A foreign hacker who penetrated security at a Harrisburg, Pa., water filtering plant is under investigation by the FBI for planting malicious software capable of affecting the plant's water treatment operations, ABC News has learned.
The hacker tried to covertly use the computer system as its own distribution system for e-mails or pirated software, officials told ABC.
"The concern was high because it is a computer that controls an important infrastructure system, and if, for some reason, it caused it to fail, it would have disrupted service," said Special Agent Jerri Williams of the FBI's Philadelphia field office.
Hackers Penetrate Water System Computers
Richard Esposito, October 30, 2006 3:15 PM
The report says this isn't the first such water supply cracking incident.
...the problem of agricultural safety and security mirrors the security
issues in computer networks, especially with the
monoculture
in operating systems and network protocols.
I say irony, because of course the concept of monoculture originated
in ecology and agriculture, from which it was imported to computing,
which
Bruce knows as well as anyone else.
...in time all global telecommunications will become Internet Protocol (IP) based.
...
In his opinion, this industry has spent too much time and energy on creating rules and regulations to govern the use of VoIP as opposed to embracing the technology and developing it and making it available for wider use in the community. Pulver made the point however, that despite these objections, the use of VoIP continued to grow at a rapid pace, and the threat of this wide spread use resulted in telephone companies in the United States dropping to their overseas rates, particularly to
their major trading partners.
Valdis Krebs has taken the ideas of connectors and mavens
as described in Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point,
and measured and mapped them for a smallish geographic area,
northern Ohio.
What he's measured is connections among bloggers and innovators,
both separately, and who's in both networks.
Amusingly enough, the first comment he got was from the most
connected connector he measured.
Who remarked that he had deliberately tried to build his
network of connections this way.
Reality imitates art?
I think it would be even more interesting if these connector maps
were updated regularly, and animated to show changes over time.
But the Internet didn't exist back then, and at least the experimental
Internet did in 1981, so Eric's got a fair claim on the beginning
of Internet mail.
What does a repressive regime do to avoid free discussion?
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's internet service providers (ISPs) have started
reducing the speed of Internet access to homes and cafes based on new
government-imposed limits, a move critics said appeared to be part of
a clampdown on the media.
An official said last week that ISPs were now "forbidden" by the
Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster
than 128 kilobytes per second (KBps), the official IRNA news agency
reported. He did not give a reason.
Internet technicians say speeds of 256 KBps, 512 KBps or higher are
increasingly common internationally. Iranian surfers will now find it
much slower to download music or anything else from the Web. Businesses
have not been affected by the move.
If the Internet provides a way to get around the traditional,
and already controled, media, find a way to repress the Internet.
Slowing it down is easier than censoring it.
In an ever-changing world, it's good to know there are some things
you can depend on, such as bugs in monopoly software, even as soon
as it's released:
Danish security company Secunia ApS reported today that IE7 contains an
information disclosure vulnerability, the same one it reported in IE6
in April. The vulnerability affects the final version of IE7 running on
Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.
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