Piracy charges against 9-year-old girl dropped

Police in Finland have dropped a piracy case against a 9-year-old girl after she attempted to download songs from Finnish pop star Chisu.

 

Once the illegal download was detected the Copyright Information and Control Centre (CIAPC) issued a letter to the girl's father, who was the internet account holder, demanding a payment of €600 in compensation, as well as requiring the signing of a non-disclosure agreement.

 

The father refused to pay, claiming that neither he nor his daughter really knew what she was doing, and that the songs ended up not even playing. The CIAPC responded by filing a complaint to the police, who raided the girl's home and confiscated her laptop.

 

Tools of the trade for digital criminals

 

News of the raid spread online, earning the CIAPC much condemnation, but now the charges have been dropped.

 

“We have decided to end the criminal investigation, because CIAPC has waived the penalty claims,” police officer Markku Nisula told Finnish news outlet MTV3.

 

It appears that CIAPC and the girl's father reached a settlement for the payment of €300, half the original amount.

 

Presumably the infamous flagship of piracy worldwide, the girl's Winnie the Pooh laptop, will now be returned to her.

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Hackers upload 1.6 million NASA, FBI and other accounts

A hacktivist group calling itself Team GhostShell has posted online the log-in details of 1.6 million accounts belonging to major government agencies like NASA, the FBI, the European Space Agency, and numerous others.

 

The sensitive details include usernames, passwords, email addresses, and even CVs and other data that was uploaded to the various agencies' databases. They have now been uploaded to several different websites to ensure they are widely circulated.

 

37 organisations and companies were hit in the attack, covering "fields such as aerospace, nanotechnology, banking, law, education, government, military, all kinds of wacky companies & corporations working for the department of defense, airlines and more," according to a press release by the group posted on Pastebin. 150 servers were hacked, using SQL injection to force databases to hand over data, and exposing the databases as lacking the necessary protection one would expect for such agencies, including encryption of log-in details.

 

 

The group said the attack is part of Project White Fox, a campaign it is waging to promote free speech online, but added that it had informed security personnel about the insecure servers that were utilised in the hack. This will be a major wakeup call to officials, given that the information could also have been acquired by various espionage agencies throughout the world.

 

Team GhostShell, which is an offshoot of hackers operating under the Anonymous banner, said this is its "last project," though it suggested that this might only be the final foray for this year. It has certainly gone out with a bang, and it has encouraged others to follow suit, which means we will likely see similar attacks in 2013.

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Twitter lets you download ALL your tweets - now what?

If you haven't been hiding under a rock for the past week or so you'll have heard the incredible and fantastic news that has driven the social media pundits and pontificators into a frothy mass of joy, not to mention that quivering mass of open data evangelists over there in the corner.

You see Twitter announced that they were finally going to be adding a new feature to the service. A feature that the social media mavens like Robert Scoble and others have been begging Twitter to do since almost the first days of the service.

So what is this new feature?

Are you ready?

You can now download all your tweets that you have made since the day you joined Twitter, and all in one archived file.

Wow, neat huh.

So I ask ...

Now what?

What exactly am I supposed to do with this file?

Seriously, now that you have downloaded all those treasured messages of 140 characters that you threw out there in order to dazzle the world with your brilliance, what are you going to do with them?

I don't know about you but I couldn't care less about what I've tweeted about 5 minutes after I hit enter to send my wise words into the Twittersphere; and you know what, others couldn't care less either. So the fact that Twitter has finally implemented the option to download all your tweets is as about as useful as eating sushi with one chopstick.

Don't get me wrong, I like Twitter and have been using the service since February 2007 (and even wrote a Windows client for it) but I can see absolutely no use to having a single file containing every single thing I posted to Twitter. Sure it's nice, and will appease all those open data proponents that are constantly pushing the company to do this, but come on people, what exactly can you do with this information beyond inflate your ego a little more?

Can you import it into a competing service like app.net or perhaps identi.ca? Can you make it available for Facebook to use in some fashion - not that Facebook would want to in the first place. On top of that, even if you were able to use all that data in some other service I again have to ask ... why?

The truth is that in the end all you have from this new feature is a big lump of a file that is useless for anything.

Thanks Twitter. Thanks for nothing, because that is what this really amounts to.

(BTW ... how's that improved search feature coming?)

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