Wired: Online Jihadists Plan for 'Invading Facebook'

Online Jihadists Plan for 'Invading Facebook'
By Noah Shachtman December 18, 2008 4:53:03 PM
Categories: Info War

Online jihadists have already used YouTube, blogs and other social media to spread their propaganda. Now, a group of internet Islamic extremists is putting together a plan for "invading Facebook."

"We can use Facebook to fight the media," notes a recent posting on the extremist al-Faloja forum, translated by Jihadica.com. "We can post media on Facebook that shows the Crusader losses."

"We have already had great success in raiding YouTube," the poster adds. "American politicians have used Facebook to get votes, like the house slave Obama."

Groups like al-Qaida were pioneering users of the internet — to train, share ideas and organize. But some observers, like George Washington University professor Marc Lynch, see a reluctance to embrace Web 2.0 tools like Facebook. "One of the biggest problems for a virtual network like AQ today is that it needs to build connections between its members while protecting itself from its enemies. That's a filtering problem: How do you get your people in, and keep intelligence agents out?" he asks.

But as Jihadica.com author and West Point Combating Terrorism Center fellow William McCants notes, the proposed Facebook invasion "is not an attempt to replicate [existing] social networks." Instead, "the members of the campaign want to exploit existing networks of people who are hostile to them and presumably they will adopt new identities once they have posted their material."

The al-Faloja poster suggests seven "brigades" work together within Facebook. One will distribute videos and writing of so-called "martyrs." Another will spread military training material. Most of them will work in Arabic, presumably. But one of the units will focus just on spread English-language propaganda through Facebook.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/12/online-jihadist.html

Daily Herald: Eagle Mountain Councilman blogs the good, bad and ugly

Friday, 12 December
Eagle Mountain Councilman blogs the good, bad and ugly
Caleb Warnock - DAILY HERALD
CRAIG DILGER/Daily Herald Eagle Mountain blogger and city council member David Lifferth - Friday, December 12, 2008.

Looking for the good, the bad, and the ugly in Eagle Mountain? One councilman here has a blog for you. Over the past three years, DavidLifferth.com, owned by the city's namesake councilman, has drawn nearly 300,000 page views from 84 countries by tracking all things Eagle Mountain.

Lifferth is hoping more elected officials will follow his lead into cyberspace.

"People just like someone who is going to be open about government," he said. "If I was not on the council, I would want someone who was in the know to blog and talk about things."

"This blogging that I have done consistently for four years now has forced me to read, understand, and explain the good, the bad, and the ugly here in Eagle Mountain," Lifferth wrote in a recent e-mail to his fans. "I have been praised for my openness and candor while at the same time I have been threatened with a half dozen lawsuits for my openness. This openness and candor caused the readership of my blog to been massive."

Lifferth said his site "has frequently been the most read Web site in all of Eagle Mountain and surrounding areas. My Web site frequently had more page views than Eagle Mountain City's site, the local newspapers sites covering Eagle Mountain, blog and forum sites, and any of the developers' sites."

All this attention is one of the best things that could happen to city government, he said.

"The quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis comes to mind: 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'"

Lifferth said one of the highest compliments paid his site came from a friend who said "the bad guys fear your Web site."

Lifferth is not exactly a cyber newbie, so to speak. He runs about 30 online sites, earning money from advertising on most, if not all, though he does not make money from his site dedicated to city politics, he said.

To draw readers, he makes sure his posts are enticing. Take this recent example: "Reagan Caused Global Warming," a post which documents why, in Lifferth's view, a significant cause of the statistical increase in average global temperature has been the reduction in temperature reporting stations in the former Soviet Union" and Reagan's role in that.

Getting 500 hits a day, Lifferth's most lucrative site is surprisingly -- not political at all -- it is a James Bond fan site, 007BondMovies.ning.com. He also runs JunkScience.ning.com and PonyExpress.ning.com, to name a few.

Lifferth said he tries to have fun with his sites. During his interview with the Daily Herald, he surprised this reporter by bringing up a photo on his Web site of this reporter perusing a competitor's weekly newspaper during a slow moment in an Eagle Mountain City Council meeting. Lifferth said he took the photo from the council dais during the meeting using his cellphone. This reporter never even knew the photo existed.

"You've taken some jabs at me and once in a while I want to take some jabs back," he said with a laugh. "... I do think I have fun with my site. I have a playful attitude."

Jokes aside, every elected official should consider blogging as a way to give information directly to the public, he said. At least several Web sites allow anyone to set up their own blog for free, so getting started is easy.

"I think elected officials should talk about what the issues are, and why things are happening," he said, noting some elected officials in Utah Valley are starting to follow suit, including council members from Payson and Saratoga Springs.

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/292207/17/

TimesOnline: Google Earth accused of aiding terrorists

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5311241.ece
From Times Online
December 9, 2008
Google Earth accused of aiding terrorists

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

An Indian Court has been called to ban Google Earth amid suggestions the online satellite imaging was used to help plan the terror attacks that killed more than 170 people in Mumbai last month.
A petition entered at the Bombay High Court alleges that the Google Earth service, "aids terrorists in plotting attacks". Advocate Amit Karkhanis has urged the court to direct Google to blur images of sensitive areas in the country until the case is decided.
There are indications that the gunmen who stormed Mumbai on November 26, and the people trained them, were technically literate. The group appears to have used complex GPS systems to navigate their way to Mumbai by sea. They communicated by satellite phone, used mobile phones with several different SIM cards, and may have monitored events as the siege unfolded via handheld Blackberry web browsers.
Police in Mumbai have said the terrorists familiarised themselves with the streets of Mumbai's financial capital using satellite images, according to the sole gunman to be captured alive. The commandos who stormed the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai said the militants had made a beeline for the building's CCTV control room.
Russia and China 'harbour cybercriminals'
A report claims that several countries are providing criminal gangs with 'political cover' against prosecution
Koobface virus worms its way into Facebook
Closure of ‘spamming gateway’ McColo Corp gives respite from junk e-mails
Related Links
'Mumbai mastermind' arrested in Kashmir raid
Indian space agency to launch Google Earth rival
The legal petition also follows unconfirmed reports that Faheem Ahmed Ansari, a suspected militant who was arrested in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in February, said he was shown maps of Indian locations on Google Earth by members of Lashkar-e-Taiber, the Pakistan-based terrorist faction that Indian officials are convinced was behind the Mumbai attacks.
Ansari was carrying a fake Pakistani passport and a list and maps of nine targets in southern Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal hotel and other sites attacked last month, a senior police officer told The Times.
Security agencies have called for the wealth of data available on Google Earth to be limited for several years amid fears the freely available application may prove invaluable for militants planning terrorist attacks.
In 2005, the operators of Australia's nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights called on the internet giant to censor images of the plant, warning that the images could be used by terrorists.
Earlier, the satellite photographs of the installation would have been available only to a handful of government agencies and NASA, they said.
In the same year, it was reported that Google omitted to blur the roof of the White House in Washington when it updated the images available on Google Earth – something it had done previously.
South Korea and Thailand also complained after the layout of air bases was revealed.
The Mumbai terrorists concentrated their attacks in south Mumbai, a popular tourist location. However, the plea filed with the Bombay High Court claims that Google Earth includes "absolutely no control to prevent misuse or limit access" to details of nearby sensitive locations, such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
The complaint comes just weeks after India said it would launch its own version of Google Earth.
The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), is being developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent.
It comes as India redoubles its efforts to reap profits from its 45-year-old space programme, long criticised as a drain on a country where 700 million people live on USD2 a day or less.
Bhuvan will use a network of satellites to create a high-resolution, birds-eye view of India – and later, possibly, the rest of the world – that will be accessible at no cost online and will compete with Google.
Isro officials say Bhuvan will provide images of far greater resolution than are currently available online – particularly of the subcontinent, a region where large areas remain virtually unmapped.
The agency intends to refresh its images every year – a feature that would give it an edge over its biggest rival and help keep track of the frenetic pace at which India's cities are growing.
About 2.5 million people used Google Earth in the UK last month, according to Neilsen, the web analysts, making it the web's seventh most popular application behind tools such as Apple's iTunes (fourth with 5.7 million users) and Windows Live Messenger (first with 14.8 million).

Reuters: "Koobface" virus turns up on Facebook

"Koobface" virus turns up on Facebook
Fri Dec 5, 2008 8:32am EST

By Jim

BOSTON (Reuters) - Facebook's 120 million users are being targeted by a virus dubbed ''Koobface'' that uses the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, then tries to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers. It...";

By Jim Finkle
BOSTON (Reuters) - Facebook's 120 million users are being targeted by a virus dubbed "Koobface" that uses the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, then tries to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

It is the latest attack by hackers increasingly looking to prey on users of social networking sites.
"A few other viruses have tried to use Facebook in similar ways to propagate themselves," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said in an e-mail. He said a "very small percentage of users" had been affected by these viruses.

"It is on the rise, relative to other threats like e-mails," said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee Inc.

Koobface spreads by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been infected. The messages, with subject headers like, "You look just awesome in this new movie," direct recipients to a website where they are asked to download what it claims is an update of Adobe Systems Inc's Flash player.

If they download the software, users end up with an infected computer, which then takes users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com, according McAfee.

McAfee warned in a blog entry on Wednesday that its researchers had discovered that Koobface was making the rounds on Facebook.

Facebook requires senders of messages within the network to be members and hides user data from people who do not have accounts, said Chris Boyd, a researcher with FaceTime Security Labs. Because of that, users tend to be far less suspicious of messages they receive in the network.

"People tend to let their guard down. They think you've got to log in with an account, so there is no way that worms and other viruses could infect them," Boyd said.

Social network MySpace, owned by News Corp, was hit by a version of Koobface in August and used security technology to eradicate it, according to a company spokeswoman. The virus has not cropped up since then, she said.

Privately held Facebook has told members to delete contaminated e-mails and has posted directions at www.facebook.com/security on how to clean infected computers.
Richard Larmer, chief executive of RLM Public Relations in New York, said he threw out his PC after it became infected by Koobface, which downloaded malicious software onto his PC. It was really bad. It destroyed my computer," he said.

McAfee has not yet identified the perpetrators behind Koobface, who are improving the malicious software behind the virus in a bid to outsmart security at Facebook and MySpace.
"The people behind it are updating it, refining it, adding new functionalities," said McAfee's Schmugar.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle, Additional reporting by Emily Kaiser; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE4B37LV20081205

Sun UK: YouTube bans 'suggestive' vids

YOUTUBE is cracking down on sexy videos in a bid to clean itself up.

In a blog posting, the video-sharing website revealed it would be enforcing a "stricter standard for mature content".

The popular site – which already bans porn – said it will be "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive'".

"Videos with sexually suggestive (but not prohibited) content will be age-restricted, which means they'll be available only to viewers who are 18 or older," the Google-owned website said.

"Our goal is to help ensure that you're viewing content that's relevant to you, and not inadvertently coming across content that isn't."

Provocative

YouTube also said videos which contain sexually suggestive content or profanity would no longer appear on its lists of 'Most Viewed' or 'Top Favorited' videos.

The internet's top video-sharing site also said it would step up enforcement of rules banning misleading descriptions in the tags and titles of a video.

And thumbnails will now be randomly selected to cut down users who manipulate frames within their videos to get a provocative thumbnail to appear with their video listing.

Some YouTube users have been known to give videos misleading titles such as "sexy" in a bid to increase the view counts of a particular video.

YouTube, which receives 13 hours of video from users every minute, said repeat violators of the new rules will have their accounts terminated.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2000335.ece

Ning: The End of the Red Light District

http://help.ning.com/cgi-bin/ning.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3451&p_sid=y1_SUrkj

The End of the Red Light District

As individuals and as a service, we stand for the freedom to create your own social networks for anything. We believe that people should be able to set their own social norms and Ning, as a broad-based service, is designed to respect many different perspectives and enable them to co-exist seamlessly and effortlessly.

We architected Ning so many diverse types of social networks could create their own social space and this is still one of the proudest achievements we have of the service today. It’s from this foundation that we’ve seen Ning grow to hundreds of thousands of social networks and millions of users around the world.

Therefore, the decision we’re announcing today to discontinue our Red Light District is a tough one. However, from a practical perspective, this difficult decision is the right one.

As of January 1, 2009, we’ll no longer support adult social networks on the Ning Platform.

We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense. Here is what we’ve seen in practice to date with respect to adult social networks on Ning:

Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.

By having legal adult social networks on Ning, we’ve seen a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks. We are always going to do the right thing as it pertains to social networks that are illegal or violate our Terms of Service. That’s non-negotiable. However, the time involved in reporting and assisting the authorities on illegal adult social networks is simply too time and cost intensive for the benefits derived by having adult social networks on Ning.

Adult social networks on Ning receive a disproportionate number of DMCA take down notices creating additional work for our team. We respect intellectual property rights and comply with the DMCA. Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here.

Our focus is on creating incredibly simple, beautiful software and rapidly adding new features for the benefit of all. We can’t do that as efficiently as we need to and still support adult networks on Ning. It’s that simple. We’ve discussed and debated various ways to keep adult networks on Ning operating, including requiring them to be private networks or partnering up with someone who can make them self-sustaining. While there are strong cases to be made for either one of these solutions, they don’t enable us to focus our team on the most efficient execution of the Ning Platform possible.

This is important in all circumstances, but in this recession we have to be relentless in providing the most compelling service in the most efficient way possible. Therefore, from a practical perspective, the only practical answer we see is a clear elimination of adult networks from the Ning Platform altogether.

As part of this transition, we are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members, which is available today from the Manage Members page. As we make progress on the specifics, we’ll communicate them in the here.

Again, this was not an easy decision and we did not make it on philosophical grounds. We made it on a purely practical one. We’re happy to answer any questions you have on this decision here and sincerely appreciate the hard work that all of you affected have put into your social networks on Ning.