Apple's China Experience Sours as State Hackers Target iCloud Data
Apple store in Beijing. Photo by Chinnian via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Hackers backed by the central Chinese government have been staging man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on Apple's iCloud in an attempt to steal iCloud user data such as iMessages, photos and contacts. According to Greatfire.org, a research group focused on Internet censorship in China, the attacks took place when Apple launched iPhone6 in China on Oct. 17.
In the course of the attacks, hackers interposed their own website, with a fake iCloud.com certificate, between users and Apple's iCloud server to intercept user data. Earlier that day, Google, Github and Yahoo faced similar attacks aimed at stealing their users’ passwords.
Greatfire saw the attacks as emblematic of the proverbial price paid by foreign companies that choose to make their services available in China, and posited that the attacks were triggered by the increased encryption standards on the iPhone 6 and the spreading of pro-democracy protest news, images and videos to mainland China through encrypted iCloud servers. The group further explained that the attacks appeared to originate from “deep within the Chinese domestic Internet backbone” and China Internet providers could not be unaware of the data interception. Read More!
Censorship? Spain Imposes ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Content Aggregators to Protect its Print Media Industry
Desperate nations do desperate things. Spain’s government, with suffocating debt and a weak economy, has been working hard to squeeze more taxes out of their society. Few thought it could get more ridiculous than their attempt to tax the sun last year. But it has…
The Spanish government recently passed an intellectual property law that will impose taxes on websites and blogs that “post a snippet of and/or link to” copyrighted material.
This includes taxing Google whose entire platform is based on linking to outside content. As such, the legislation is officially called the “Google Tax”, but it will tax any website that links to Spanish media stories.
According to The Guardian:
The Spanish government has successfully passed a new copyright law which imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News, in an effort to protect its print media industry.
The new intellectual property law, known popularly as the “Google Tax” or by its initials LPI, requires services which post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the organisation representing Spanish newspapers, the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (known by its Spanish-language abbreviation AEDE). Failure to pay up can lead to a fine of up to €600,000.
The law is the latest volley in the war between European newspapers and Google. The publishers accuse the search firm of using their copyrighted material to build up a news service without doing any reporting itself; Google defends itself by claiming that it 10 billion views to newspapers’ websites every month.
The company says that it is “disappointed” with Spain’s new law. “We believe that services like Google News help publishers bring traffic to their sites. As far as the future is concerned, we will continue working with the Spanish publishers to help increase their revenues while we evaluate our options within the framework of the new legislation.” Read More!
Is the Internet broken, and can it even be fixed?
(CNN) -- Our modern global communications infrastructure still relies on core principles that were defined when the Internet had only a few thousand users.
We have faster computers, more storage space, and more people using the network, but worryingly, some of the key assumptions haven't changed.
As an example, take the protocol that helps determine how data gets to its destination. Different networks in the Internet "advertise" routes to deliver data to other networks, with the most efficient candidate being chosen.
In early 2010, a mistaken advertisement from China Telecom caused a small but significant proportion of global Internet traffic to be mistakenly routed through China.
Concerns such as these were not foreseen by the early designers; back then, the Internet was operated by people who knew and trusted each other.
The same cannot be said today.
Growing bigger
The increase in the size of the Internet recently caused a number of key machines in the infrastructure to run out of memory.
The fix for this was relatively simple but, crucially, required those machines to be rebooted.
While turning our home machines on and off is relatively low-risk, doing the same with a device that handles connections for thousands of users, and which may not have been rebooted for 20 years, is of much greater concern.
The Internet is not some mathematical abstraction. It is a physical, evolving system that is constantly changing according to the demands that we place on it.
As such, much of the Internet is, in some senses, "broken," and will continue to be so.
As we fix or paper over certain aspects, the network changes and we discover new issues. The internet, just like human laws, governments, and societies, is an evolving process rather than a static solution. Read More!
Cyber-attack weblink 'malicious'
A Twitter-user signposted cyber-attacks which crippled the Home Office website by flooding it with huge amounts of internet traffic, a jury has heard.
Mark Johnson is alleged to have posted a link in his social media account which meant other web users could join in with the hacking attack launched by the cyber activists group Anonymous, in 2012.
He denies a charge under the Computer Misuse Act of encouraging or assisting a distributed denial of service (Ddos) attack against the Home Office website and Home Secretary Theresa May's own constituency webpage, putting both out of commission.
Timothy Devlin, for the Crown, said that during a concerted two-day cyber attack "8,347 connections" hit the Home Office site in one half-hour period.
The sheer weight of connections meant that an alternative "disaster recovery" version of the site had to be put online in place of the main site, he added.
The Crown alleges Johnson of Josiah Wedgwood Street, in Stoke-on-Trent, assisted in both web attacks by posting a "malicious" weblink through his Twitter account which, when clicked, allowed a web-user to add their connection to the cyber assault.
"We say Mark Johnson published that link in his Twitter account," said Mr Devlin.
"He was saying 'if you want to help close down the Home Office and Theresa May's website, here's the link'."
He added: "We say Mark Johnson published links on Twitter for people to get involved in these joint attacks.Read More!
Republican gains in mid-term polls could aid Obama's Asian trade deal
Big Republican gains in today's mid-term elections would be a blow to much of US President Barack Obama's agenda, but one item on his to-do list might get a fresh chance to move forward: trade. That could breathe life into Asia-Pacific trade talks essential to his efforts to deepen engagement in the region.
Obama needs special authority, known as fast track, to negotiate trade deals that Congress can reject but cannot change. It would smooth the way for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) under discussion with 11 nations.
But Lori Wallach of the advocacy group Public Citizen said US negotiators had not broached in the TPP negotiations the issue of currency manipulation, despite demands from many US lawmakers that it be included. Liberal-leaning groups also fear it will lead to internet censorship and grant more power to corporations, adding to Democrats' reluctance to support it.Read More!
