The Balkan Chronicle

If proven, international fallout could occur over insecurity of the HTTP Secure system

It has come to light that the National Intelligence Service has been using a technique known as “packet tapping” to spy on emails sent and received using Gmail, Google’s email service. This is expected to have a significant impact, as it proves that not even Gmail, previously a popular “cyber safe haven” because of its reputation for high levels of security, is safe from tapping.

After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its ""law enforcement and intelligence price list"", someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company's spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.

Hackers temporarily blocked the official World Youth Day site Thursday just as Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Madrid to preside over the festivities, a spokeswoman for the event said.

The site (www.madrid11.com) was taken down for about an hour at around midday (1000 GMT) and the event's computer experts were trying to determine the source of the attack, the spokeswoman said.

Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws.

Gordon Frazer, Microsoft UK's managing director, made news headlines some weeks ago when he admitted that Microsoft can be compelled to share data with the US government regardless of where it is hosted in the world.

The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet. The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought -- and it will not be the last attack of its kind.

The complex on a hill near an interchange on the highway from Tel Aviv to Haifa is known in Israel simply as "The Hill." The site, as big as several soccer fields, is sealed off from the outside world with high walls and barbed wire -- a modern fortress that symbolizes Israel's fight for survival in the Middle East. As the headquarters of Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, this fortress is strictly off-limits to politicians and journalists alike. Ordinarily, it is the Mossad that makes house calls, and not the other way around.

One of Germany's police unions is calling for the controversial "naked scanners" at airports to be abandoned after a trial at Hamburg showed an unacceptably high rate of false alarms

The head of the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP) police union, Bernhard Witthaut, told the daily Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung on Monday that the two full body scanners had proved a failure.

Last week Germany's Federal Office for Information Security issued a warning claiming that a security hole in several versions of iOS leaves users vulnerable to malicious code contained in infected PDF files.

The exploit, originally uncovered by a team of hackers at JailbreakMe.com, grants the hacker administration privileges over Apple's devices, giving access to passwords, banking information, email, contact information and even allows for telephone conversation interception... all of which is undetected by the user. So far, the only available patch released to resolve the issue is for jailbroken Apple devices. And so far, there have been no reports of hackers actually taking advantage of this newly-discovered exploit.

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to establish "shadow" Internet and cellphone systems to help dissidents undermine authoritarian governments, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The effort has quickened since former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government shut down the country's Internet in the last days of his rule, said the Times report, which cited planning documents, classified diplomatic cables and sources.

Facebook users will soon no longer need to identify their friends in photographs – the website will do it for them.

In an announcement Tuesday, representatives of Facebook said they would be introducing a new facial recognition technology for the picture tagging process. The technology – which piloted last year to a trial audience – will operate by recognizing faces from a database of all 500 million Facebook users. Google halted release of a similar program, citing privacy issues associated with the software.

Like Apple and Google, Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile operating system.

Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude.

On February 3, it finally happened: the clock ran out on the Internet as we know it. That was the day that the stash of Internet protocol addresses that are used to identify and locate computers connected to the Internet—the telephone numbers of the online world—was exhausted.

The problem is that the current system for IP addresses, IPv4, uses numeric addresses that are 32 bits long—giving a total of just over four billion potential numbers, which must have seemed like a lot when IPv4 was introduced in 1981. But there are now seven billion people on Earth, and more and more of them—and their devices—are going online all the time. Fortunately, engineers realized the limitations of IPv4 a long time ago and lined up a successor, called IPv6, in 1998. (IPv5 was an experimental system that never went public.)

WikiLeaks is now at the centre of a global battle between media and those in power but what's new about what Julian Assange is doing? WikiLeaks is much more than just another journalistic scandal, it is a challenge to the way that power and news media operate in the Internet Age.

In some ways WikiLeaks is a traditional investigative news operation. It gets its information from a source and the journalists decide what they will publish. It needs a platform, an audience and revenue just like any other newsroom. It can also be sued, censored or attacked. But because it is trying to operate online outside of normal national jurisdictions it is harder to hold to account. It can use mirror sites and multiple servers to avoid physical restraint.

Researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute have discovered a way for hackers to access passwords stored on a locked iPhone in only six minutes, without even cracking the phone's passcode.

Jens Heider, one of the authors of a research paper published this week, said Apple's iPhone and iPad are not as secure as commonly thought.

The European Union is considering introducing legislation that would enable people to request that all personal information stored about them online be permanently deleted.

Users could sue websites for invading their privacy and would have a right to be “forgotten” online, under new proposals from the European Union. It has drafted potential legislation that would include new, unprecedented privacy rights for citizens sharing personal data.

D`oh, now there's a redundant question.
Yesterday, ZDNET blogger Ed Bott asserted that "it's time to stop using IE6." I s-o-o-o-o disagree. For many organizations and all consumers, it's time to stop using any version of Microsoft's browser -- IE6, IE7, IE8 and forget someday releasing IE9. Less than a week ago, the German government told its citizens to switch from Internet Explorer. This is good advice for you, too.