Open Data: Why the Crowd Can Be Your Best Analytics Tool

From the bounty of data emerged "data science" and a plethora of new tools to deal with the size and speed of information. Today we are seeing crowdsourcing increasingly commoditize data, and projects like OpenStreetMap replacing the NAVTEQs of the world.

Open Data: Why the Crowd Can Be Your Best Analytics Tool

Backlink: http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/01/open-data-crowd-best-analytics-tool.html

The push-button tool being used to shut down Visa, MasterCard, and other sites

Terrific piece by Joel Johnson on Gizmodo about the software tool being used to take down MasterCard, Visa, and Sarah Palin's websites.

LOIC ("Low Orbit Ion Cannon") is an application developed by 4Chan-affiliated hackers designed to--when used en masse by thousands of anonymous users--launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Like Visa.com and Mastercard.com, for instance.

It's a pushbutton application...

The idea behind LOIC is that it can allow you to participate in attacks even if you've no clue how to hack. Just download a copy of LOIC (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux!), punch in the target information like a URL or an IP address and zap.

It's interesting to see the tweets from Operation Payback on Twitter. It looks like they've also gone after Joe Leiberman's site, as well. I'm sure he'll have some choice things to say about it. No doubt he is loving every second of the attention he's garnering from all this.

The push-button tool being used to shut down Visa, MasterCard, and other sites

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xt8s9I9qrUs/the-push-button-tool.html

Dmitry Sklyarov and co. crack Canon's "image verification" anti-photoshopping tool

Dmitry Sklyarov and his colleagues at Elcomsoft have cracked the "image verification" system in high-end Canon cameras; this system digitally signs the photos you take so any alternations, "touch ups" or other modifications can be detected. Sklyarov (who became a cause celebre when he broke the DRM on Adobe's ebooks and was thrown in jail by the FBI at Adobe's behest) and his team have a sense of humor -- they've produced correctly signed images of astronauts planting the Soviet flag on the moon and the Statue of Liberty holding a sickle, among others.

The problem is that the HMAC sits in the camera's RAM in a de-obfuscated form and can be extracted, according to Sklyarov. It is also possible to extract the HMAC from the camera's Flash ROM and manually de-obfuscate it. Canon also released a third version of ODD, which Sklyarov was also able to break and forge the ODD. Elcomsoft has written a program that can analyze a camera's processor and firmware.

The problem is a design flaw and can't be fixed, according to Elcomsoft. Sklyarov said he was able to extract the HMAC keys for the following models: EOS 20D, EOS 5D, EOS 30D, EOS 40D, EOS 450D, EOS 1000D, EOS 50D, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 500D and EOS 7D.

The problem, of course, is that for this system to work, the camera has to keep a secret from its owner -- and if one camera owner manages to extract the secret, all cameras fall. According to NetworkWorld, Sklyarov offers a silly remedy for this: "Canon should prevent its cameras from running non-Canon code to avoid the use of software tools by an attacker" -- that is, use DRM to control which code can run on a Canon camera (there is a thriving world of hobbyists who have improved the Canon firmware).

Dmitry Sklyarov and co. crack Canon's "image verification" anti-photoshopping tool

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/5zDr8YfeqYo/dmitry-sklyarov-and.html