It is critical that Internet users be skeptical. In fact, skepticism may be more important than any anti-malware software.
The latest illustration of this was an April Fools joke pulled by Emmanuel Goldstein and the gang at 2600. As they explained on their show, Off The Hook, on WBAI in New York, they started by hiding the true ownership of one of their domains.
When a domain, such as hope.net (the one used in the joke) is registered, the person or organization that pays for it, identifies themselves in a public directory known as WhoIs. Some registrars offer a privacy service, where they instead register the domain in their name, preventing the general public from learning the true owner of the domain.
Then they tried to publicize the fact that their hope.net site was connected with Barack Obama, playing up his campaign theme of hope. Hope, in this case, really stands for Hackers On Planet Earth and is the name of the convention run by 2600.
They went so far as to re-direct their hope.net site to Obama's real website for a period of time (for more on this, see One Web site, many names: an introduction to domain forwarding). Then they made a phony copy of the real site, scribbled all over it and added links to Hilary Clinton's web site.
CNET didn't run the story, but others did, not to mention the 84 votes the story got on Digg.
Wonkette: Obama Site Hacked?. "A super-secret Wonkette operative informs us that Obama's campaign recently purchased Hope.net and was set to launch the site before getting foiled by MALICIOUS HACKERS ... We are not cybersleuths here, but it sort of looks like this domain does indeed belong to Obama for America."
Comedy Central's Indecision2008: Barack Obama's Website Assassinated "As if we needed another reason to doubt Barack Obama's ability to keep us safe from insomniac Islamofascists, at appears that now he can't even keep his website safe from cyber-terrorists..."
SayAnything: Barack Obama's New Website Hacked, Redirected To Hillary Clinton's Site. "Apparently Barack Obama's campaign recently registered the domain "Hope.net," presumably to finally explain to everyone what we're all supposed to be hoping for. But unfortunately for Obama, the website has been hacked and all the links redirected to Hillary Clinton's campaign website."
Off The Hook runs for an hour, but you can listen to the 14-minute discussion of their joke here.
It's an excellent exercise in skepticism.
See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.
Wednesday night on Off The Hook, a radio show on WBAI in New York, Emmanuel Goldstein and the guys from 2600 discussed a feature on the Web site of the U.S. Postal Service that can only be described as ill-conceived.
If you're going to be away from home for a while, the your local post office can hold your mail to avoid an overflowing mailbox. Fine.
In the old days (and you can still do this), you went to the office and filled out a form (PDF). Someone on the show who has done this said the Postal Service doesn't validate the identity of the person who requests mail to be held. It validates only the identity of the person who comes to pick up the mail.
Government techies copied this manual system to the Internet.
You can go to https://holdmail.usps.com (or click on Hold Mail at the Postal Service home page, as shown below) and put a hold on mail delivery. Notice that I didn't say put a hold on your mail delivery. You can put a hold on mail delivered to anyone. This is true with the traditional system, too, but the Internet makes it worse, adding more anonymity and making the process easier. Too easy.
The agency site claims that it needs a name, address, and phone number to stop mail delivery. When tested, however, this turns out not to be the case. Requests with wrong names and wrong phone numbers were accepted, according to a listener who wrote in to the show. All you really need to know is an address.
And with the address, you can stop all mail delivery, not just mail to one person. Quoting from the Frequently Asked Questions: "All mail, regardless of name, will be held for the address entered. Submitting an online Hold Mail request once is all that is required to hold mail delivery for everyone at the address."
Don't have a computer? Simply call 800-ASK-USPS
Off The Hook runs for an hour, but you can listen to this 8-minute segment here
WBAI has an MP3 of the entire show.
See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.
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