Technology / Hacklabs

from independent, 21 October 2008: Early plans to create a giant "Big Brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK were last night condemned by the Government's own terrorism watchdog. Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the independent reviewer of anti-terrorist laws, said the "raw idea" of the database was "awful" and called for controls to stop government agencies using it to conduct fishing expeditions into the private lives of the public. more

from mostly water, 14 August 2008: NEW YORK - The Big Apple is turning into Big Brother, civil liberties groups have warned in response to a new plan from New York city’s police chiefs to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan and hold the details on a massive database. more

from friends, 14 August 2008: An airborne laser weapon dubbed the 'long-range blowtorch' has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF). The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer. more

from email, 14 August 2008: Plans to give local councils and other public bodies the power to monitor e-mail and internet traffic have been branded a "snoopers' charter". The government wants to make it mandatory for phone and internet companies to store all information on personal web use for 12 months. The plan - contained in a Home Office consultation paper - is aimed at making it easier to investigate serious crime. more

from various sources, 12 August 2008: from the guardian - Europe should consider sharing vast amounts of intelligence and information on its citizens with the US to establish a “Euro-Atlantic area of cooperation” to combat terrorism, according to a high-level confidential report on future security.  more

from the Torgygraph, 11 April 2008: Well, its nice to know its not just the average citizens who are being forced into the database society: the pigs will have to be tagged like naughty children too. Every Metropolitan police officer will be "tagged" so that senior officers can monitor their movements on a tracking system, it has been disclosed. PLUS +++ Every police officer must be DNA-profiled as a matter of urgency to avoid them unintentionally contaminating crime scenes, the forensic science watchdog said yesterday. more

from email, 10 April 2008: Cracking a power company network and gaining access that could shut down the grid is simple, a security expert told an RSA audience, and he has done so in less than a day. Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company's desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution. more

from email, 8 April 2008: A London CAAT map on Platial.com has won a site award in the “Activism” category. The map, called London Arms Trade, shows the locations of the offices of weapons manufacturers and distributors in London. The map was created using CAAT resources and the British Defence Industry Directory (Online), to begin to pinpoint those involved in making London the capital of the world arms-broking trade. more

from infoshop, 7 April 2008: Infoshop.org and the Alternative Media Project is pleased to announce the debut of our new link aggregator service, Infoshop Links. Our new service allows people to add links to their favorite websites and enables people to vote on which websites they find interesting, useful or entertaining. People will also be able to view the most popular links, new links, and links arranged by category. more

from various sources, 3 April 2008: During the Republican National Convention assembled in New York in August 2004, protesters used a new mobile text messaging system to communicate developments in the attempted blockades. Although the service, called TXTmob, was widely used by demonstrators, reporters and possibly even police officers, little was known about its inventors. Last month, however, the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created TXTmob. more

posted 31 March 2008: "Police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region have poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues. Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a "one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counter-terrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time..." more

from email, 17 March 2008: A symposium was held last weekend at Hokkaido University to highlight the contributions of citizens media to summit reporting and the role of media centers. The event was organized by the G8 Shimin Media Center Pre-Establishment Working Group with cooperation from Hokkaido U faculty and the G8 Media Network and had been announced on the second page of the Hokkaido Shinbun, the major local newspaper.  more

from infoshop, 29 January 2008: Look to the Left (LTTL) is a new search facility designed to help you navigate the massive volume of information continuously being published by lefty web sites. It is geared towards helping activists search the web more effectively by eliminating the corporate clutter. more

from Cyptogon.con, reposted here 4 January 2008: This is a relatively old article but its all relevant to those people interested in surveillance, social control, data mining, online security, anonymity and traceability. Its written by someone who knows how the internet was developed and how it really works.

As he says "A lot of times, ignorant people refer to things they don’t understand as “tinfoil” ... What follows, however, is so far out that it seems like tinfoil even to me. But then again, I haven’t been targeted by a death squad for my activities online, like some people are in many countries around the world. So, is it tinfoil? For you, maybe. For people struggling against repressive regimes, maybe not." more

4 December 2007: Evidence that the investigation into the "Urewera 16", originally arrested in NZ on terrorism charges, had been under investigation since a 2004 hack on the National Paty's web site.

"On the 12th and 13th of March 2004 the New Zealand National Party website was the subject of attacks, or ‘hacks’, via the internet... The offender(s) uploaded images and text to the website which were predominantly anti the National Party [among other things “Neo Capitalist, Multinational, Racist, Trash” next to a picture with a circled A on a black background]..." more

Users of encryption technology can no longer refuse to reveal keys to UK authorities after amendments to the powers of the state to intercept communications took effect on Monday (Oct 1). more

Two similar articles which popped up in the media today, though when you read a bit more carefully you will realise that its not as bad as it looks. The articles are based on reports on trials conducted by Plymouth plods.

Primarily, the use of head-mounted cameras could be 'problematic' for our sort of people in a public order situation, whether it is an unseemly scuffle with the cops outside the London Anarchist Bookfair, or a larger, more full-on unseemly scuffle with the cops on May Day.  more

repost from infoshop: "The first venture capital money to come into Thefacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal. A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book "The Diversity Myth,"] which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC.  more

In our second podcast we cover upcoming events and background information on the G8, the opposition to it and the alternative summit. The Flash Radio repression forecast informs on the current political climate. more

After a number of great experiences sharing knowledge and skills, the next Indymedia London training tries out a new venue: the Camberwell Squatted Centre. From 3 to 5pm (roughly). For every one who wants to get involved and needs a face-to-face friendly introduction. more

from infoshop: May 02 2007 - An online debate is raging over a number, in this case a series of numbers and letters that reportedly allow people to decrypt files used in HD DVD technology.

This code can be used to decrypt and view certain kinds of DVDs. When users to several social news sites such as Digg started submitting stories about this number, several websites started deleting stories and any mention of the encryption key.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 more

The idea is using pre-translated sentences to write a text. Since you can only use those sentences to write and since they have been already translated, the machine can automatically generate a translation in any number of languages (depending on how many translated sentences were added).

This will not work for literary prose, but it will be fine for simple communiques about people arrested on demonstrations or other typical events. more