MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.

Check out the whole article here about how he got so big and how he makes his money! 

An as-yet unheard of entity calling itself The Regime gained access to 711chan.org, a site popular with vigilante group “Anonymous.”

The hacker/s first posted a message (below) saying that “This site has not been blessed by The Regime and is deemed lame.”, believing Anonymous to be self-proclaimed hackers, when in reality, the media has given them that title. It also refers to Anonymous’s attempt to bring down the Church of Scientology (operation chanology), saying that “chanology is lame, scientology is lame.” It thereafter declared that /i/ (where Anonymous had been discussing Operation Chanology) had been rm’d (removed). Minutes later, 711chan was not responding and as of 2:44 p.m. (eastern time) the site was still down.

The downtime lasted only three minutes, after which it was replaced by the words “let’s try this again”, which showed that ‘Plasma’, the tech admin, was already reversing the damage done.

At around 0.30 GMT, an attempt to load 711chan yielded what appeared to be Google of Romania’s homepage due to their provider buying IPs from RIPE.

As of 01.00 GMT, an error screen is shown in place of 711chan, saying “Warning: require(/var/www/lib/gettext/gettext.inc.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/config.php on line 215.”

“Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/var/www/lib/gettext/gettext.inc.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear’) in /var/www/config.php on line 215,” added the message.

At 02.00 GMT, 711chan was back to normal, except for many images missing that had been posted in the last three weeks.

At 14.00 GMT, The Regime struck again, saying that this time all backups had been “rm” (removed) and that “all your db(databases) are belong to us”, an allusion to the phrase “all your base are belong to us”.

It was subsequently discovered that 711chan wasn’t hacked, as originally believed, but that the passwords were keylogged from one of the head admin’s computers, and used to compromise two machines related to 711chan. 711chan’s machine was freshly reinstalled and setup within two hours of being compromised, however the other machine was not back online until 05.00 GMT and the site remains down.

A video posted to YouTube by “TheRegime01″ responded to “Anonymous” using Scientology jargon: “Your attacks on Scientology have not gone unnoticed, we have the money, resources and tools to put an end to your SP behaviour and so called hacking activities. You have soiled the good name of LRH and now it is you that have *our* attention.” “SP” refers to the Scientology term Suppressive Person, and “LRH” refers to Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard. Both terms were also used recently in the Church of Scientology-produced video featuring Tom Cruise promoting his beliefs.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

The Internet-based group “Anonymous” has released statements on YouTube and via a press release, outlining what they call a “War on Scientology”. Church of Scientology related websites, such as religousfreedomwatch.org have been removed due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service-attack (DDoS) by a group calling themselves “Anonymous”. On Friday, the same group allegedly brought down Scientology’s main website, scientology.org, which was available sporadically throughout the weekend.

Several websites relating to the Church of Scientology have been slowed down, brought to a complete halt or seemingly removed from the Internet completely in an attack which seems to be continuous. The scientology.org site was back online briefly on Monday, and is currently loading slowly.

On Monday, the group released a video titled: “Message to Scientology” on YouTube concerning their intentions to attack the Church of Scientology. A robotic voice on the video begins with “Hello leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous,” and continues by explaining their motivations: “Over the years we have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent and your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed.” The message goes on to state that the group intends to “expel Scientology from the Internet”. As of Wednesday, the video had been viewed 370,347 times, favorited 2,473 times, and is currently YouTube’s top third video of the day.

The “Message to Scientology” video was highlighted as the “YouTube Video of the Week” by The Michigan Daily. Commenting on the video, the piece The Michigan Daily states “if this video is any indication, it seems like the assailants mean business.” In a blog post on USA Today’s website, Jess Zielinski wrote that it was “not a shock that hackers hold a grudge against Scientology,” and in a followup post on another USA Today blog, Angela Gunn wrote that “those of us who remember … the adventures of Operation Clambake are fascinated to see this kind of thing flare up again”. Blogging for Wired magazine, Ryan Singel wrote about the incident in a piece on Wednesay titled “War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology — There Can Be Only One”. Singel wrote that the Project Chanology wiki page “directs Anonymous members to download and use denial of service software, make prank calls, host Scientology documents the Church considers proprietary, and fax endless loops of black pages to the Church’s fax machines to waste ink”. According to Wired, “The Church of Scientology did not immediately respond to a call for comment”.

The viewpoints expressed in the video are echoed on the so-called “Project Chanology” website, an open source of information and direction for those within Anonymous, which talks of tactics such as blackfaxing and prank calling alongside other “real-life” methods of attack. The satirical website Encyclopedia Dramatica also has a similar page devoted to “Project Chanology”.

“Anonymous” released a statement on Monday in the form of a press release, “Internet Group Anonymous Declares “War on Scientology”: “Anonymous” are fighting the Church of Scientology and the Religious Technology Center”. In the statement, the group explained their goal as safeguarding the right to freedom of speech “A spokesperson said that the group’s goals include bringing an end to the financial exploitation of Church members and protecting the right to free speech, a right which they claim was consistently violated by the Church of Scientology in pursuit of its opponents.” The press release also claimed that the Church of Scientology misused copyright and trademark law in order to remove criticism from websites including Digg and YouTube. The statement goes on to assert that the attacks from the group “will continue until the Church of Scientology reacts, at which point they will change strategy”.

The attack was reportedly motivated by the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube. After the Church of Scientology lodged a copyright infringement complaint with YouTube, the site took down the video. The Tom Cruise video is still available on Gawker.com, which has stated it will not remove the video “It’s newsworthy, and we will not be removing it.”

Gawker.com discussed the actions of the “Anonymous” group, in a post on Monday titled “Scientology vs. the Internet: Why Kids On The Internet Are Scientology’s Most Powerful Enemy”. Gawker.com briefly outlined actions of other anonymous users critical of Scientology, including actions taken in the past by users of YouTube, Digg, and YTMND “This isn’t the only group of Internet users unafraid of the intimidating cult; a whole range of sites has turned the Church into a mockery by doing what mainstream celebrity-coverage outlets wouldn’t dare.”

A poster on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology (a.r.s.) was critical of the actions by the “Anonymous” group. In a post titled “Open Letter to Anonymous” Jeff Jacobsen, webmaster of lisamcpherson.org, posting as “cultxpt” wrote that “It’s understandable that people get upset over the things the Church of Scientology has done online and off”, pointing out that the Church of Scientology had “tried to shut down a.r.s.”, and “spam our newsgroup to this day”. In 1999 “sporgery”, a form of nonsensical spam tactic, was used as an attempt to disrupt discussion on the newsgroup. Previously in 1995 Helena Kobrin, an attorney for the Church of Scientology, attempted to remove the a.r.s. group from Usenet. Kobrin sent a rmgroup message which stated: “We have requested that the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup be removed from all sites”. This later led to a declaration of war by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, and an increase in popularity of the a.r.s site. This initial conflict came to be known as “Scientology versus the Internet”.

The post from Jacobsen went on to criticize the actions of the “Anonymous” group, stating: “We’re supposed to be the good people,” and stated that contrary to the Anonymous group’s tactics, “Our weapons as critics are reason, evidence, argument, and free speech”.

On Tuesday, the founder of Operation Clambake, a non-profit organization and website critical of Scientology based in Stavanger, Norway, released a statement about the attacks by “Anonymous”. Andreas Heldal-Lund was critical of the “Anonymous” groups actions, stating: “The author of Operation Clambake does not condone such activity. Attacking Scientology like that will just make them play the religious persecution card. They will use it to defend their own counter actions when they try to shatter criticism and crush critics without mercy.” Heldal-Lund went on to emphasize the right of all people and organizations to freedom of speech - including the Church of Scientology: “Freedom of speech means we need to allow all to speak - including those we strongly disagree with. I am of the opinion that the Church of Scientology is a criminal organisation and a cult which is designed by its delusional founder to abuse people. I am still committed to fight for their right to speak their opinion.”

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

Stock prices dropped sharply in Europe and Asia Monday, with fears of economic problems in the United States causing some of the biggest single-day losses in recent years.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index fell 5.5 percent - its biggest fall since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Losses of between three and seven percent were recorded in India, China, Britain, France, Germany and Canada.

While there are many factors linking national economies, analysts blame recent losses on fears of a recession in the United States.

The United States is the main export market for many overseas businesses. Foreign investors also have bought large stakes in U.S. companies.

When American home loan companies began reporting large numbers of defaulting loans in late 2007, the losses spread to other financial institutions, tightening credit markets and sparking worries about Americans’ high levels of debt.

Last week, President Bush proposed a $145 billion stimulus plan to encourage more consumer spending. But analysts say the measure may not be able to prevent a recession - defined as a broad decline in a nation’s economy over a period of at least six months.

U.S. markets are closed for a national holiday Monday, but stock futures trading indicates further losses are expected when markets reopen Tuesday.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

The attack was launched on Wednesday by a user labelled “Anonymous”, on the website “Insurgency Wiki”, a spinoff of 4chan. The “History” section of the site explains, in a satirical fashion, that the incident was prompted by the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube. Though YouTube is complying with the Church of Scientology’s requests to take down the video, other sites such as Gawker.com have stated that they will keep hosting the video.
 
Writing in a blog post, Matthew Ingram of The Globe and Mail dubbed the ongoing conflict involving the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove the Cruise video from the Internet: “Scientology vs. the Internet, part XVII”. He characterized the conflict between the Church of Scientology and anonymous posters of the Cruise video as “another small skirmish in a war that Scientology has been waging for almost 15 years, since the early days of newsgroups such as alt.religion.scientology, which posted internal church documents in 1994. Lawsuits have been filed, mailing lists have been shut down, homes of discussion group participants have been raided and their computers seized — an all-out war.”
 
One poster admitted to being a part of the effort, writing in a blog post “I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres [sic] something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these ‘events’ every now and again.” The poster wrote that “Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology.”

“Someone emailed me earlier today talking about a tool a group’s been using to attack the scientology website. It’s an interesting tool, created to overload/create malformed strings and crash a website’s database,” said the post by an unknown author on pigmy.

The Church’s website is currently unreachable. Some individuals reported that when they are able to reach the site, all they get is a message stating, “The word scientology means search for truth…”. As of 15:11 GMT the site was accessible again, but only loads at relatively slow speeds, and by the end of the day Saturday the site was not loading at all.

Posts on the message board for the Scientology-critic site Operation Clambake from Friday theorized that a denial-of-service attack had occurred, and wrote that as of Friday the Scientology.org site was either not loading at all, or loading very slowly. Critics of Scientology at the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology were critical of the attacks to the Church of Scientology website, with one poster writing “How can people look at both sides if one side is gone?”

Traffic to the Scientology website had already increased 18-fold prior to the attack, following increased attention after the Tom Cruise video appeared on the Internet. At that time, one in three visits to the site came from BBC News, and the website increased to number 3 in the company Hitwise UK’s Lifestyle-Religion category.

 Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

The popular video website YouTube has been blocked in Turkey once more. Several sources quote complaints against a video that insults Atatürk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, as the reason for the block. On Friday, internet users in Turkey found the website replaced by a notice saying:

“ Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace. ”

A Turkish court issued a similar order in March last year, after a row between Turkish and Greek users escalated and resulted in insults of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Insulting Atatürk is a serious offense in Turkey. Internet service providers such as Türk Telekom (the largest and formerly state-owned ISP) can use the domain name system to put the ban into effect.

At the moment, it remains unclear which videos or comments exactly are to blame. Some media sources say that the video compared Atatürk with a monkey. This led some YouTube users to suspect that a video entitled ‘ataturk was a gay and a monkey turkey turkiye turks’ led to the block. This video was added on November 7, 2007, and is a series of images with Atatürk’s face on monkeys, homosexuals, obese individuals and several pictures of Borat. The uploader of the video, known as gaymal45, has several other videos which mock Prime Minister Erdogan and President Abdullah Gül.

Under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk, and other national symbols, is punishable by imprisonment. The article received a lot of attention because it resulted in the prosecution of intellectuals like Literature Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk and murdered journalist Hrant Dink.

It is also unclear how long the ban would last. The ban in March was lifted after 3 days, when YouTube sent evidence to the Turkish prosecutor that the video had been removed.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

In an exclusive report, Wikinews has learned that on Wednesday two users, one anonymous and the other only known as MODX, added code on the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia for a computer virus known as the LoveLetter or ILOVEYOU virus.

The users inserted the VBScript code into various pages including the Wikipedia Sandbox, a page used for editorial testing. This was relatively harmless, as the code could not be activated despite causing some antivirus software to issue an alert.

A Wikipedia administrator began blocking the users and reverting their edits. “I went further and deleted the contributions of these editors where I could in the hopes of preventing follow-up attacks, copycat actions, and random editors stumbling into viral traps whilst walking through a page history”, said Scientizzle, the administrator who found the code and attempted to clean up the additions.

However, a major problem arose when he tried to delete the edits from the sandbox. This involves deleting the entire page and restoring good revisions, but the sandbox has such a “massive revision history” that this caused Wikipedia’s servers to overload for half an hour, locking countless users out of editing the encyclopedia.

“My action caused the site to come to a screeching halt for half an hour and filled my [user discussion page] page with ‘wikitrout’,” added Scientizzle jokingly.

Developers for Wikimedia (the parent foundation of Wikipedia and its sister projects) quickly implemented a check on such massive deletions to prevent such an event from occurring again. Brion Vibber, Wikimedia’s Chief Technical Officer, added restrictions on the deletion of any page with more than 5000 revisions.

“A couple times a year somebody does something like trying to delete the Wikipedia:Sandbox, which reaaalllly bogs down the server due to the large number of revisions. While there are warnings about this, I’m hacking in some limits which will restrict such deletions to keep the system from falling over accidentally,” said Vibber on a Wikipedia community discussion page.

Scientizzle was advised that the edits should have been removed via oversight. Oversight is the process of deleting edits from public view, usually reserved for non-public personal information and libel, but also used for selective deletion of revisions on pages with extremely long edit histories. Only a few administrators have access to the process.

“I was advised that oversight was a better option for removing contributions on huge pages and, as such, contacted the oversight mailing list to request the complete deletion of all contributions by these users,” added Scientizzle.

The ILOVEYOU virus or worm started in the Philippines on May 4, 2000 in e-mails titled ‘I Love You’. In less than a day, it managed to spread across the entire globe, traveling to Hong Kong, to Europe, and then the United States. At least 10% of the world’s computers that had Internet access were infected with the virus. The virus overwrote files on computers with copies of itself, including system files and multimedia.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site.

It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. This would seem unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

For now it sure does look like all the content has been wiped from the RIAA homepage. Let’s hope they have backups, or not.

LOS ANGELES — Social networking giant MySpace has entered into an agreement with 49 states that includes the elimination of all links to adult websites, according to one state Attorney General who has signed on to the plan.

The move is part of a plan to fight online predators targeting children, and according to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, includes a commitment by MySpace to “Obtain and constantly update a list of pornographic web sites and regularly sever any links between them and MySpace.”

“Kids face a real danger on web sites like MySpace because they never know who they are communicating with online,” Shurtleff said. “This agreement recognizes the intentions of MySpace to make improvements but it is my hope that all social networking sites will find additional ways to protect children.”

Such a move would pose further challenges for legitimate adult marketers that rely on receiving traffic from these popular portals to fuel their websites ? an especially popular option for solo-model and personality website owners.

As part of its agreement with the state attorneys general, MySpace will:

–Strengthen software identifying underage users;
–Retain a contractor to identify and eliminate inappropriate images;
–Allow parents to send their child’s e-mail address so MySpace can restrict the child from signing in or creating a profile;
–Obtain and constantly update a list of pornographic web sites and regularly sever any links between them and MySpace;
–Create a closed “high school” section for users under 18;
–Implement changes making it harder for adults to contact children;
–Dedicate resources to educating children and parents about online safety;
–Provide a way to report abuse on every content page, consider adopting a common mechanism to report abuse and respond within 72 hours to abuse reports.
–MySpace will also create and lead an Internet Safety Technical Task Force; which in conjunction with the attorneys general and other social networking sites, experts and groups will develop improved Internet safety practices.

Reports will be issued quarterly, with a report on the group’s formal findings and recommendations planned for a late 2008 release.

via Xbiz

Today PCWorld.com published an article about the threat of free video sites to the porn industry. The industry doesn’t have only competition of pro’s but from amateurs as well. This article is an interesting read, especially for the content webmasters here. I won’t copy the article due to copyright of Reuters. Instead I will post the url to the article where there is information about Vivid (and the AEBN lawsuit), some quotes from XTube.com, a vision of the future of the porn industry and the potential to go mobile with porn. To read the whole article:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141315-pg,1/article.html#