August 11th 2010
Judge Teri Jackson sentenced Terry Childs to 4 years in prison last week. Childs took sole control of San Francisco’s city network for nearly two weeks claiming he was the only person certified for such access. He eventually provided administrative access to the mayor who negotiated with Childs after his arrest. Childs will next receive […]
April 28th 2010
Back in July of 2008 we covered the story of Terry Childs, a network administrator for the City of San Francisco, who was imprisoned after taking sole control of the city’s network. Though services were not interrupted, he locked out the rest of the city’s IT staff from the city’s network. After the Mayor of […]
August 19th 2008
Judge George O’Toole Jr has lifted the gag order preventing three MIT students from publicly discussing MTBA security flaws. As noted here, the MBTA made the student’s report public in their petition to gain the restraining order in question. The MBTA, which had earlier denied that security flaws existed, had asked the judge to prevent […]
July 24th 2008
The Sanfrancisco Chronicle reports that after a secret visit by the mayor of San Francisco, the network administrator who locked the cities technology staff out of the network surrendered his password. See earlier coverage of this story. Terry Child’s defense attorney, Erin Crane, claimed that Mr. Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent staff, […]
July 3rd 2008
There has been commentary, criticism, and even worry about ICANN’s proposed laissez-faire policy to allow a broad range of top-level domains. Our friends at Circle ID try to calm the waters by reminding us that ICANN’s byzantine committee structure, and its tendency to avoid both conflict and even the clearest paths of action, can make […]
May 16th 2008
Who controls the software you use: you, or the software’s producer? That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit by Blizzard, creator of World of Warcraft (WoW), against MDY Industries. Apparently, MDY has developed software called Glider that allows a WoW player to cheat by having their computer play for them in their stead. […]
April 8th 2008
Credit card numbers were selling for as little as 40 cents each and access to bank accounts was going for $10 in the second half of 2007, according to the latest twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec, which you may download here. As highlighted in our earlier article, Big Business Big Brother, data breaches […]
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