French government OKs Web piracy law

LONDON -- The French National Assembly has voted to adopt the central clause in the anti-piracy Creation and Internet Law, which would allow a state body to cut off copyright infringers' broadband access after two warnings were issued.

The three-strikes scheme proposed by the French government to tackle P2P file-sharing has met with opposition from some politicians and consumer groups, but the vote has been welcomed by parts of the international music business.

"The French government has taken a decisive step to protect artists and creators, setting an example to the rest of the world," said IFPI chairman and chief executive John Kennedy in a statement. "The great thing about this French initiative is that it will result in very sensible and achievable actions by ISPs to reduce piracy in a way that is overwhelmingly preventative and not punitive."

IMPALA, which represents 4,000 independent labels across Europe, also welcomed the vote.

"We see this as a great breakthrough. Independents produce 80% of all new releases and as a result suffer particularly from illegal downloading," said executive chair Helen Smith in a statement. "We feel that this text reaches an excellent compromise between the interests of the fans, the music companies and the ISPs."

Michel Lambot, co-president of PIAS and co-president of IMPALA, added: "This was a bold move by the French, and has brought its fare share of criticism. We hope the law will now be able to go on to be the success that we believed it would and that it will serve as an example that other countries can follow."

France's consumer rights group UFC-Que Choisir has opposed the plan.

Thursday's vote on the three-strikes measure was crucial to the legislation, which will undergo parliamentary scrutiny article by article, beginning April 9, before it is finally passed into law.

Survey: Credit card fraud a top concern in U.S.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but people in the U.S. are worried that as the economy worsens, the chances for identity fraud, particularly with regard to credit card data theft, will increase.

Nearly 75 percent of Americans believe that the global financial crisis increases their risk of identity and related fraud, according to the Unisys Security Index due to be released on Monday.

More than two-thirds surveyed said they are extremely or very concerned about other people obtaining and using their credit and debit card data, with 90 percent at least somewhat concerned.

Credit and debit card fraud is the top security concern for people, with 68 percent saying they are extremely or very concerned. And 66 percent said they are seriously concerned about unauthorized access to or misuse of personal information.

More than 40 percent of respondents said they are extremely or very concerned about security related to viruses and unsolicited e-mail.

Overall, people are more worried about their financial security and less worried about national security than in previous surveys, according to the survey.

The survey of more than 1,000 respondents in the U.S. was conducted from February 20-22.

France to Block The Pirate Bay, Disconnect File-Sharers

Despite public protests the French Parliament has passed a controversial new law that will see alleged copyright infringers disconnected from the Internet. In addition, France’s Minister of Culture Christine Albanel has stated that under the new law, ISPs may be ordered to block The Pirate Bay.

In order to clamp down on piracy the French have passed a new law requiring Internet service providers to cut off Internet access for persistent offenders. Under the new legislation ISPs have to warn alleged copyright infringers twice, and if they they ignore these warnings their Internet access is terminated for up to a year.

One of the biggest problems with the new law is that copyright infringers will be identified only by an IP-address, which will undoubtedly lead to many false accusations. Those who want to prove their innocence have only one option, namely, to install a spyware application that will monitor their every move on the Internet and report it back to the authorities. Hardly practical.

The law goes much further than disconnecting alleged file-sharers though. In addition it is now possible to take “any action” in order to put a halt to copyright infringement. Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, explicitly named The Pirate Bay as one of the sites that could be easily blocked under the new law.

Thus, without having to provide evidence that a website is engaging in illegal activities, it can still be blocked. Potentially this could mean that access to BitTorrent sites is disallowed in France, as well as access to sites like YouTube or perhaps even Google.

In summary, the new law introduces unlimited options for the copyright holders to go after sites and people that may or may not infringe copyright, without having to actually proove that the accused are guilty. To date, this is by far the most aggressive and unbalanced piece of copyright legislation that we’ve seen.

Even more so, only last week the European Parliament spoke out against such disproportionate legislation by adopting a report that aims to protect the rights and freedoms of Internet users and excludes ‘three strikes’ as a punitive sanction. Unfortunately, members of the French parliament completely ignored this.

What struck us most is that the people who get to decide on these issues have no clue about file-sharing at all. Many of them don’t know what BitTorrent is, or how it works. Yet, they decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of Internet users.

New Nmap version detects the Conficker worm

The Conficker worm is receiving a lot of attention because of its vast scale (millions of machines infected) and advanced update mechanisms. Thanks to research by Tillmann Werner and Felix Leder of The Honeynet Project and implementation work by Ron Bowes, David Fifield, Brandon Enright, and Fyodor, a new Nmap release is here which can remotely scan for and detect infected machines.

To scan for Conficker, use a command such as:
nmap -PN -T4 -p139,445 -n -v --script=smb-check-vulns --script-args safe=1 [targetnetworks]

A clean machine should report at the bottom: “Conficker: Likely CLEAN”, while likely infected machines say: “Conficker: Likely INFECTED”. For more advice, see this nmap-dev post by Brandon Enright. Dan Kaminsky broke the story on Doxpara.com.

While Conficker gets all the attention, 4.85BETA5 also has many other great improvements:

* Ndiff now includes service (version detection) and OS detection differences.
* [Ncat] The --exec and --sh-exec options now work in UDP mode like they do in TCP mode: the server handles multiple concurrent clients and doesn't have to be restarted after each one.
* [Ncat] The -v option (used alone) no longer floods the screen with debugging messages. With just -v, we now only print the most important status messages such as "Connected to ...", a startup banner, and error messages. At -vv, minor debugging messages are enabled, such as what command is being executed by --sh-exec. With -vvv you get detailed debugging messages.
* [Ncat] Chat mode now lets other participants know when someone connects or disconnects, and it also broadcasts a current list of participants at such times.
* [Ncat] Fixed a socket handling bug which could occur when you redirect Ncat stdin, such as "ncat -l --chat < /dev/null". The next user to connect would end up with file descriptor 0 (which is normally stdin) and thus confuse Ncat.
* [Zenmap] The "Scan Output" expanders in the diff window now behave more naturally. Some strange behavior on Windows was noted by Jah.
* The following OS detection tests are no longer included in OS fingerprints: U1.RUL, U1.TOS, IE.DLI, IE.SI, and IE.TOSI. URL, DLI, and SI were found not be helpful in distinguishing operating systems because they didn't vary. TOS and TOSI were disabled in 4.85BETA1 but now they are not included in prints at all.
* The compile-time Nmap ASCII dragon is now more ferocious thanks to better teeth alignment.
* Version 4.85BETA4 had a bug in the implementation of the new SEQ.CI test that could cause a closed-port IP ID to be written into the array for the SEQ.TI test and cause erroneous results.
* Nbase has grown routines for calculating Adler32 and CRC32C checksums. This is needed for future SCTP support.
* [Zenmap] Zenmap no longer shows an error message when running Nmap with options that cause a zero-length XML file to be produced (like --iflist).
* Fixed an off-by-one error in printableSize() which could cause Nmap to crash while reporting NSE results. Also, NmapOutputTable's memory allocation strategy was improved to conserve memory.
* [Zenmap] We now give the --force option to setup.py for installation to ensure that it replaces all files.
* Nmap's --packet-trace, --version-trace, and --script-trace now use an Nsock trace level of 2 rather than 5. This removes some superfluous lines which can flood the screen.
* [Zenmap] Fixed a crash which could occur when loading the help URL if the path contains multibyte characters.
* [Ncat] The version number is now matched to the Nmap release it came with rather than always being 0.2.
* Fixed a strtok issue between load_exclude and TargetGroup::parse_expr that caused only the first exclude on a line to be loaded as well as an invalid read into free()'d memory in load_exclude().
* NSE's garbage collection system (for cleaning up sockets from completed threads, etc.) has been improved.

Introspection of Virtual Machines,get access to memory

Save the children? ICANN opens debate on CyberSafety charter

The group behind the campaign to take porn off of port 80 is now lobbying ICANN to create a new "Cybersafety Constituency" to assist in the formulation of domain name system policy.

ICANN has been soliciting a lot of comments on its governance and future of late, including one petition to form a CyberSafety Constituency (CSC) within the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group. (NCSG). The petition (PDF) as filed with ICANN is fairly innocuous and harmless-sounding, but the woman doing the filing—Professor Cheryl B. Preston, of Brigham Young University—has ties to other nonprofit organizations that should have been disclosed at some point within the application procedure.

Preston is general counsel for the nonprofit group CP80, which advocates for the creation of an Internet filtration system that would supposedly seek to keep porn and other adult content sandboxed away from the family-friendly tubes. The organization deserves credit for proposing a system that wouldn't automatically cripple Internet access speeds nationwide, force deep packet inspection, or turn ISPs into de facto Internet police. That said, failing to qualify as prima facie terrible does not automatically qualify CP80's legislative baby, the Internet Community Portals Act (ICPA) as a good idea.
Filtering at the port level

CP80's solution to the seemingly intractable problem of Internet filtering is to segregate traffic by port. All "normal" traffic (have fun defining that) would continue to flow over Port 80 or whatever port it's currently assigned to. Adult content, however, would be shifted away from Port 80 (hence the group's name, "Clean Port 80") and on to a new port—let's call it Port XXX. Were CP80's legislation to pass, the Internet would look something like this:


The system as illustrated would allow an ISP to sell access plans to both the filtered and unfiltered Internet, consumers could choose which they want, freedoms are preserved, and everyone goes home happy...at least in theory. CP80's proposal might deserve a small bit of credit for avoiding some of the obvious issues that sank the concept of an adult-content .XXX domain name—except for the massive technical flaws and political challenges inherent to the ICPA's design. If you're already wondering about international governance and enforcement, don't worry—CP80 has anticipated your concerns:

Got that?
The ICANN connection

Professor Preston describes the CSC as a group that would focus on Internet safety issues and cites her personal concern that "as Internet policies are developed at ICANN, the interests of families, children, consumers, victims of cybercrime, religions, and cultures become better represented...we need to carefully craft mechanisms involving law and industry that balance unfettered free speech and anonymity with some protections against exploitation of the most vulnerable, the ability to address and reduce criminal activity, and the right of Internet users to have choices in the nature of their access."

As proposed, the CSC would also function as a global outreach initiative and would attempt to coordinate international responses to what the paper posits are common cross-border, cross- cultural concerns. Again, as written, all of this is very kosher: everyone wants to balance rights and responsibilities, protect the "most vulnerable" from exploitation, and give users freedom of choice. Preston's letter advocating the creation of the CSC is consistent with her work for CP80, but some mention of the latter should occur in any discussion of the former, especially since CP80 makes it clear that they've considered the role ICANN might hypothetically play in the creation and international adoption of ICPA-equivalent legislation.

Preston's omission is made potentially more serious by the fact that CP80 itself isn't exactly a digital city on a hill. The organization is headed by Ralph Yarro III, CEO and largest shareholder of the SCO Group. He's also the Founder/CEO of ThinkAtomic; if you visit that company's website you'll note (for now, at least) that the "Featured Company" of the day is CP80. ThinkAtomic is a prominent backer of CP80, and is listed as providing the group with legal, strategic, medical, and technology contributions. Run down the page, and you'll note a common last name—Ralph, Justin, and Matthew Yarro are all listed as technology contributors.

If the BYU professor is serious about establishing the CSC, she'd do well to distance herself from either CP80 or the CSC petition before ICANN. There's nothing within the CSC's stated mission objective that would automatically create conflict with other actors interested in maintaining free speech and online anonymity. The best way to disperse accusations that she or the organization she currently represents has a hidden agenda is to cut ties with one or the other. Whether people agree or disagree with any particular position a hypothetical CSC might advocate, they won't respect the body as legitimate if its viewed as nothing more than the puppet of a US group.

As for CP80's ICPA proposal, it's a bad idea; there's no way feasibly address the political and technical challenges of the project. Even if all such barriers vanished, there would still remain the age-old question of censorship—who does the censoring and writes the standards? Pretending that these issues are irrelevant because we all agree that protecting children is important is whitewashing the topic at its finest. ICANN is accepting public comment on the issue.

By Joel Hruska

Forensics Tool for Firefox 3.X - F3e

An interesting article i stumbled upon while surfing .
Aparently Firefox uses SQLite databases to store all sorts of interesting stuff like :
Internet browsing history,Bookmarks,Settings,Downloads,Cookies,Form History etc.

Mr. Chris Cohen has written a very useful freeware tool that extracts data from these databases . The tool is called Firefox 3 Extractor or F3u and you can download it from here

The location of these databases , differ among operating systems and can be found at these locations :

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\{user id}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{profile folder}\

Windows Vista

C:\Documents and Settings\{user id}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{profile folder}\

Linux/Solaris

{User dir - See /etc/passwd for the location}/.mozilla/firefox/{profile folder}/



Aparently f3u has lately started to extract *experimentaly* same information from chrome browser , even though i haven't quite tested it yet.


If you would like to see a tutorial on how to use it you can click Keven Murphy