Pirate Party Banned From Gaming Exhibition

Despite having booked and paid for their booth at Gamex, Sweden’s largest gaming exhibition, the Pirate Party have been excluded from the action this week. The party, who say they were nagged for 2 to 3 months to book for the event, were this week informed they were too controversial and no longer welcome.

Running from the 3rd to 6th November, Gamex is Sweden’s biggest gaming show. All the big names in interactive entertainment are there showing off their wares, including giants such as Activision, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Nintendo.

One group that will not be there, however, are the Swedish Pirate Party.

“The Pirate Party would have been in place inside the show, but now we will not be,” says Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg. “We are simply no longer welcome.”

Troberg says that after the sales people from the exhibition pursued the party for months to participate, they decided to book and pay for a booth. Not only that, the party also agreed to a package of advertising and hotel rooms.

As can be seen from the photograph below of pre-event billboard advertising, everything was in place for the party to participate.

But earlier this week, just before the event was due to start, the Pirate Party received some surprise news.

“On Tuesday afternoon, I called a representative of the show with a few simple practical questions, but she seemed generally stressed out and said something vague about the show and not wanting any problems before she hung up,” says Troberg.

“I thought it was a bit strange, but in the afternoon, the pieces fell into place when the fair manager, Bear Wengse, phoned me and kindly, but firmly, announced that the Pirate Party was no longer welcome at the fair.”

Wengse informed Troberg that the exhibition is a meeting place and not a venue for political conflict and the party’s presence could cause problems, particularly since some of their work “could be perceived as criminal.”

Troberg countered that as a political party they only want to change certain laws democratically, and that can not be considered a crime. Nevertheless, the ban stood.

There isn’t a complete ban on politics at the event, though. The Swedish Social Democratic Youth League (SSU) are being allowed to appear – even though they too support the decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing.

However, the SSU probably fly a little more easily under the radars of some of the more prominent entertainment industry exhibitors at Gamex – Warner, Sony and Disney as prime examples. There’s no proof that these companies objected to the Pirate Party’s presence, but the party’s support for their arch-enemy – The Pirate Bay – won’t have gone unnoticed.

Nevertheless, Troberg is upbeat. She extended thanks to the forces behind the party’s exclusion, the net result of which was more exposure for the party than they would have otherwise achieved at the exhibition, and at much less expense.

Visitors to the show wanting to show their support for the party weren’t disappointed, though. Yesterday the party’s Young Pirate division were outside the event, handing out free T-shirts to be worn inside.

“I find it absolutely hilarious that a gaming fair banned the Pirate Party on the official pretext that ‘our culture is harmful to gaming’,” Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, told TorrentFreak.

“A decade down the road, people will just shake their heads at that. What else can you do, really?”

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.

Microsoft Uses Law To Cripple Hacker Spam Network

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft on Thursday said it combined technology with an "extraordinary" legal maneuver to cripple a massive network of hacked computers that had been flooding the Internet with spam.

The software titan's Digital Crime Unit got clearance from a US judge to virtually sever the cyber criminals' command computers from hundreds of thousands of machines worldwide infected with a Waledac virus.

"We decided the best tactic would be to literally build a wall between the bot-herder, the command computer, and all of the other computers -- effectively cutting the umbilical cord," said Microsoft attorney Richard Boscovich.

Microsoft got a US judge to grant an ex parte temporary restraining order that let the firm erect the cyber blockade without warning bot-herders, masters of the "botnet."

"It was of crucial importance that when we went out to sever the connection between the bot herder and the bots, that severing had to be done without him knowing," said Boscovich, who works in the digital crime unit.

Microsoft drafted a complaint that made a case to the court that the damage to computer owners worldwide, and to the software firm, was major enough to warrant "this rather extraordinary order," Boscovich said.

The mission to take down one of the ten largest botnets in the United States was referred to internally at Microsoft as "Operation b49."

Waledac is estimated to have infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, letting its masters mine machines for information or secretly use them to fire off spam email.

Hackers typically infect computers with malicious codes by tricking owners into clicking on booby-trapped email messages or Internet links that plant viruses.

Bot-herders are then free to hire out botnets for nefarious tasks such as spewing spam or overwhelming legitimate websites with myriad simultaneously requests in what are known as distributed-denial-of-service attacks.

The Waledac botnet was believed to be capable of sending more than 1.5 billion spam email messages daily.

During a three week period in December, Waledac-infected machines sent approximately 651 million spam email messages to users of Microsoft's free Hotmail service, according to the software firm.

The spam included messages pitching online pharmacies, knock-off goods, and penny stocks.

"Three days into the effort, Operation b49 has effectively shut down connections to the vast majority of Waledac-infected computers, and our goal is to make that disruption permanent," a Microsoft lawyer said in a release.

"But the operation hasn't cleaned the infected computers and is not a silver bullet for undoing all the damage we believe Waledac has caused."

Computer users are advised to purge their machines of viruses and make sure their programs and security software are up to date.

US courts allow for hearings to decide whether temporary restraining orders should be made permanent, setting up an unlikely scenario in which bot-herders would argue for their right to reconnect with their machine minions.