-mail messages to block crackers from using the same words to unleash malcode. For instance, according to a news source, "eval" becomes "review," prompting "evaluate" to become �reviewuate." Such alterations aren't new among e-mail providers, but most companies prefer to block or alter pieces of software code, not words in the text of messages. The Palo Alto, Calif., company didn't notify customers of the practice, nor indicate late last week if it planned to stop.

posted by Lorenzo 4:40 PM

 

Operation Mockingbird - The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories." . . . In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling.
This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.

posted by Lorenzo 4:51 PM

 

Vatican complaint closes blasphemous sites
Five internet sites carrying blasphemies against God and the Virgin Mary have been shut in Italy after a complaint by the Vatican . . . The police blacked out pages on the site so that internet surfers who try to visit them find nothing but the words "Site seized by the Head of Rome's Special Police Force on the orders of Rome's Chief Prosecutor". . . . On May 12, in his most recent comment on the internet, he [the Pope] announced his intention next year to consider the subject: Internet: a new forum to proclaim the Gospel.

[Hagerty comment: Talk about blasphemy, using the Internet to spread the gospel that birth control is a sin should be classified as a crime against humanity. That bunch of misguided old men in the Vatican should spend less time covering up for the the child molesters in their ranks and attempt to get their minds into the 21st centruy.]

posted by Lorenzo 9:30 AM

 

Yahoo! Censors Chinese Web Portal
BEIJING (AP) - Internet portals in China, including Yahoo!'s Chinese-language site, have signed a voluntary pledge to purge the Web of content that China's communist government deems subversive, organizers of the drive say.

posted by West 6:18 PM

 

BAD NEWS FOR PRIVACY: PGP GONE BAD
NSI, makers of McAfee Virus software, bought Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) for $35 mil in 1997. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) then bought NAI. Both George H. W. Bush and Bobby Inman , the Naval admiral and former NSA chief involved with the Iran-Contra affair and other dark side government affairs, are former directors of SAIC. So is Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry. SAIC has so many links to the Pentagon that, like Dyncorp, it is considered by many to be a government shill. With so many dealings with government the buyout of PGP by SAIC should be viewed as extremely suspicious. Bobby Inman was a big promoter of the concept that Government must control all encryption. PGP was the only private holdout for years and is good enough to cause government spooks much lost sleep. Phil Zimmerman, the anti-government creator of PGP says that copies of its encryption software which were sold before Fall 2001, when he left NAI, are solid, but future versions may be tainted. So beware. If you have existing copies of PGP obtained prior to fall of last year, do not upgrade to any new versions.

posted by Lorenzo 7:57 PM

 

Hope Remains ... Shorewood high school students exemplify courage in face of fascist repression of free speech
In response to plans by students of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's high school to walk out in protest against honoring him, officials of the school have cancelled the all-school awards ceremony intended to honor him. Rehnquist was graduated from Shorewood High School, in suburban Milwaukee, WI, in 1942. . . . "in response to security concerns and planned student protests, . Rehnquist will no longer address students at an all-school assembly. Students had planned a walkout and demonstration during Rehnquist's acceptance of Shorewood's first Tradition of Excellence award." . . . The paper continued, "as anti-Rehnquist pamphlets circulated and plans for student demonstrations came to light, Rick Munroe, principal, decided on a lower profile event," in which only selected students will be invited to attend. . . . The students had attempted to circulate a flyer listing "Ten Reasons to Protest Chief Justice Rehnquist," but the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin had to twice intervene to work out agreements to allow them to do so, after students carrying the flyers were told they could not enter the school if they had them in their backpacks. . . . Among the reasons cited in the flyer was Rehnquist's role in stopping the recounting of votes in Florida after the November 2000 presidential election, and his writings which favored allowing state-enforced racial segregation to continue as being constitutional, a view which was unanimously rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. His stance allowing execution of childhood offenders and mentally impaired, and his active opposition to an ordinance prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations were also cited.

posted by Lorenzo 1:41 PM

 

Pacifica Radio blows 9-11 coverage
(Kellia Ramares, OnlineJournal.com, June 22, 2002)
I've got news for you, Pacificans: Bush knew. The administration allowed the 9-11 attacks to occur to garner support for a war the American people would not back otherwise. A war without end that it being used to fill the pockets of the defense contractors, to gain control of the Central Asian drug trade for the benefit of Wall Street and to destroy our constitutional rights. . . . This is the story of all our lives and Pacifica's coverage is dreadful. . . . How many of you know that Porter Goss, co-chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, is a former CIA case officer? Do you know that several of these committee members receive campaign contributions from the Carlyle Group and the Big 5 defense contractors? . . . I didn't learn about them from Pacifica. I learned about them from Guns & Butter's inaugural guest, Michael C. Rupert of From the Wilderness. . . . There are people being disappeared into the INS Gulag and Navy brig, including now an American citizen, and there are public affairs programmers not up on the story? Shame on you, Pacifica! Shame that every public affairs show in the entire network is not crawling all over this story and leading the ouster of this illegitimate, thieving, treasonous, murderous, warmongering excuse for an Administration. . . . I call on everyone dissatisfied with Pacifica's 9-11 coverage to let your voice be heard, at these meetings and at your local stations. Our lives and our freedoms depend on the truth being heard.

posted by Lorenzo 12:44 PM

 

How the search engines sold out
(John Naughton, The Guardian, July 7, 2002)
From a user's perspective, the key factors are how comprehensive is the search engine's database and how relevant are its rankings to the inquirer's interests. Ranking is important because even a relatively specialised query can turn up thousands of potentially relevant links, and few users will look beyond the first few screenfuls. From a commercial point of view, therefore, what matters is not just that one's site is indexed, but that it comes up in that vital first screen. And that is where things begin to get interesting. . . . advertising dried up after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Which left only one possibility - charging website owners a fee in return for boosting their rankings in search results. This enables companies to ensure higher ranking for their sites than they might objectively deserve. The practice of charging for ranking rapidly became widespread (with the honourable exception of Google), and as a result millions of naive inquirers are nowadays directed every day to sites which have paid for premium placement. . . . In principle, the Web makes it possible for customers to shop around for the best supplier; but it can only deliver on that promise is the search process is objective. Secondly, paying for placement distorts the Web as a medium for the unfettered dissemination of ideas: if powerful institutions (corporations, governments) can influence the outcome of web searches, then they can effectively ensure that some voices are rarely heard. . . . last week the US Federal Trade Commission wrote to several search engines that charge for prominent placement - notably AltaVista, LookSmart and AOL Search - demanding that they should make that practice clearer to Web users.

posted by Lorenzo 12:29 PM

 

Guardian Unlimited List of Interesting Weblogs
July 4 2002: For the past month, readers have been sending us the URLs of their weblogs. We'll soon be publishing a more comprehensive guide - but until then, here is a list of some of the blogs we liked, with brief notes. If you have a blog, please mail us at weblog@guardianunlimited.co.uk.

[This is an excellent list of some interesting weblogs . . . we assume that Matrix Masters didn't make their list due to the fact that our site now has a dozen different blogs, whereas their list is of single topic blogs. :-) ]

posted by Lorenzo 12:19 PM

 

How One Spam Leads to Another
(Michelle Delio, Wired.com, July3, 2002)
E-mail addresses are the currency in a financial shell game that involves rapidly moving consumer contact information from database to database while concealing where and how the data was collected, according to West's research, which he has documented in a map that painstakingly details all the dark and twisted paths that your e-mail address has been traveling. . . . Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from websites and public posts on Internet newsgroups and bulletin boards and then sell the addresses to other spammers, or to unscrupulous marketing companies who pay a bounty fee per submitted name. These marketing lists may eventually be sold to legitimate companies who often believe they are purchasing a list of eager consumers' addresses. . . . Spamdemic traces how West's e-mail addresses are being passed around from database to database. West said that he has not given his address to even one of the companies that appear on his map, or given any of them permission to send him e-mail. Yet nearly all seem to have one or more of his e-mail addresses. And most -- although not all -- are spamming him.

posted by Lorenzo 2:01 PM

 

Damage Control at CNN
(Arabia.com, June 30, 2002)
Although Turner himself has no role in CNN's coverage of any news items, uproar ensued against CNN immediately, with the network's Jerusalem bureau being flooded with hate mail and threats from Israelis. Local Israeli cable channels have decided to air Fox News instead, and threatened to take CNN off the air for supposedly being "biased" against Israel. Apparently, if the Israeli army bulldozes Palestinian homes, or kills unarmed Palestinian civilians in cold blood using tank shells (usually labeled a "mistake" by the Israeli army), reporting on such actions is deemed "biased," "anti-Israel," and "pro-terrorist." . . . CNN immediately flew its top executive to Israel after Turner apologized in an interview with Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, and the network hastily compiled a weeklong series focusing on the victims of Palestinian terror. An apology was also issued because an interview with the family of a Palestinian suicide bomber received more programming time than interviews with the family of two of his victims. According to Eason Jordan, CNN's president of newsgathering, this was "rectified. by airing extensively the interview with the [victims'] family." . . . In a final insult, yesterday's "analysis" of George W. Bush's "peace plan" for the Middle East was moderated by a panel consisting entirely of right-wing figures known for their anti-Arab stances. . . . The panel highlighted CNN's desperate attempts to pick up the mess left by Ted Turner, with a lunge to the far right to avoid being abandoned for Fox News in Israeli cable markets. Eric Alterman of MSNBC states clearly, "when the Israelis and their most right-wing supporters rule the roost. nobody even notices the egregious bias in the presentation." . . . CNN deserves congratulations for stooping to a new low in unethical journalism. It proves what we've known all along: that Israel's influence on US media and foreign policy are so great, they can distort and hide any semblance of the truth.

posted by Lorenzo 7:29 PM