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Friday, January 26, 2001 |
U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman, Herb Kohl, and Sam Brownback plan to
introduce legislation that will punish companies that market excessively
violent video games to children. Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, said:
"Practically everybody in the industry still markets inappropriate games to
kids, practically every retailer regularly sells these games to kids, and
practically all parents need to know more about the rating system." But Doug
Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, which
represents video game makers, argues that such legislation could violate the
First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and might simply make it
more complicated for the video game industry to police itself. (AP/USA Today
25 Jan 2001; NewsScan Daily, 26 Jan 2001)
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/games/2001-01-25-violence.htm ["NewsScan" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 23]
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Just a day after Microsoft's Web sites were down for an extended period of
time because of the "human error" of a technician, they were victimized by
the "human malice" of a network vandal who subjected them to a "denial of
service" attack that flooded them with bogus communications, causing them to
gridlock and reject legitimate communications from their customers. The
company has called in the FBI for assistance. Computer security expert Abe
Singer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center said that part of Microsoft's
vulnerability to attack was due to the fact that its four domain-name
servers are linked in a single network. "They had all their eggs in one
basket and basically someone knocked down the basket." (*The Washington
Post*, 26 Jan 2001; NewsScan Daily, 26 Jan 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47581-2001Jan25.html) ["NewsScan" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 22]
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DirecTV has the capability to remotely reprogram the smart cards used to
access their service, and also to reprogram the settop box. To make a long
story short, they were able to trick hackers into accepting updates to the
smart cards a few bytes at a time. Once a complete update was installed on
the smart cards, they sent out a command that caused all counterfeit cards
to go into an infinite loop, thus rendering them useless.
A commercial use of information warfare? Very interesting article at
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/templates/article.html%3Fid%3D143
(sorry for the long URL).
Jeremy
[Reminder: As usual, no guarantee as to the future validity of URLs. PGN] ["Jeremy Epstein" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 22]
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Twenty-one-year-old Jerome Heckenkamp has been indicted by federal
prosecutors for allegedly hacking into computers at eBay, Exodus, Juniper,
eTrade, Lycos, and Cygnus and causing a total of more than $900,000 in
damage, in events that took place in 1999 while he was a student at the
University of Wisconsin. He has pleaded innocent of all charges and says
the break-ins were done by someone else using his computer. (AP/*San Jose
Mercury News*, 25 Jan 2001; NewsScan Daily, 26 Jan 2001
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/ap/docs/786396l.htm) ["NewsScan" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 22]
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Maximillian Dornseif, 2002.
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