Kaspersky Lab Will Quit BSA Over SOPA Support

One of the largest computer security laboratories in the world, the famous Russian Kaspersky company, is planning to quit the anti-piracy lobby outfit for software firms, Business Software Alliance, also known as BSA, next month. The company has taken this decision because of the BSA’s strong support for the debatable American anti-piracy legislation called SOPA.

According to the Russian newspaper “News” (“Izvestia”) report, Kaspersky is not the only tech company concerned about the impact SOPA will have on the industry. For example, the largest Russian social network InTouch (“VKontakte”), has been recently targeted by the Motion Picture Association of America and labelled as the largest copyright infringer.

A representative of Kaspersky company also said during the interview to “Izvestia” that the legislation proposed in the United States will become a serious threat to the evolution of technology. Kaspersky Lab also admitted that the company has decided to quit Business Software Alliance because it doesn’t want to be associated with this kind of legislation. The Russia’s largest antivirus company has promised to release an official statement in the nearest future, announcing its position.

Meanwhile, Business Software Alliance can boast a quite impressive list of members, including such software giants as Microsoft, Intel, Adobe, Apple, Dell, and McAfee. This past October, the outfit has publicly expressed its support to the SOPA bill, introduced in the United States. However, the SOPA appeared to be so controversial that because of this surrounding it has already determined a lot of companies worldwide to boycott it. Among them are such companies as Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Twitter. Right after Business Software Alliance expressed its support to the legislation two months ago, a hearing was held with such guests as the Motion Picture Association of America, AFL-CIO, Pfizer, and Google, being the only voice speaking against the legislation at that meeting.

In respond, the CEO for Business Software Alliance, Rober Holleyman, wrote after the hearing in question that the outfit still supports SOPA, but admitted that it “could sweep in more than just truly egregious actors”.

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How to Access Censored Websites

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began targeting “rogue” online services last year within the ‘Operation in Our Sites” campaign. As a result, a lot of domain names have been either closed or blocked. That anti-piracy policy has already spread its tentacles outside the American soil; for instance, in the United Kingdom, BT (the largest Internet service provider) had been forced by the court order to block access to Newzbin2, a well-known Usenet indexing service. Meanwhile, one more threat to the liberties of the ordinary user is the undergoing Stop Online Piracy Act (better known as SOPA) – a legislation that might grant absolute power to government authorities over the web itself.

DNS blocking is recognized as the adopted solution against the “notorious” online services. It has been argued against by Public Knowledge: the outfit explained that this blocking method actually causes conflict between DNS server on the web, thus creating both security holes and opening doors for identity theft. In addition, not all users were happy to see they aren’t able to access their favourite websites any more. That’ why there appeared a lot of ways to circumvent the sites blocking.

One of them is BlockAID – a service especially designed to help Internet users access blocked online locations by getting a built-in database of all those websites. In case an Internet user tried to access a blocked Internet portal, BlockAID would redirect them to the correct address instead of the one seized by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Although this piece of software doesn’t automatically detect blocked services yet, it still can learn to do so. If you are interested in this application to help you access blocked sites, you can easily find an online guide on how to use it.

Among other solutions the experts point at a FireFox plug-in introduced by MAFIAAFire. This software easily installs on your PC as an add-on to the Internet browser, and, being at its conceptual stage, makes an attempt to overcome the problem of blocked sites by sending a number of the user’s requests (that he chooses) to certain websites via a proxy. The plug-in is also available on the Internet, as well as many reviews and advices on how to use it more efficiently.

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World Is Always Being Watched

Whistle-blowing site Wikileaks has recently released papers which reveal the shady world of the international surveillance industry through a new project named Spy Files. A lot of the companies involved appear to operate in plain sight.

Wikileaks has highlighted a huge, billion dollar industry that has largely slipped under the radar, and this is expected to change everything. The firms specializing in surveillance equipment (mostly to repressive regimes) seem to have flourished because mass interceptions of whole populations have gone largely unchecked. However, the leak warns that it isn’t just the usual culprits you would expect – instead, the culture of Orwellian citizen espionage can be seen everywhere. According to the source, this industry already spans twenty-five countries, with developed countries in the west supplying monitoring instruments to others across the globe.

Meanwhile, Wikileaks is trying to bring attention to the alarming fact that this industry is mostly condoned by western countries. The whistle-blowing website is trying to emphasize the scale of the industry and endemic problems involved, like an alarming lack of regulation among purchasers. At the same time, the United States is calling to tighten up legislation that currently allows loopholes for companies to keep operating within.

Julian Assange’s website has released around 300 documents detailing companies involved in flogging surveillance equipment to countries like Libya, including Amesys, a French firm at the centre of a scandal because of exporting surveillance equipment to Gadaffi’s intelligence services. Aside from this company, corporations like Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens also made an appearance in the list. In addition, Nokia Siemens Networks has also faced the woeful record featured after its subsidiary was found to supply tracking equipment to repressive regimes as well.

Spy Files project promises more releases within this week and later, up into the next year. Meanwhile, the service points out that the industry is largely condoned. In the UK, Foreign Secretary William Hague has himself been linked to a company involved in this industry, which is actually unregulated. What is alarming here is that intelligence agencies, along with military forces and police authorities, can silently and secretly intercept phone calls and take over PCs without even the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. This is something to worry about, isn’t it?

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Russian Hackers Vote

Part of the Russian news sites appeared to be inaccessible because of DDoS-attacks, high traffic and poor technical training. Those accessible feature faked information about the election results.

Election Sunday in Russia turned out to be a disaster for online services. By the evening of the day websites of the largest newspapers, radio stations and news agencies were completely offline or experiencing outages. Most of the services were highlighting the situation on the elections, trying to track the efforts of multiple voting in different areas.

According to the experts in information security, the most extensive DDoS attacks were launched at the radio station “Echo of Moscow” site and the service “Votes”. At the moment the experts point out at the intense attack on the sites telling about the preliminary election results. The attack is carried out by a large botnet dispersed around the world, with a lot of attacking computers located in the United States, China and other countries. Meanwhile, there are few Russian IP addresses. Security experts also noticed something like the attack at the service “Votes”, but they registered mainly Russian IP-addresses and those from the ex-Soviet Union countries over there.

German Klimenko, the well-known Internet expert and owner of the statistical service Liveinternet.ru, explained that last Sunday the traffic to the news media was much more than usual over the weekend, which could also lead to unstable operation of the resources.
Indeed, the attendance of opposition resources increased by 20%, with people visiting to monitor information on violations during the election. That’s why every major website is constantly exposed to DDoS-attacks, but when combined with the increased traffic, it can lead to the consequences the resources weren’t prepared for.

At the same time, Anton Nosik, the owner of bloghosting LiveJournal, which has been experiencing cyber attacks since Monday, is sure that DDoS-attacks on major Russian resources must be investigated by law enforcement agencies. He is going to insist that no such episode was left without recourse to law enforcement and supervisory authorities. The latter should investigate the inaction of the police. Nosik argues that LiveJournal has twice appealed to the police because of the attacks it suffered in the spring and summer of 2011. However, criminal charges were never filed.

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Adobe Launched Marketing Campaign

Adobe has recently purchased a company called Efficient Frontier that is engaged in adverts in the channel. The company believes that splashing out on Efficient Frontier could really improve its own Digital Marketing Suite, along with the abilities for flogging advertisements to different companies and in turn firms flogging advertisements to wherever else.

Adobe Senior Vice President for digital marketing recently made an uncharacteristically thrilling statement, saying that its clients would want to know exactly how they are able to spend dosh in order to get the best return. The outfit known as Efficient Frontier is believed to provide Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite with a little more shine to online advertisements.

The software of this company, according to experts, will provide Adobe with a way to promote more advertisements in Facebook. This social network is considered essential to Efficient Frontier’s algorithms – substantially, predicting results and targeted advertisements. The capabilities in question will be tied to Adobe SearchCenter that is already running with Facebook advertisements buying. Likewise, the company is going to integrate Efficient Frontier’s applications into its own Adobe SocialAnalytics software that is aiming at maximizing return depending on what online users are blogging about and discussing on the Internet.

The company’s SearchCenter has already paid search management included. Adobe believes that this will help Efficient Frontier complement this nicely by implementing search portfolio optimization. The company hasn’t disclosed thus far how much money and efforts it has already spent on Efficient Frontier. However, taking into account all the moves the company is taking, the industry experts could estimate that it wasn’t just a modest sum.

This is not the first case of such acquisition that would help one of the online companies prosper due to smart advertising. The market develops in regard to this line of behaviour, and more and more players understand this and take steps to keep pacing along the trend. Meanwhile, as it often happens in these cases, the board has to agree and government has to approve. Here Adobe expects that the deal will close in Q1 of the company’s 2012 fiscal year.

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