Category Archives: Ethics
Security Review: New Weapons in the Fight Against Doping
The use of performance enhancing drugs and medical techniques is a serious problem in every sport, but no sport is as notorious for doping scandals as is professional cycling. While Olympic athletes, baseball players, and body builders are often caught … Continue reading
Current Events: One more botnet-related legal fray
As part of an “expose’” on cyber crime, BBC’s “Click” team took it upon themselves to hire a botnet. With the stated goal of demonstrating the power of “cyber criminals” in today’s world, the journalists purchased the use of ~22,000 … Continue reading
Security Review: UW Parking Enforcement
The parking at the University of Washington has always been a deadly game of cat and mouse between driver and parking enforcement. There are limited parking resources on campus, and parking enforcement wants to make sure that they are maximizing … Continue reading
Current Event: Telegraph website hacked
The Telegraph, a famous daily newspaper in the UK, was hacked into by a Romanian hacking group last week. The group exposed a weakness in the way the website queried its database for property searches and was able to obtain … Continue reading
Current Event: Air Force Engineers develop BitTorrent sniffer
Original article: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/airforce-engineers-develop-bittorrent-sniffer.ars The Air Force Institute of Technology has a new method for passive BitTorrent tracking. The system attempts to read the header of BitTorrent packets, and compare the hash in the packet to a known set of bad … Continue reading
The BBC Borrows a Botnet
In an effort to make the public aware of the threat of botnets, the BBC comes very close to violating the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. The BCC technology program Click acquired a botnet of about 22,000 computers and used them … Continue reading
Security Review: In-Eye Video Camera
Rob Spence, a Canadian Filmmaker, is currently developing a prototype to equip his prosthetic eye with a built-in, wireless video camera. The digital system, while not able to transmit information to his brain, will be able to route the signal … Continue reading
Current Event: Convicted Botnet Leader Retains Job
In three sequential articles, ComputerWorld traces the sentencing of convicted botnet leader John Schiefer as well as his continued employment at the start-up Mahalo. Schiefer is an ex-security consultant and is the first botnet leader to be charged under the … Continue reading
Current Events: UK Company Illegally Sold Worker Data
According to an article at the Guardian, dozens of companies in the UK had been buying personal information about potential employees from a company called the Consulting Association in violation of British data protection laws. The Data Protection Act made … Continue reading
Current Event: YoBusted.com, busted?
According to a recent article from Business Week, a photo-sharing site, YoBusted.com, has crossed the line between maintaining personal privacy and extortion. This site allows users to post incriminating pictures of friends without proof that his or her permission to … Continue reading