One of the surprises from my trip to Costa Rica has been the prevalence in the media of stories regarding internet fraud, phishing and other hacking attacks. Back in August the police arrested 16 individuals involved in identity theft in order to remove ¢800 million CRC (about $1.6 million USD) Read more
Kopimists around the world are grieving the loss of the IFPI.com domain (which stands for International Federation of Pirates Interests) in a WIPO dispute over its ownership. The owner, as such things stand, was the Pirate Bay. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry initiated a domain name dispute with Read more
(via Ars Technica) EFF has released a report outlining several practices at Comcast, a popular American ISP. This is controversial, because some ISPs sell themselves as high-speed with no restrictions, which would be violated by bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping. Comcast claims that it delays bittorrent traffic, and does not Read more
Those of you interested in Creative Commons may remember that the organisation was sued by a family in Texas as a result of a Flickr image that got misused by Virgin Mobile Australia (more details here). The complaint against Creative Commons from the Chang family was with regards to negligence, Read more
Last week I was rather quiet for several reasons. On Wednesday I presented a paper entitled “Build Your Own World” at the beautiful Glasgow venue called The Lighthouse (available from the awesome Slideshare website). I was very impressed with the knowledgeable and diverse audience, but I am now a complete Read more
President Nicolas Sarkozy has a new target: Internet pirates. According to Reuters, France is set to punish illegal downloaders by cutting off their broadband. Apparently, they will receive warnings, and at the third their ISP will be forced to cut them off. I am sure that many people will make Read more
I’ve just received a second academic scam. My comments in green: From: un.academicawards@katamail.com [this would be more convincing if it was masked as a UN addres] UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY AWARDS COORDINATOR [actually, there is such thing as the UN University!] BRENT ADAMS (UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL GRANTS)UNIVERSITY STAFF AND UNDERGRADUATE AWARD Read more
Is your wife cheating you on the virtual world? Do you want to check on the extra-curricular activities of a future employee? Hire SL(eye) Investigations! Their services include: • Vetting & Pre-Employment Screening• Asset Tracking• People Tracing• Theft & Fraud Investigation• General Research• Computer Security & Data Recovery The site Read more
We have all become used to identity fraud scams coming from the daughter of the late Prime Minister of Burkina Faso; or lottery winning addresses for the UK National Lottery mysteriously coming from Yahoo Hong Kong addresses. I have just received a first, which I thought I would share with Read more