My Bots Weblog

«The SANS Top 20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities Four years ago, the SANS Institute and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) at the FBI released a document summarizing the Ten Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities. Thousands of organizations used that list, and the expanded Top-20 lists that followed one, two, and three years later, to prioritize their efforts so they could close the most dangerous holes first. The vulnerable services that led to worms like Blaster, Slammer, and Code Red have been on these lists.»...
Source: http://www.sans.org | Source Status

«Google: Ethical Concerns Google's early and strong commitment to their users and informal corporate mission to "Do No Evil" or to "Don't be evil" has gained them wide trust. While their web search technology is well known, Google specializes in general data indexing. As a trusted and centralized source of information on the web, Google has assumed immeasurable power. Now as a publicly traded corporation with over three thousand employees, Google must assume a great responsibility to their users, to deliver fair and relevant results and to protect privacy at all costs. As their user base grows and their popularity increases, decisions at Google will not come without ethical consequences. The node ranking technology, dubbed PageRank, is used in some form to rank web pages, news articles, images, and user documents. It appears at first glance to be a democratic system, but it is a flawed one. Under most democratic systems, votes are weighted equally. PageRank, however, is mathematically inclined to give more power to relevant pages. To Google's credit, since web pages frequently contain more than one link and thus vote more than once, the page's total importance is at least disseminated among its links. In spite of Google's patents giving away much of the ranking method, certain variables and factors remain a secret and draw skepticism to the impartiality of the ranking scheme. Further, it is known that scrubbing mechanisms other than PageRank prepare the search results for their final display on Google's web page. Among the further scrubbing methods of search results, one that I found most surprising is that Google censors search results in China, France, and Germany.» [...] «Google has become a substantial news source and plays a part in telling the web which stories are relevant, when in fact the web should be telling Google what is relevant. The same issue holds for normal web searches; when Google was a relatively unknown outside observer to the social interactions on the web, PageRank was fresh and promising. As Google slowly begins arbitrating these interactions by dictating what is relevant to trusting masses, PageRank could become stale and merely project importance on its own monstrous creations. »...
Source: http://everything2.com | Source Status Categories: Analyse des Stratégies d'Influence, Bibliographie/Fabrique de l'opinion

«Reporters Without Borders marks the World Summit on the Information Society by presenting 15 countries that are "enemies of the Internet" and pointing to a dozen others whose attitude to it is worrying. The 15 "enemies" are the countries that crack down hardest on the Internet, censoring independent news sites and opposition publications, monitoring the Web to stifle dissident voices, and harassing, intimidating and sometimes imprisoning Internet users and bloggers who deviate from the regime's official line. The "countries to watch" do not have much in common with the "enemies of the Internet." The plight of a Chinese Internet user, who risks prison by mentioning human rights in an online forum, does not compare with the situation of a user in France or the United States. Yet many countries that have so far respected online freedom seem these days to want to control the Internet more. Their often laudable aims include fighting terrorism, paedophilia and Internet-based crime, but the measures sometimes threaten freedom of expression.» [...] «- European Union The EU is responsible for regulating the Internet and rulings often apply to member-states. A European directive on 8 June 2000 about e-commerce proved a threat to freedom of expression, by making ISPs responsible for the content of websites they host and requiring them to block any page they consider illegal when informed of its existence. This creates a private system of justice, where the ISP is called on to decide what is illegal or not. Technicians thus do the job of a judge. The EU is now studying a proposal to oblige ISPs to retain records of customers’ online activity. The proposal could limit Internet users’ right to privacy. »...
Source: http://www.rsf.org | Source Status Categories: Juridique, Crise/Analyse de Crise,Tendances