“We’re Not Winning” the Cyber-War

Much like the War on Drugs or even the War on Terror, the inability of the American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) government and Federal law enforcement bodies to quell the onslaught of hacker attacks points to a larger systemic issue: the inability to combat decentralized opponents. Sure it may seem like good news when the FBI reports it has snagged the leader of the hacker commune LulzSec (followed by the revelation that he was a FBI informant anyways), but such arrests have done little to stop the brazen digital vigilantes.

The problem with fighting such decentralized adversaries is that they don’t need traditional leadership structures to operate, and even if there is a leader at the top of the chain, like in the case of LulzSec, I would guess that there are always two or three other hackers ready to take on his role immediately following his downfall. So just how bad is the hacker epidemic?

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal Shawn Henry, the FBI’s top cyber cop, offered his own grim assessment of the situation, stating that “we’re not winning” the war against hackers and the current methods employed to fight cyber-crime are outdated and “unsustainable.”

T-Mobile Considers Tower Selloff for LTE Funds

 

In an effort to find the necessary revenue to fund its ambitious, and slightly confusing, proposed foray into LTE, T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is apparently prepared to leverage the farm, developing a plan to sell off key T-Mobile assets to generate more income. In fact, Bloomberg recently reported that T-Mobile has hired a strategic advisory group to assist in selling off one of T-Mobile’s only real assets, its wireless towers…they didn’t really need them anyways.

While I’m sure a selloff of the company’s wireless infrastructure will generate much needed revenue for both Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile, two companies who have see their fortunes flag over recent years, the timing certainly strikes me as odd, given that it was just over a month ago that T-Mobile announced its plan to invest in a “network modernization” strategy that included a network upgrade to 4G.

That said, there are rumours that such a selloff is part of an overall strategy to make T-Mobile self-sufficient, alleviating the current financial burden on Deutsche Telekom (DT) and allowing the American wireless carrier to hopefully find its wings in an increasingly competitive market.

To be fair, though, T-Mobile isn’t the first company to consider selling off its wireless infrastructure to third party tower operators, and there is some upside to such a deal as well. First the obvious one, with the sale of its towers analysts anticipate that T-Mobile will be able to generate upwards of $3 billion, how much of that is earmarked for network upgrades and how much will line DT’s pockets, however, remains to be seen.

Employers Demanding Facebook Passwords

In this era of heightened privacy awareness it’s the sort of story that makes you shake your head, but recent anecdotal evidence across America suggests a disturbing trend among businesses, companies demanding employees—prospective and current—hand over their Facebook passwords or face dismissal. It’s the sort of story that has civil liberties watch dog groups up in arms and has even put the social networking giant itself on high alert.
While the blogosphere has yet to put any names to the alleged corporations who have been engaging in these sorts of corporate social networking shenanigans, the story seems to have enough credibility that Capitol Hill is now getting involved, with government officials already calling for legislation that would see this sort of demand for private information come to an abrupt end.
Still, on the face of it the story seems far-fetched, as I find it hard to believe that suddenly corporations across the country have forgotten en masse the ongoing privacy debate. But that aside for the moment, consider this: in this fragile economy what would you do if faced with the choice between maintaining your privacy or making a living?
In recent months, we’ve seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information. This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends. It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.
The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidences of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords. If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends. We have worked really hard at Facebook to give you the tools to control who sees your information.
If true, it’s the sort of thing that makes me scratch my head, as surely someone within these companies made mention that in this sort of privacy sensitive ecosystem such behaviour would quickly becoming a rallying point for free speech lobbyists, government officials, and every person with a keyboard around the world.
That said, while such behaviour is certainly preposterous, it should come as no surprise that this certainly isn’t the first time social networking has been used as a tool of big business or big government to find out information about you and yours. To wit, speaking to a close friend who works as an insurance fraud investigator for one of Canada’s largest insurance companies, she noted that her job has been made exponentially easier because of people’s lack of online awareness, meaning that with just a few clicks she is often able to find out whether or not a person’s insurance claim is valid based on information (photos, posts, location tags) they’ve shared on Facebook.
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RIM Introduces BlackBerry 10 to Developers – Sort Of

Research In Motion is hoping to meet a major deficiency at the pass by offering a version of its BlackBerry 10 to app developers right out of the gate.
The plan is for the Waterloo-based company to provide app developers with an unreleased prototype device – not a BlackBerry 10 smartphone, mind you – that will run an updated version of the operating system running on the PlayBook. Using this interface, developers can get the jump on pushing out apps for RIM’s newest incarnations.
The prototype device is called the BlackBerry Dev Alpha, but sources say that it will only resemble the product that will be made available to consumers. App developers will receive their devices in May at an Orlando developers’ conference.
RIM has lagged behind companies like Apple in the app department and is hoping to turn those fortunes around with the eventual but delayed release of BlackBerry 10 products. Much like the PlayBook, the release of these devices will be absolutely critical to the company’s future fortunes and could make or break things. RIM has a heck of a lot of ground to make up to Apple and Android devices, of course, and many analysts think that there’s no catching up.
With BlackBerry even having lost its touch in Canada, it’s hard to say what RIM can do to reverse its fortunes. The company is banking heavily on apps to give them a push in the right direction and BlackBerry’s 10’s rumoured capability to unify “the mobile operating system ecosystem” for RIM smartphones and tablets, but it may not be enough.
After all, RIM hasn’t even held home ice advantage. Last week, it was revealed that Apple toppled BlackBerry as the top-selling smartphone in Canada, marking the first time RIM’s devices haven’t been the top-selling in the Great White North since the company’s inception. In 2010, BlackBerry devices outsold iPhones by more than half a million devices. But in 2011, Apple’s iPhones sold 2.85 million to BlackBerry’s 2.08 million