The United Persons » Hacking

“When logging into a website you usually start by submitting your username and password. The server then checks to see if an account matching this information exists and if so, replies back to you with a “cookie” which is used by your browser for all subsequent requests.

It’s extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called “sidejacking”) is when an attacker gets a hold of a user’s cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.

This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new “privacy” features in an endless attempt to quell the screams of unhappy users, but what’s the point when someone can just take over an account entirely? Twitter forced all third party developers to use OAuth then immediately released (and promoted) a new version of their insecure website. When it comes to user privacy, SSL is the elephant in the room.

Today at Toorcon 12 I announced the release of Firesheep, a Firefox extension designed to demonstrate just how serious this problem is”: http://codebutler.com/firesheep

Download (OS X, Windows): http://github.com/codebutler/firesheep/downloads

In Firefox: File –> Open File –> [Find and install the file]
then Tools –> Add-ons –> [Find the add-on and click on it]
then check the images at http://codebutler.com/firesheep

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The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’…

mazsa — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:16:29 +0000

The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host – “After its previous bandwidth provider had to take the site offline due to concerns over an aggressive Hollywood injunction, today The Pirate Bay is fully back in operation with a surprising new supplier. From a few hours ago, in a move intended to “stand up for freedom of expression”, the Swedish Pirate Party became the site’s new host. [...]”

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-party-becomes-the-pirate-bays-new-host-100518/

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Should Obama Control the Internet? – A n…

mazsa — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:15:07 +0000

Should Obama Control the Internet? – A new bill would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic and access private data. http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/should-obama-control-internet

Cf.

“Netsukuku is the name of an experimental peer-to-peer routing system, developed by the FreakNet MediaLab (Italian), born to build up a distributed network, anonymous and censorship-free, fully independent but not necessarily separated from Internet, without the support of any server, ISP and no central authority. It does not rely on a backbone router, or on any routing equipment other than normal network interface cards.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku

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Hacking Business Models: “This weekend, …

mazsa — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:03:28 +0000

Hacking Business Models: “This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

“Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use. [...]

“Purpose

* Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
* Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
* Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.

“Principles

* Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
* Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
* Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
* Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
* Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.

“Methods

“Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:

* Consensus-based decision making.
* Corporate transparency – any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
* Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
* Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
* Don’t try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
* Prefer to work with people who share our values.
* Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.

“Monty’s amendments

Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
Be a virtual company, networking with others.
The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are

unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.

“Default Employee Rules: [...]”

http://zak.greant.com/hacking-business-models

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