CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0038, 03/01/2008

Title: CourseCast 38: Pakistan vs. YouTube, Wikileaks is Back, CAPTCHA hacked

Description: Pakistan vs. YouTube, Wikileaks is Back, CAPTCHA hacked

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 38, recorded March 1st, 2008. This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information. This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Story 1 - Pakistan Takes Down YouTube

The Pakistan government, upset by cartoons of the prophet Muhamad on YouTube, instructed its telecommunications agency to censure YouTube and prevent it from entering the country. By accident, or design, and with the help of vulnerability in the Internet protocol, Pakistan managed to reroute global requests for YouTube through its own routers where they died. This effectively prevented anyone in the world from accessing YouTube for two hours.

Sources: How Pakistan knocked YouTube offline (and how to make sure it never happens again) (cnet), Pakistan Cuts Access to YouTube Worldwide (NYTimes)

Story 2 - Wikileaks is Back Online

Wikileaks is a Web site that supports the anonymous postings of sensitive business and government documents in order to police the ethical practices of businesses and governments. Recently Wikileaks was sued by a Swiss banking company on charges that it had posted confidential and personally identifiable account information of some of its customers. The Judge ordered that the wikileaks domain name be disabled. The judge's verdict drew criticism and court filings from numerous well known organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, concerned that the order violated the First Amendment protection of free speech. The judge has withdrawn his order and Wikileaks is back online.

Sources: Judge Reverses His Order Disabling Web Site (NYTimes), ACLU and Others File to Join Wikileaks.org Case (TopTechNews),

Story 3 - CAPTCHA Work Around

You know those pictures of squiggly words that you are asked to interpret and type when applying for an online account? They are called CAPTCHAs and are designed to keep automated systems from generating numerous accounts for devious intentions. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Well, it looks like hackers have designed a way to get around CAPTCHAs. Hacking software has been designed that automates account generation, emails the CAPTCHA image to some low-paid worker in a developing country, who types the word allowing the software to complete the process and gain an account. This type of attack is being used to acquire email accounts on gmail, yahoo, and hotmail which are used by spammers in strategies to bypass email filters. New evidence suggests that more advanced software is able to successfully interpret the CAPTCHA without the need for human assistance.

Sources: Spammers Get Past Security into Google's Gmail (TopTechNews)

New Briefs

  • Google has released a new and useful online service called Google Sites at sites.google.com. The service allows individuals and groups to create and manage Web sites. (NYTimes)
  • Live video streaming support will be added to YouTube sometime in 2008 (NewTeeVee)
  • Sprint has upped the ante in the "all you can speak" competition by offering unlimited voice AND data AND premium services for $99/ month. (Cnet)
  • The EU has fined Microsoft a record $1.35 billion for defying anti-competitive sanctions. (BBC)
  • According to Ars Technica, "A new bill proposed in the Tennessee state senate aims to reduce copyright infringement at universities by forcing the schools to become antipiracy enforcers." (Ars Technica)
  • A Task Force has been created to identify effective online safety tools and technologies for protecting children online at social-networking Web sites. Participants include AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Second Life's Linden Lab, Microsoft, Semantic, Verizon and Yahoo. Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society is leading the effort. (TopTechNews)
  • iTunes has overtaken Target and BestBuy to become the number 2 top music retailer in the US. WalMart is number 1. (TopTechNews)
  • Nokia is promoting a new concept phone called the Morph, that would use nanotechnology to morph into a variety of shapes including a handset, a bracelet, or a tablet. It’s flexible, stretchable, semitransparent, self-cleaning, and green. (Gizmodo)
  • Comcast’s hearing before the FCC regarding its limiting bandwidth to customers may be a "do over" as it was discovered that Comcast paid dozens of individuals to fill the seats at the hearing and prevent the public from attending (AP on newsvine)
  • Google is running short on global bandwidth, and so is joining with five telecom companies to build an undersea cable between the US and Japan. (Reuters)
  • The British government has warned that it will impose legislation to make Internet service providers responsible for controlling the illegal pirating of music and film over the Internet if voluntary strategies are not proposed. (NYTimes)
  • Microsoft has lowered the price of Windows Vista by around 20 percent. (The Register)
  • A new Institute for Advanced Architectures, composed of researchers from Sandia and Oak Ridge National Labs, has a goal of developing an Exascale supercomputer. Currently super computers run at teraflop speeds, that's trillion of instructions per second. It is anticipated that soon they will break the petaflop barrier, that's a quadrillion instructions per second, an exascale computer would run one thousand times faster at a quintillion instructions per second. (Sandia National Labs)

That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site at www.course.com/coursecasts. E-mail us with your suggestions for the show at course.coursecasts@cengage.com. Until next time, have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!