Many ISPs or other Internet services in these current days will often voluntarily co-operate with the authorities without requiring warrants and such. Some will be even working directly with the MPAA/RIAA. However there are some people out there, like Nick Merrill who are are totally not like that.

Today he is raising money to start a non-profit ISP and mobile phone service that will be designed to resist surveillance, with things like encryption, minimal logging and mostly by challenging requests by the authorities that are abusive and/or illegal and/or unconstitutional.

So if you do live in the U.S.A. and more precisely NY for now, you could be very interested in checking out Calyx Institute and perhaps donating via Indiegogo or via their Paypal form.

Also, check out the people on the advisory board.

Today I learned that on March 8 2012 the FBI will be shutting down some surrogate DNS resolvers and that could break the Internet for as much as 500 kilo Americans and many others in the world. These resolvers have been configured on computers that have been infected with some DNSChanger virus.

Wait, what ? Yeah so, this virus would replace the user's resolvers and point their DNS queries to malicious servers that would give whatever results they want, like point people to really fake banking sites and fake webmails etc etc with the difference to usual phishing being that they would have the correct URL in the address bar

So then I searched a bit and find out that the FBI has chased down the bad guys and replaced the malicious servers with one's that provide true DNS results so that no user's would be impacted, that was Operation Ghost Click.

The effect of this is that if you were infected, you probably still are. Indeed those infected had no idea because everything just continued functioning as usual. That was the goal it seems.

The obvious question is, why didn't they just redirect users to a page that explains that their systems have been infected, the FBI just saved the day, and eventually add a few links to help the user find a fix for their systems ? If I was a tiny bit paranoid I'd say it was a good opportunity to gather some user data.. . If I wasn't paranoid I would say that the "ruling class" is afraid of exposing their subjects to reality, fear of panic and all that stuff.

Lulz is everywhere and suddenly. They appear to have attacked (by cyber means) half of the Internets, so far only parts of the bad half have been hit. Some say this is a fork of Anonymous, the group that isn't really a group. Others even suspect they could be an undercover group of government agents looking to attract 1337 h4x0r5 in to their net.

This article talks about the subject, paranoia, informers, denunciation, etc... note the DarkMarket incident. From a suspicious point of view, this all looks very suspicious.

From what I originally understood, this group formed partly because of the absurd idea from the U.S. government that cybercrimes should be considerable as acts of war. Maybe some people don't believe there is a difference between actual war crimes and a good old DDoS ?

So what should we make of a cyber attack where British intelligence officers attack Al Qaida's website. They replaced a recipe for a bomb with a recipe for cupcakes, the style is very Lulz by the way. Does this mean that the U.S.A. gov considers that the U.K. just declared war on Al-Quaida ? Does this legitimise any eventual response ?

This may sound a bit hippie but, can't we just DDoS each other and own each other's blogs without going all atomic bomb or navy seal ? That would be nice.

The U.S. government has declared that hacking can now to be considered an act of war in certain circumstances. Until now when someone hacked into a system they could eventually be traced and get some fine or even prison time and such. Now if it's an act of war, well, I guess they consider they can now just bomb your place or something. I'm not sure how this really works.

Lulz Security, or LulzSec, is a serious organisation that doesn't like to laugh. So they hacked into some FBI affiliated website, infragardatlanta.org just for the fun of it, they had to it was Friday. They seem to be doing this to demonstrate that it's a ridiculous concept that seems to say "we don't know how to secure our databases so... you know, we'll resort to fists".

Read more about lulzsec releases, and if that is down a report of this incident can be found here.