Canadians Opposed Surveillance Legislation

The governing party of Canada – the Conservatives – was planning an omnibus crime legislation which was supposed to include surveillance provision. Although the bill is not yet tabled, opposition to this bill is already growing.

Recently the web was hit by the suggestions that the Canadian surveillance bill may be bundled in to omnibus crime legislation and tabled in the near future. That wasn’t exactly news for industry observers, but the news was that multiple experts, academics and organizations have stepped up to formally oppose the bill in question. They have recently sent an open letter to Prime Minister where they voiced their concerns about the proposed legislation. The opposers cited previous laws making up the surveillance legislation in the last government session and expressed their concerns about them. The particular concern is that three of the proposed bills would have serious negative implications for the privacy rights of the citizens. In addition, the controversial aspects would not receive the scrutiny they deserve if they were rolled into an omnibus bill.

The main focus of concern was the ease by which the country’s ISPs, social networks, and even their handsets and cars can be turned into instruments to spy on their activities, thus implicating fundamental rights and freedoms. In addition, the letter contains a very detailed list of other concerns, warning that the costs of enforcing such measures would finally be passed on to consumers, because it is a new cost of doing business for Internet service providers. Actually, it has precedent: in France, when the country’s government forced Internet service providers to adopt a “three-strikes” regime, the broadband providers just passed the costs of implementing the system on to their subscribers.

Although the letter was signed by a lot of people and organizations, there’s a difference between when the citizens were fighting dangerous bills in the past and today. The matter is that the Conservatives have a majority government, which means they are able to pass whatever bills they want without fearing an opposition. In other words, no evidence or reason would matter to the government, it will simply legislate how it likes, and this is the government the country is stuck with.

Protection By Foxy Proxy And MAFIAAFire

As you already know, there is a comprehensive list of methods to circumvent the website filtering suggested by the United States, and some of them go way beyond circumventing kinds of censorship as suggested by the proposed legislation. Actually, it will be very interesting to see how the suggested services respond to those supporting online censorship. Today industry observers agree that it will be very difficult to stop already existing ways to fight DNS censorship. It will be considered very impressive if broadband providers find a way to stop all the methods of bypassing the website filtering.

Meanwhile, aside from the methods of protecting from the censoring legislation by your own means, there are ready-made solutions provided by the others in form of the software designed particularly for accessing censored websites.

Foxy Proxy

Foxy Proxy is a simple add-on for FireFox that everyone can download and install. After obtaining a huge list of simple proxies residing outside of the United States, you will have much better chances to access the site blocked by the American government or corporate interests.

The advantage of this ready solution is that it’s extremely easy to install – being able to access censored online service is merely a click away. In other words, it becomes a fast fix with minimal effort if you have access to an impressive list of proxies. However, the reliability of the add-on is no guarantee. Considering the technological aspect of this plugin, it is not 100% secure, because you only rely on one proxy. In addition, you won’t be able to use this add-on for all kinds of web traffic, and it is confined to FireFox only.

MAFIAAFire

This simple plugin for FireFox and Chrome has been widely discussed in the Internet before. You can easily download and install the add-on, and if a website you are trying to access has had its domain seized, you will be redirected to an alternate domain (if it has any) and still access the service.

The plugin is really very easy to install and then it will be maintained for you through updates. On the other hand, it uses DNS servers that can also be blocked. You should keep in mind that the tool depends on the assumption that there’s an alternative domain name used in the first place for access. In other words, if no alternate domain exists, you won’t be able to access the original website in this fashion. 

Microsoft Restricted Access To Geolocation Database

Microsoft has locked down their Wi-Fi-powered geolocation service. The reason for the decision was that insecurity expert Elie Bursztein recently raised privacy concerns about the data which is being stored within the service.

The expert was trying to find out whether it was possible to track a laptop by snuffling the Wi-Fi information stored by Windows each time it connects to an access point. Actually, the only way he could do that was by obtaining access to Microsoft's MAC Address Database. As a result, Microsoft took a decision to restrict access to its database as a prevention measure for the future.

According to media reports, the decision follows the Google’s move, which had the same privacy complaint. Currently Microsoft, Google, and Skyhook operate Wi-Fi geolocation databases particularly designed to provide quick location data to electronic devices, including phones, tablets, and laptop computers.

Recently it was discovered that Google's database was full not just of access point MAC addresses, but also of laptop and smartphone addresses that could have been easily tracked. As a result, search giant switched something in its service so that it restricted access by requiring two nearby MAC addresses to be entered instead of only one. In other words, the new approach made it virtually impossible to query a particular phone's MAC address in order to learn where the person was.

Meanwhile, the disadvantage of all this is that if someone wants an approximate location with only one access point visible, Microsoft will reject to give them one. On the other hand, it seems that companies like Google and Redmond took a decision to better ensure their users’ privacy than convenience, in this particular case. As for the industry experts, most of them believe that the change is really unfortunate, because Wi-Fi-based positioning is a very convenient feature to have, particularly for laptops often Wi-Fi-enabled but in most cases lacking GPS hardware. In our days, geolocation is a feature from HTML5, supported by all up-to-date browsers in order to enable services like foursquare and location-based search. Some suggest that instead of restricting the service, a move in the opposite direction, like publishing the API and making it accessible to 3rd parties, plus integrating system-wide support for it would all be a valuable improvement to Windows and the online community.

PayPal Gave FBI Details Of 1,000 Hackers

After the FBI raids against Anonymous members that were carried out a few weeks ago, some might wonder where exactly the police was getting the names and addresses of the hackers the FBI claimed to arrest. Now the answer seems to be close to us: it turned out that such information was included into the shopping list details provided to the FBI by PayPal.

According to the media reports, PayPal, the online financial entity, is no longer a friend of Anonymous, and is known for collecting a thousand of IP addresses of people noticed to carry out Anonymous' denial-of-service attacks against PayPal late last year.

Meanwhile, everyone who understands that a hacker must know at least some ways to mask their address before doing things like this will realize that the names on the provided list most likely appear the bottom feeding script kiddies. Considering that the FBI is trying to catch the high-profiles Anonymous leaders rather than average members, there are some doubts that the clever hackers won’t think about hiding their IP addresses first. Still, an FBI affidavit suggests that the authorities may have many more people to arrest.

According to one of the FBI agents, PayPal security department has been cooperating with the bureau since the beginning of December, a couple days after the online payment system froze WikiLeaks’ donation account, because it soon found out that the company website started receiving serious DDoS traffic.

The FBI agents started monitoring Anonymous press releases, and at the same time PayPal started collecting traffic logs on its intrusion prevention system that had been installed on its network. The online payment company provided the FBI a USB thumb drive with the traffic logs in question, which contained about one thousand of IP addresses sending malicious network packets to the service within the DDoS attacks. The FBI receives the IP addresses engaged in sending the largest number of packets coming from hackers. Those packets contained such strings as “Wikileaks” and “Goodnight”.

According to the media reports, the affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for the house of a Texas couple and their son. Although the family hasn’t been charged yet, the house became the source of over 3,500 packets in about 2.5 hours.