• Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. -via- WSJ Broad New Hacking Attack Detailed.

and the infographic above is how they did it.

‘Operation Titstorm’ a Success

• Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group, Anonymous, unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.
• The group, which has brought down Scientology’s websites and undertaken a host of other online pranks, dubbed the attack “Operation Titstorm” to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography hosting adult actors if they appeared under age. Other violent material targeting children is also to be censored.
• Anonymous, whose past targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi webcaster,  sent Australian media e-mail messages warning of the attack, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
• “No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be unwanted,” the e-mail said. “The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”
• At one point Thursday, Parliament’s website was felled after getting 7.5 million hits a second. Usually, it receives a few hundred a second.
• Flyers seeking recruits for Wednesday’s barrage said the group would follow the service attack with “a shitstorm of porn email, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices….”

New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism.
Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
NYT: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

• Ground breaking surveillance software, Vitamin D Video, is now available for sale at an impressively low price. I had a chance to review the program’s impressive object recognition and recording capabilities when I covered the beta launch a few months ago. This is a really cool application of limited artificial intelligence. Vitamin D Video uses algorithms based on human brain activity to quickly identify objects in a video feed. By setting the controls, you can specify events that will trigger a recording, an email alert, or an audio notice. Vitamin D not only acts like an electronic watchdog for your camera, it can take hours of monotonous footage and reduce it down to a highlight reel you want to watch. During the beta, testers used the program for some really cool applications you can read about on the VDV site. Interested in getting a copy for yourself? It’s free if you only want to use it on one camera. Two cameras and you’ll have to pay $50. Or you can pay $200 and use as many cameras as you like from one computer. That cheap price tag could launch Vitamin D Video to dominate the small business and home market.

• Washington (CNN) — The Pentagon will no longer shape the U.S. military to fight two major conventional wars at once, but rather prepare for numerous conflicts and not all in the same style, according to a draft of a new strategic outlook the Pentagon is announcing on Monday.
• The change will be addressed in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated document that looks at future threats and the military’s requirements to mitigate them.
• According to Pentagon officials, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be asking for $708 billion, including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — $44 billion more the 2010 budget of $664 billion.
• The last major review was released in 2006 and the Pentagon’s view of the world has changed dramatically in the four years since.
• The 2006 review was heavily focused on the threat of a large-scale conventional war with China and that country’s saber rattling over Taiwan. It also stressed the need for more of and a greater role for special forces troops for use in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The 2010 review still stresses the threats from China, but will look at the need to defend against a growing threat of cyber attacks — without directly tying China to past cyber attacks, according to Pentagon officials — and China’s focus on preemptively striking and crippling an adversary’s ability to tell what it will do next ahead of a large attack.
• “Prudence demands that future conflicts could involve kinetic and non-kinetic (use of explosive weapons and laser weapons) attacks on space-based surveillance and communications,” according to the draft.

• Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, said “there are at least 10 countries in the world whose internet capability is sophisticated enough to carry out cyber attacks … and they can make it appear to come from anywhere.”
• “The Internet is the biggest command and control centre for every bad guy out there,” he said.
• The head of online security company McAfee told another Davos debate Friday that China, the United States, Russia, Israel and France are among 20 countries locked in a cyberspace arms race and gearing up for possible Internet hostilities.
• Mundie and other experts have said there is a growing need to police the internet to clampdown on fraud, espionage and the spread of viruses.
• “People don’t understand the scale of criminal activity on the internet. Whether criminal, individual or nation states, the community is growing more sophisticated,” the Microsoft executive said.
• “We need a kind of World Health Organisation for the Internet,” he said.
• “When there is a pandemic, it organises the quarantine of cases. We are not allowed to organise the systematic quarantine of machines that are compromised.”
• He also called for a “driver’s license” for internet users.
• “If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”
• Andre Kudelski, chairman of Kudelski Group, said that a new internet might have to be created forcing people to have two computers that cannot connect and pass on viruses. “One internet for secure operations and one internet for freedom.”

• Here you will find hundreds of radical zines ready to print. You can also upload zines to the site ( zines with file sizes bigger than 7mb can be uploaded to http://indymedia.org and linked here). Feel free to comment and contribute.

Many categories, quite a resource for resistance thinking and doing.

Although it is just a toy for RC planes, it drops the ‘bomb’ when you want AND you can still put a payload in the bomb compartment. Hmm…

• If flying remote control planes doesn’t sound like fun to you… imagine dropping remote controlled bombs while flying a remote control plane.  Sounds a whole lot more exciting, doesn’t it? That’s what the makers of the $17 Quanum RC Bomb System were thinking, and I have to agree with them.  It looks fairly realistic, and is a simple to install for any RC plane enthusiast.  It sticks to the underside of and .25 size or larger RC aircraft, and is triggered by an extra servo channel in your receiver. That means you can drop it at just the right moment to assault your target.

• The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said “unprecedented and probably impossible” carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F).
• Scientists say exceeding this limit could lead to dangerous global warming.
• “We urgently need to change our economy to live within its environmental budget,” said Nef’s policy director.
• Andrew Simms added: “There is no global, environmental central bank to bail us out if we become ecologically bankrupt.”
• None of the existing models or policies could “square the circle” of economic growth with climate safety, Nef added.
• Magic bullets - such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear or even geo-engineering - are potentially dangerous distractions from more human-scale solutions,” said co-author Victoria Johnson, Nef’s lead researcher for the climate change and energy programme.
• She added that there was growing support for community-scale projects, such as decentralised energy systems, but support from governments was needed.
• “At the moment, magic bullets… are getting much of the funding and political attention, but are missing the targets,” Dr Johnson said.
• “Our research shows that to prevent runaway climate change, this needs to change.”
• The report concluded that an economy that respected environmental thresholds, which include biodiversity and the finite availability of natural resources, would be better placed to deliver human well-being in the long run.
• Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-thank, said Nef’s report exhibited “a complete lack of understanding of economics and, indeed, human development”.
• “It is precisely this economic growth which will lift the poor out of poverty and improve the environmental standards that really matter to people - like clean air and water - in the process, as it has done throughout human history,” he told BBC News.
• “There’s only one good thing I can say for the Nef’s report, and that’s that it is honest. Its authors admit that they want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs.”

(Mr. Clougherty, could you point out for us a time in human history when economic growth wiped poverty clean from the planet and did no environmental damage?)

• LONDON (AFP) - A man was arrested by anti-terrorism police and suspended from his job after he sent a Twitter message joking that he was going to blow up an airport, a report said Monday.
• When heavy snow at Robin Hood airport in Doncaster, northern England, threatened to ruin Paul Chambers’ plans to fly to Ireland, he vented his frustration by tapping out a message on the social networking site.
• “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote, according to The Independent newspaper. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
• A week after posting the message, Chambers was arrested under anti-terrorism laws at his office after police had apparently received a tip-off.
• The 26-year-old was questioned for seven hours by officers who failed to see the joke in his message. He has been bailed to February 11 when he will find out if he will be charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax.
• He has also been suspended from work pending an internal investigation and banned from the airport for life.

Related: Tactics of Failure as Strategy.

criminalwisdom:

HOW TO THROW KNIVES
Image from Sideshow World’s Knife Throwing And Dangerous Acts collection.