Scammers have contacted websites demanding a ransom message be paid or else they will ensure the site will be blacklisted for aggressive spamming activities.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
You may have heard the recent news that President Trump has decided to label the the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a “foreign terrorist organization.” The IRGC is Iran’s powerful military/security/law enforcement apparatus — that also owns a ton of businesses. As the White House itself admits, this is the first time a foreign government agency has been referred to as a foreign terrorist organization. This is big news in a huge variety of ways — in large part because it could end up criminalizing lots of people and businesses who unwittingly do business with the IRGC including (checks notes) a firm called The Trump Organization.
But, leaving that aside, it raises some other issues as well. We’ve been talking about the impact of the terrible EU Terrorist Content Regulation that the EU Parliament will soon be voting on. But, as we’ve discussed in the past, there are lots of questions about who decides just what is “terrorist” content. Daphne Keller tweeted about the IRGC decision, wondering what happens when one country’s laws demand the removal of content from another country’s government and suggests (accurately) this is going to lead to a huge mess.
Has anyone written on what happens when powerful govts disagree about which groups platforms must block as “terrorist”?
Right now it’s easy: block ‘em all. But eventually there will be groups one govt cares about and thinks should *not* be blocked. Then things get interesting. https://t.co/sjISXxuKQg— Daphne Keller (@daphnehk) April 7, 2019
Of course, it also gets even more complex than that. On a recent On The Media episode, they discussed efforts by a few different websites to archive terrorist propaganda, both to learn about what’s happening (in the form of open source intelligence), but also for the purpose of historical records. As the piece notes, many researchers and reporters find those archives to be incredibly valuable. And yet, they’re dealing with issues of demands for the content to be taken down as “terrorist content.”
This is not a new issue. For years, we’ve pointed out how demands to delete “terrorist content” online has regularly resulted in the silencing of human rights groups documenting war crimes.
Combine all of this together and we’re creating a recipe for disaster. The EU is demanding that all “terrorist content” be deleted with one hour’s notice. The US is designating government organizations as terrorist groups. And human rights groups trying to document war crimes are being kicked off the internet. None of this seems like a good way to actually fight terrorism. It really seems like a solution designed to pretend that terrorists can be swept under the rug, like if we don’t know what they’re doing out there, they’ll just magically disappear.
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Tech Q&A: Blocked malware download keeps trying | Technology telegraphherald.com
Question: I’ve been getting a pop-up at the bottom of my screen that says, “Do you want to open or save ImgSync from image8.pubmatic.com?” My choices are …
By now, of course, you’re aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into “Oath” with AOL and other no longer relevant properties) has suddenly decided that nothing sexy is allowed on its servers. This took many by surprise because apparently a huge percentage of Tumblr was used by people to post somewhat racy content. Knowing that a bunch of content was about to disappear, the famed Archive Team sprung into action — as they’ve done many times in the past. They set out to archive as much of the content on Tumblr that was set to be disappeared down the memory hole as possible… and it turns out that Verizon decided as a final “fuck you” to cut them off. Jason Scott, the mastermind behind the Archive Team announced over the weekend that Verizon appeared to be blocking their IPs:
GOOD MORNING INTERNET
This morning, Tumblr mass IP-banned entire swaths of @archiveteam volunteers and warrior instances. Some of our folks will do some work to see if they can get a little more out, but Tumblr has spoken: Get the hell off our lawn, we got some deletin' to do. pic.twitter.com/CrDCaSoPuR
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) December 15, 2018
On Sunday, Scott announced that the Archive Team has figured out a way to get past the blocks:
why look at that the archiving of tumblr restarted how did that happen must be a bug surely a crack team of activist archivists didn't see an ip block as a small setback and then turned everything up to 11 pic.twitter.com/5H7GoJon70
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) December 16, 2018
Still, this is a pretty fucked up thing for Verizon to do. It’s one thing to decide to completely change the kind of content you host. That’s their call. But, at the very least, allow the people who focus on archiving the internet for historical purposes the chance to actually do what they do best. Blocking the Archive Team is a truly obnoxious move, cementing Verizon’s reputation as really not caring one bit about the damage the company does.
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