The Weekend Brief

Last Updated on Saturday, 28 November 2009 09:16 Written by Jeffreycarr Saturday, 28 November 2009 09:16

The holiday weekend notwithstanding, a lot is going on. Here’s some of the more interesting stories in my newsreader to tide you over until Monday, when I’ll be announcing the start of a weekly series of reports that I’m very excited about.

• “Let’s taste it.” This is one of those interesting translations that comes from machine translation software. In this case, it’s the recommendation of a Bulgarian poster on Russian hacker forum Форум АНТИЧАТ who posted about SHODAN, a new search engine which enables users to find servers by type, country, host name and port. Richard at Taosecurity has some concerns about it.
• Cool video demo of Palantir’s use in cyber security analysis is up at the Palantirtech blog.
• Nikita Borovikov, leader of the Russian youth organization Nashi, is upset over the dismantling of historical statues in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and plans a protest there. It will be interesting to see if there are any DDoS attacks against Tashkent websites in the near future similar to those launched against Estonian websites (also over a statue issue).
• DST sold an undisclosed percentage of its shares of the hugely profitable Mail.ru and Astrum Online to Naspers. It’ll be interesting to see where Yuri Milner (CEO of DST) decides to reinvest the proceeds of the sale – acquiring more shares of Facebook stock perhaps?
• Perhaps this proposed Canadian law will force ISP providers to start paying attention to who they sell their services to and what type of data they’re hosting. That would be a welcome change from the present situation of some ISPs shrugging their shoulders and taking the position of “if you find it, we’ll take it down – maybe”.

Have a good weekend. See you Monday.