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.

I don't use FTP anymore to transfer files.. However today I *had* to. This is the day I realise that I still haven't found the perfect FTP client.

The LFTP problem:

Don't get me wrong, I like this program, however it's when I need to "get" recursively that I start to have to think.. is it "mirror" or "mirror -R" ? .. knowing that one of the options will delete stuff remotely I have taken the habit of simply not using this tool. It does seem completely stupid to have such an option when most people are used to the "-r" switch.. . why would "get file" become "get mirror directory/" ? So close yet, no. (And yes, I know, I can be that way : ] ).

The NCFTP issue:

hmm, well, it's actually the program I've used the most, it has bookmarks and stuff, uses the normal "-R" syntax, it also has some neat features useful when scripting. However it does not support any form of encryption, so it can only be considered private if used in 1855. Another issue I encountered today, is when I finally was going to recursively get a directory I got this new and neat error: tar: This does not look like a tar archive Yes, directories are not tar archives, thanks for the heads up.

Yet another FTP client, YAFC:

This one seems cool, I'm sure it's the best one for me EXCEPT (of course) that whoever develops this program does not seem to care about the users enough to leave a help file or something. There is a manual, but say you copy a file that already exists, you get a nice prompt: Overwrite? [yncauR, ? for help] And yes, the "?" has no effect (in my case at least). Even the "help" command does not work. So this could be the one, but I might never know. To be fair, I met this program only recently so maybe when we get to know each other better things will work out... .

The solution:

I think that the 3 developers need to get into some threesome and bring to this earth a decent, simple, functional command line GNU FTP client that works..

Microsoft has purchased Skype. Now I'm wondering what is going to happen to this software. I know its never been Free Software, however in it's early days it was directly available for GNU/Linux at a time where most other software vendors would not consider platforms other than windows and macos. Another thing is that I have to admit that it does work and it works well.

So what will happen next ? I predict they will first drop the GNU/Linux version. Then they will of course drop the p2p system and prefer a centralised method that will make it less efficient... Good side is that maybe more work, technical and promotional, might go into XMPP + Jingle (Jabber) and that would be cool. In the meantime, brb need to delete an account.

I don't even know how to go about writing about this.. So the Internet used to be a place where physical location did not matter.. Then websites started to deny access depending on your IP's declared physical location... .

Innovation being a part of the Internet, it seems that we may soon have a system to mimic real world borders, at least in Europe that is. It would work just like regular borders, most people can come in, some will need a visa others just a load of cash or something.

Of course internal movement will be free, except from time to time, like in case of revolutions in countries bordering Europe, France and Italy will try to close the borders down to national levels.

Anyway, the good news is that this might just slide as it is probably just a some kind of tantrum from Hungary's tenure of European presidency.

Lately Sony's Playstation network has been totally compromised and has been down for I don't even know how long and seems wont be back up until next summer or something.

The reason for the outage has changed since it all started, first it was hacked by Anonymous, then it was down because of equipment failure or something.. Now it's been hacked by professional Internet robbers with the intent to re-sell the data, estimated at 100 000$ or more.

Since Sony has been a real bunch of assholes with some hardware hackers (Sony clients), like graf_chokolo and geohot, they have annoyed a few people and they have to expect a reaction. If we live in a world where in a couple of days (or less?) some people can get their homes raided, their R&D stolen from them and other things like fines, prison threats etc etc etc, then do expect a reaction that will not be (only) in the form of protests, boycotts, rants, etc...

At what point does one company have too much power ? And how on earth did we come to this point where taking apart an object you own and playing with it is illegal because you don't own the things you buy ? Will Ikea sue me if I transform a kitchen worktable into a bench and publish a howto ?

So, kiddie script hackers, a failed hard drive, the Internet mafia or God herself ? Doesn't matter, Sony deserves everything it just got, heck it probably deserves so much more.

Yuri Gagarin is the first human to orbit our planet, he made it around the world in 108 minutes on April 12 1961. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event The Attic Room has put together a trip around the planet. This video uses original images as well as new images, they tried much to stay on the same path Yuri took.

So go to firstorbit.org, read more about it, watch it, download it share it.. . Oh by the way, this is released under the Creative Commons license.

Humble Bundle is back and it's cooler than ever (because it's frozen). The idea is:

• Pay what you want
• Support charity
• DRM free

The really cool part is that it will run on the operating system that reasonable people prefer, GNU/Linux. The games will also run on the gaming OS, Windows and the show off OS, MacOS.

Go get your copies at Humblebundle.com. Also note, just like last time, it seems that GNU/Linux users are far more generous than the users of other operating systems... .. .

My first and second (and third) impression was "this must be an April Fools' joke... I'm sure it must be.

source: e-edition.metro.co.uk (you can put any fake email in their box).

More on Comodo as it seems that there was another attempt to generate more SSL certs. Very interesting is that COMODOHACKER explains him/her.self via the copy pasting site. Some interesting details were shared like: I hacked Comodo from InstantSSL.it, their CEO's e-mail address mfpenco@mfpenco.com Their Comodo username/password was: user: gtadmin password: globaltrust Their DB name was: globaltrust and instantsslcms You have to admit that with a password like that... . you can be sure they mean business. (and by that I mean none of my business).

Anyway, it has been confirmed that this person is indeed responsible (at least partially) for this nice demonstration by errata security.

I'll just say it again, when will we all agree that the business of signing SSL certificates is just a bunch of bullshit ?

We [should] all know that trusting third party SSL roots is bad, but if you are still not convinced then read how Comodo's SSL service was compromised. In short a reseller account was broken into and from there the attacker requested certificates for 7 domain names.

What this means is that certificates are issued without being verified. Whether it is the reseller or an attacker that is trying to generate certificates, they are not really verified, they are simply issued. Again, why do people trust ANY of these Certificate Authorities ?

Maybe time to think more about Monkeysphere and/or an SSL verified over DNS system.