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Soon it will be practicable to take someone's photo on a smartphone and within minutes know their Social Security number and a range of other private data like their personal interests, sexual preference and credit status, researchers will tell the Black Hat security conference this week. The technique calls for linking faces of random individuals to images in databases that contain other information about them and using that information to project Social Security numbers, says Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who will present the research at the conference. He says if he can arrange the logistics, he...

Long story short, hacking is noble if you’re a powerful left-winger, but sinful if you’re allegedly rightwing. It’s also acceptable for powerful left-wingers to tap the phones of less powerful left-wingers, in order to cement their leadership ambitions. The first and most important principle to keep in mind though is to have an unbalanced worldview, bordering on schizophrenic. Don’t worry. There’s a proud history here you should be aware of. Take Democrat Obama’s hero Democrat FDR. The historian Paul Johnson reminds us in Modern Times (page 650): The tradition of presidential skulduggery had begun with Franklin Roosevelt. He had created...

You mess with Murdoch … you mess with the whole family. ABC News puts a spotlight on the reaction of Wendy Deng Murdoch to an attack on her husband, News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch, as he and his son James testified before a Parliamentary committee earlier today: A Parliament hearing into hacking by News Corp. journalists erupted into chaos Tuesday as CEO Rupert Murdoch was attacked by a man with what appeared to be a pie.Wendi Deng Murdoch, his wife, rose from her seat behind her husband to protect him and took a swing at the intruder. The man was...

LONDON (AP) — Police say Sean Hoare, the whistleblower reporter who alleged widespread hacking at the News of the World, has been found dead. Police said Hoare's death at his home in England was not considered to be suspicious, according to Britain's Press Association news agency. Hoare was quoted by The New York Times as saying that phone-hacking was widely used and even encouraged at the News of the World tabloid under then-editor Andy Coulson.

snip ...British tabloids have been known for decades for buying scoops and digging up dirt on the famous. Fleet Street has long had a well-earned global reputation for the blind-quote, single-sourced story that may or may not be true. The outrage in this case stems from the hacking of a noncelebrity, the murder victim Milly Dowler. snip The idea that the BBC and the Guardian newspaper aren't attempting to influence public affairs, and don't skew their coverage to do so, can't stand a day's scrutiny. The overnight turn toward righteous independence recalls an eternal truth: Never trust a politician. snip...

Breaking news - headline only so far

Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been arrested in connection with an investigation into phone hacking and bribery. The 43-year-old was arrested by appointment by Operation Weeting police at a London police station. Met Police said she is currently still in custody. This is the 10th arrest made by police investigating hacking allegations by the News of the World newspaper. She was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of corruption allegations. The Operation Weeting team is conducting the current investigation into phone hacking.

4Share Change font size: A | A Vyan at Daily Kos is getting giddy in a post headlined “Could we soon see a world without Fox News?” It's apparently all over for FNC: "In less than a week the News of the World Wiretapping and Bribery Scandal has quickly metastasized into a Multi-Headed Dragon of Death for Murdoch Empire and simply lopping off one head, doesn't seem to be enough - the infection has already spread." Now that Fox-hating liberal interest groups, bloggers, and Democrat politicians are vowing to investigate, the Kosmonauts think Murdoch's "criminal enterprise" is about to collapse:...

Two "events" caught my attention today. One was something that just happened; the other was more about the infamous Stuxnet worm. I am not sure I have good answers to both these events, but I have some ideas, and I think we need to think together about solutions. Let's start with the event that just happened. According to Information Week, "Hacktivist group AntiSec started the week with yet another intrusion on a government contractor, this time targeting Booz Allen Hamilton and posting what it claims are 90,000 military email addresses and passwords from the contractor online." I took a look...

The Obama campaign website was hacked on Tuesday and invited supporters to two fake anti-government events hosted by an unnamed "Commy Obama."The campaign's application for mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, directed users to two events titled "Rules of Politics" scheduled for noon on Tuesday in Washington."1. Politicians and other public servants lie," read the event description provided on the Obama campaign website. (Full screenshot here.) "2. Politicians tell you what you want to hear and offer to provide things for 'free' to get votes. 3. When government buys, the people pay."The 430-word message lists 21 total anti-government criticisms,...

This is a doozy, even as it's still unverified. According to Anonymous, hacker @Abhaxas just leaked a lengthy text file revealing part of Florida's voter database. Included are voter statistics, candidates, and electoral race data. In the release, Abhaxas writes: So, this is a little ironic. Here is inside details of florida voting systems. Now.. who still believes voting isn't rigged? If the United States Government can't even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!

LulzSec the hacker group that has been a thorn in the side of major institutions ranging from Sony to the CIA, says it is going away -- but not quietly. The group said late Saturday it would disband. In what it says is its final act of mayhem, it publicly unloaded a trove of documents containing a significant amount of compressed data. "Our planned 50-day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance...our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011," LulzSec says in its final message. . The group says it chose to end its campaign...

A British teenager is suspected of masterminding computer hacking attacks on the CIA, the U.S. Senate and Sony from his bedroom. Ryan Cleary, 19, was arrested at his family’s home in Essex in a dramatic swoop following a joint inquiry by Scotland Yard and the FBI. He was held hours after the UK’s serious crime unit came under online siege from the hacking group known as LulzSec. The group recently declared on Twitter its intention to break into government websites and banks and leak confidential documents.

CNN) -- They've breached or busted the websites of the CIA, PBS and the U.S. Senate, and launched at least part of an extended attack on Sony, whose PlayStation Network was brought to a grinding halt for the better part of a month. And, to hear them tell it, it's all for a laugh. Meet Lulz Security, or LulzSec, the gleeful and secretive band of hackers who appear to be responsible for a string of high-profile and sometimes embarrassing Internet attacks. Their most recent strike, and arguably the most ambitious, was a distributed denial-of-service attack Wednesday that shut down the...

Chinese Warn Google May Get Punished For Making Country Look Bad Jun 6, 2011 at 8:31am ET by Greg Sterling China is being very defensive. Google’s recent exposure of more attempted Gmail hacking, targeting US government officials and Chinese human-rights activists, has made the Chinese government embarrassed and angry. Suspected state-sponsored Gmail hacking is what initially caused Google to discontinue cooperating with China’s internet censorship policies. Chinese: Google Is a “Political Tool” Last week’s hacking incident and Google’s statements that indirectly point to the government as the source have the Chinese seeing red, so to speak. Claiming that China is...

Google wouldn't be human if it weren't relieved that the latest Chinese hacking incident targeted not a hole in Google's defenses but a gullibility of its customers. The proper term is "spear phishing" for the use of email cons to scam a specific, chosen individual into revealing his or her password, allowing unauthorized access to inboxes and online accounts. In a blog post this week, Google announced that the latest attacks seem to come from Jinan, China. The targets were the Gmail accounts of "senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military...

After spending the last two days generating more questions than answers, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) held a press conference this morning to announce that he had nothing more to say. Saying that the “prank has apparently been successful,” Weiner told the media that he had “answered questions extensively … that anyone wanted to put” and that he would have no more to say on the matter of a salacious picture sent out on his Twitter feed: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Funny, most of the media is under the impression that Weiner hasn’t really answered two questions in particular:...

In an interview with CBS News Wednesday, New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner repeatedly refused to deny that his crotch is seen in a lewd photograph sent to a college student from his Twitter account. Weiner did say explicitly that he did not send the photo. "I did not, this was a prank, a hoax," he told CBS News' Congressional Correspondent Nancy Cordes. He said his "system was hacked into," noting that "we've retained a firm that is going to take a look at the Internet security that to make sure this does not happen again." Weiner said the firm...

Revealed: The glamorous Twitter girls followed by Congressman Weiner as he denies sending lewd picture By Daily Mail Reporter Sent private messages on Twitter to porn star called 'Miss Ginger Lee' Pursued attractive congress worker two days after 9/11 attacks Sponsored a bill in 2008 to give 1,000 visas to foreign models Refuses to answer questions on crotch shot as he hires a lawyer The New York Congressman under fire for allegedly sending a crotch picture to a female student faced fresh controversy today after it emerged he follows a string of glamorous women on Twitter. Anthony Weiner has almost...

Lockheed Martin Corp, the world's biggest aerospace company and the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, has been hit by an unspecified cyber incident, the government said on Saturday. The Department of Homeland Security said it and the Defense Department had offered to help gauge the scope of a "cyber incident impacting LMCO," as the maker of fighter jets, ships and other major weapons systems is known. The U.S. government also has offered to help analyze "available data in order to provide recommendations to mitigate further risk," Chris Ortman, a Homeland Security official, said in an e-mailed reply to a...