According to a timeline compiled by users at the online chat board 4Chan, an anonymous poster appeared on the "Random" board known as /b/, claiming to have accessed Palin’s account. Skeptical posters apparently dismissed the claim as a hoax, until the hacker posted the password ("popcorn"), prompting groups of forum users to log in. One of these—who appears to be the source of the documents released on Wikileaks—subsequently changed the password and notified one of Palin’s assistants via e-mail. That user, however, inadvertently included the new password in the released screenshots, prompting a second flood that triggered Yahoo’s security lockdown.

Ars also notes that

If Palin’s recourse to the popular Web mail service was an attempt to dodge disclosure requirements, it has clearly backfired.

Wikileaks seems to be down for the moment, but Pirate Bay has the same content: Sarah Palin Email Leaks (which doesn’t seem like much). Hopefully someone has the full email account stored for future reference. If not, this has got to be one of the stupidest hacks ever.

Also on: Gawker, Guardian, Slashdot.

Senator Lieberman’s staff identified numerous videos that they believed violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.

Google then goes on to educate Lieberman on a concept called free speech. A concept that is utterly feared and despised by Zionists / Jews / Israel firsters. Reading the comments on the post in question shows that there is a real healthy backlash brewing. Actually, the resentment is quite astonishing. Maybe people are finally getting it?

Get this, the whole YouTube, Google thing was in Haaretz and the J’Post a couple months back with little interest and no response. Guess what ? , now Lieberman is making a issue of it.

Please tell "Traitor Joe" that this is still the USA and not Israel… yet… so we are at least nominally a democracy.

Lieberman is such of tool of the xenophobic warmongering wing of the Republican party. Why anyone even listens to him is a mystery to me.

Did Lieberman comment on videos in which he himself calls for war on Iran? Did he comment on videos in which he advocated pre-emptive strikes on countries? Did he comment on videos in which he portrays American citizens as terrorists for not supporting the Iraq war?

In the case of Senator Lieberman one wonders whether he fully appreciates and understands what being just an American means.

In the absence of an informed citizenry, a democracy devolves into government by media. Those who control the media control the votes. Mr. Lieberman would like very much for the US constitution to be destroyed and replaced with Knesset fiat.

It’s interesting to me that youtube has decided remove these videos when there has been considerable press on anti-Islamic films being present on youtube and there has not been any effort to remove them, despite the fact they contain "hate speech".

Ouch! Payback is a bitch, as Zionists reap the whirlwind I guess. You’re all going to wish you had stopped while you were ahead.

With an average broadband speed of 4.9Mbps, the US is being Chariots of Fire-d by South Korea (49.5Mbps), Japan (63.6Mbps), Finland (21.7Mbps), Sweden (16.8Mbps), and France (17.6Mbps), among others. Not only that, but the price paid per megabyte in the US ($2.83) is substantially higher than those countries, all of which come in at less than $0.50 per megabyte.

The report argues that the government cannot stand idly by and hope for the best. Again, using Sweden as an example, broadband expansion has been neither easy nor cheap. But it has worked, and now the government can take a step back.

Several of these initiatives have been proven in countries like Sweden, which has pumped $800 million into subsidies for broadband deployment; for a country the size of the US, that would come to some $30 billion. Needless to say, no such major infrastructure investment has been forthcoming from the federal government. But Sweden has also targeted the demand side of the equation, subsidizing personal computers that businesses purchase for employees’ home use. This kind of a program is also important in the US, where broadband availability runs ahead of actual broadband usage.

These pranks are commonplace now, but be careful of what you click on and from whom. If that link points to anything even pretending to be child porn, that’s enough evidence for the FBI of intent to download it. The authorities could then raid your home and possibly throw you in jail. No joke, it just takes one click and you’re under intense suspicion.

Vosburgh eventually went to trial and was convicted of clicking on an illegal link and possession of child porn due to two tiny thumbnails that the FBI believes depict underage females—this is despite the testimony from multiple computer experts saying that the cache was created automatically and Vosburgh had no idea how or where to find these thumbnails on his machine.

It boggles the mind. But that is just the sort of society we have voted ourselves into. And the motives for the government to invent crime are well known by now. At the end of the day, it is the only certain insurance against their own extinction. Considering the poor foundations upon which this whole idea was constructed it is not surprising that the machinery of repression eventually chose to expedite the matter and skip a few steps. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to them who is convicted as long as the quota is met and the rationale for the laws in question can be backed up with irrefutable numbers.

The really “paranoid” among us will surely theorize that this is part of a broader attack on the unregulated Internet itself. By instilling fear and making people move more carefully in the wired realm, much of the spirit of the net is effectively negated. In time, users may start to flock to sanitized, approved and effectively balkanized networks. And to recap, the child porn scare has also provided ample reason for hands-on censorship of the Internet in countries where censorship was previously unheard of. Sweden is a good example of this. After a while, the same idea was tested against file sharing. Both in terms of implying the existence of “child porn” on torrent trackers and in terms of applying the same sort of DNS blocks to the same torrent trackers. In the end, justice and sanity won the day, but we have hardly seen the last of this assault on the net.

Senator John McCain (R. – AZ) has introduced legislation [PDF] that would hold blogs responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles. Provisions of the proposed bill include: (1) commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000,” (2) bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs, and (3) any social-networking site must take “effective measures” to remove any Web page that’s “associated” with a sex offender. “Because ‘social-networking site’ isn’t defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites.” The list could include any site that allows comments, authot and personal profiles. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that this proposal may be based more “on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts.” “McCain’s legislation could deal a serious blow to the blogosphere. Lacking resources to police their sites, many individual blogs may have to shut down open discussion.”^*

Using the smoke screen of “child pornography” to produce a platform to limit another freedom. How original. Obviously, this is opening a Pandora’s Box. Just as Sweden followed the British example to block web sites alleged to portray “child porn” some time ago. That decision has enabled the previously ugly act of censorship to enter the realm of possibilities. As we realized when Swedish ISP Perspektiv Bredband blocked allofmp3.com. So thanks a bunch for opening that can of worms.

The myth of the borderless internet, never very credible to those who had any real understanding of the interplay between politics and technology that underpins the network, took another hit last week when the US Congress voted to ban bank and credit card payments to gambling firms.

If President Bush signs the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act into law, as he is expected to do, then within months US credit card companies and banks will be forced to check for and refuse payment for most forms of online gambling.

Whether or not you approve of gambling or online gambling, and whether or not you think that this move smacks of hypocrisy or is a blatant attempt to protect the US gaming industry from overseas competition, the law provides a good example of how governments can control the internet.

Too bad the measure is so clearly disingenuous, because limiting the effects of gambling could have been a fairly decent, though of course futile, thing to do. Plus, it also brings the total sum of moral capital when it comes to criticizing other nations for censoring the net to zero.

A federal court has issued a proposed order which would direct ICANN to suspend the spamhaus.org domain after the spam blacklist site thumbed its nose at a $11.7 million default judgment last month. Spamhaus was sued by e360insight, a company that had been blacklisted by Spamhaus for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. Although Spamhaus initially filed a response to the complaint, it decided not to participate any further in the case, a decision that led to the default judgment.

Strange as it may seem, with Spamhaus being British and supposedly not subject to Illinois laws, one actually has to point that out in a formal argument. Which Spamhaus didn’t. The question is if this is a one-off glitch or a potential venue for abuse, a test balloon if you will, for a flood of similar cases that will come up with convenient ways to rid the wired world of troublesome domains.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said Tuesday that it had reached a new agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce that would technically keep the group under American control through 2011.

U.S. government officials have repeatedly said they would relinquish control over ICANN, even going as far as holding hearings on the subject of privatization. But it now appears that government control of the body that governs the Internet’s domain name servers would last into the foreseeable future.

And guess what, they lied to buy time.

Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

It is a great victory for bullshit peddlers everywhere … if they had any idea Sploid existed.

Shut down, laid off, on the nickel, run out of town, shown the door, eighty-sixed, suicided, under heavy manners, finaled by the fuzz, down in the hole, out of the groove, sadder than a map, under the Hoover blankets, taking a bank holiday, riding the rails to Hungry Town, brought down and fought down.

• Require any manufacturer of “routing” and “addressing” hardware to offer upgrades or other “modifications” that are needed to support Internet wiretapping. Current law does require that of telephone switch manufacturers–but not makers of routers and network address translation hardware like Cisco Systems and 2Wire.
• Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to “commercial” Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the “public interest.” That would likely sweep in services such as in-game chats offered by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming system as well.
• Force Internet service providers to sift through their customers’ communications to identify, for instance, only VoIP calls. (The language requires companies to adhere to “processing or filtering methods or procedures applied by a law enforcement agency.”) That means police could simply ask broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon for wiretap info–instead of having to figure out what VoIP service was being used.
• Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public “notice of the actual number of communications interceptions” every year. That notice currently also must disclose the “maximum capacity” required to accommodate all of the legally authorized taps that government agencies will “conduct and use simultaneously.”