White Hackers

Well its not legal now but it may be once the FCC approves it. As of now only federal agencies can spy on you legally:P

Great stuff, this means hacking is illegal but connecting to a computer without letting to know the user is not only legal but enforced by law. What a strange world...

"Proposed changes to the Police and Justice bill would make it an offense to make, adapt, supply, or offer to supply any article which is designed or adapted to impair the operation of a computer, prevent or hinder access to a computer, or impair the operation of any program or access to any data." Hell, you don't even have to write anything. If you know what it is/does, you could be found guilty! "knowing that it is designed or adapted for use in the course of or in connection with an offence under section 1 or 3" Spooky stuff there kids.

Thinks the federal government is too intrusive? You ain't seen nothing yet. An FCC mandate will require that all hardware and software have a wiretap backdoor that allows the government to tap into all your communications. The mandate expands the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), and requires that every piece of hardware and software sold include the backdoor. The rule isn't yet final, but once it is, all vendors will have 18 months to comply. And in fact, says Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), some router makers already include such a backdoor. So your hardware may be vulnerable. There are several problems with this rule. First is the obvious massive intrusion into all of our privacy. Second, says Templeton, is the way that the rule will stifle innovation. According to the Washington Post, he claims that the rule will "require that people get permission to innovate" would create "regulatory barriers to...

new nmap born. (version 3.9999) Now we are getting very close to the big 4.0 release. QUOTE I am pleased to announce the release of Nmap 3.9999. From the version number, you can probably guess that we are getting very close to the big 4.0 release. But this version has many changes, so I wanted to give you a chance to fully test it out before releasing 4.0. Please let me know if you find any problems in the next few days. Now back to the changes -- I think you'll like these. One new feature is runtime integration, which allows you to press [enter] at any time for a status report with an estimated completion time for the current scan. Another is asynchronous DNS, which speeds up large network scans as Nmap doesn't have to resolve each IP serially using the (slow) host resolver anymore. Windows users may appreciate that there is now an executable installer -- nmap-3.9999-setup.exe, which takes care of things like WinPcap and the registry performance improvements for you. The trad...

There are three fairly interesting flaws in how HTTP cookies were designed and later implemented in various browsers; these shortcomings make it possible (and alarmingly easy) for malicious sites to plant spoofed cookies that will be relayed by unsuspecting visitors to legitimate, third-party servers. http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/107/4...5/30/0/threaded View

Information Security made great strides last year. Sadly, so did cyber crime. In the U.S. ? according to a recent FBI study ? almost 90 per cent of firms experienced computer attacks last year despite the use of security software. So what happened in 2005? In a year when rootkits went mainstream and malware went criminal, information security improved. There was no global pandemic like the Slammer or Blaster worm juggernaut. There was no malware with a replication magnitude of the order of Code Red, Slammer, Nimda, or the Iloveyou virus. With the notable exception of PHP worms, even the Linux side had fewer popular viruses and worms. Patching got easier. Not only did more and more sophisticated patch management tools arrive from every sector, but there were fewer patches to deploy. Administrators got better at blocking hackers and malware. And end users don't click on every file attachment they receive. But security onslaughts attain greater significance as the year saw the metamor...

For its upcoming Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft is readying a new, highly configurable firewall designed to give administrators much greater control over which applications can run on the systems they manage. After just over a month of testing by users of Microsoft's Community Technology Preview (CTP), the firewall is "very much on track" to be in the final Vista release scheduled for later this year, and the company is considering adding a similar feature for its consumer users, said Austin Wilson, a director in Microsoft's Windows client group. More here Vista two way firewall http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,124501,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp