LulzSec Hacker Group Disbands, Runs Away

26 June 2011 - It was probably getting a bit too hot for LulzSec, a group of hackers that have caused a lot of sleepless nights for data security experts in recent weeks. LulzSec said late Saturday it would break up, reports PC World, but they planned to go out with a bang. "In what it said was its final act of mayhem," wrote PC World, "it publicly unloaded a trove of documents containing a significant amount of compressed data." The group's farewell came via Twitter. PC World quoted LulzSec communique as saying, "Our planned 50-day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance...our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011." The FBI, as well as investigative agencies from the U.S. and other nations, have been in hot pursuit of the LulzSec internet criminals. British authorities arrested a suspected member of LulzSec near London recently. Even other hackers were trying to uncover the identities and whereabouts of LulzSec's members. The Telegraph UK says that LulzSec claimed to have "accomplished its mission to disrupt corporate and government bodies" and "has claimed responsibility for security breaches at targets including the CIA, Sony and the US Senate. Before disbanding it issued one last batch of data which included internal documents from internet giant AOL and the US phone company AT&T." More about LulzSec at The Telegraph... Why has LulzSec been wreaking havoc on the Internet? LulzSec claims they did it "just because we could." I get this uneasy feeling that we have not heard the last of LulzSec. Even if the group never operates under that name again, some of it members could continue the misdeeds. Worse, copycat digital criminals around the world will undoubtedly be inspired by LulzSec.

Updated: Blogger Is Back, But Posts Are Gone, Widgets Displaced

UPDATED: May 13, 2011 - Google's "Blogger" blog site is was down for an incredibly long time. It went out of service for bloggers late on Wednesday night and I am only now able to log in to post this. The outage was spotty, however: I was able to post three items yesterday but now I see that they are missing. Thanks a lot, Blogger. My layout was effed up, too, which I just scrambled to fix. Update, 7:00 pm CDT: Yesterday I posted three items, all of which disappeared. Two have now reappeared after Blogger did its under-the-hood fixes, but one is still lost in the ether.

Online Porn Just Pretext for Censorship, Group Says

The Chinese government just can't help it's totalitarian tendencies. It is a nation, after all, that has never known democracy and seems hell bent on repressing for as long as possible. Now that the sparkle of the Beijing Olympics has dimmed, the Chinese government feels it can drop all the pretty pretenses of a democratic peoples' utopia. We are able, again, to see the Chinese government for what it truly is: A bunch of freedom-fearing quasi-fascists. An international group of journalists is protesting one of the latest efforts to keep the Chinese people down: Reporters Without Borders regards the campaign against Internet porn that China launched on 5 January as just a pretext for reinforcing online censorship. More than 90 websites have so far been blocked, but some of them have no pornographic content. Foreign ministry spokesperson Jian Yu nonetheless insisted today that “China takes a positive and open minded attitude toward the management of the Internet.” FULL ARTICLE... RELATED: Obama's Pet Reporters Liberals, too, should reject the Fairness Doctrine Subscribe to Chicago News Bench

More Popular Than Andrew Greeley

We don't like to brag, but for the selfless purpose of informing the public, Chicago News Bench (CNB) is more popular than Andrew Greeley's Web Site. That's according to Alexa, a top ranking service of web sites worldwide. Alexa compiles detail traffic stats on web sites. One of the many things they also do is break down popularity by region. CNB is a Chicago based web site, and Alexa ranks CNB as the second most popular in Chicago. In Alexa's category of "Top Sites in Personal Pages" for "Chicago/Society and Culture/Personal Pages," we are number two after a blog called "Whatever," which is ranked number one. Greeley's site is number three. Greeley is a best-selling author. RELATED: Andrew Greeley's Biography Page Subscribe to Chicago News Bench

Internet Ad Revenue Keeps Growing

While newpapers and magazines suffer ad revenue losses and dwindling circulation, ad revenue for Web sites is projected to keep growing. That's essentially what Geoff Ramsey writes at eMarketer: In our latest projections, released in August, eMarketer saw online advertising growing from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009. eMarketer benchmarks its online ad spending projections against quarterly reports by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which uses PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct its surveys. For the first half of 2008, the IAB reported 15.2% growth for online ad spending, which is in line with eMarketer’s predictions. Ramsey correctly points out that not everybody is optimistic, but he does provide strong evidence and statistics that support the bullish outlook. Marketers should rightly ask, “What is behind the bullish projections for online ad spending, especially when most traditional media are taking the financial equivalent of body blows?” The seven reasons are as follows:... FULL ARTICLE at eMARKETER...

MUST READ: WAR BLOGS IN GEORGIA

From the war zone of Georgia / South Ossetia, compelling posts from bloggers who are there, some hiding in their basements, machine guns on their laps. This special feature from Global Voices should not be missed. READ IT NOW... RELATED: Bloggers Chime In On Russian Attacks Wired.com: Georgian bloggers ward off Russian cyberattacks Russian Bloggers Are As Powerful As Russian Hackers Attacks on Georgia Web Sites May Not Be ‘Cyberwar’ (NewsFactor) Russian cyberwar! Yes, no, maybe so? Russian Cyberwar Against Georgia Coincides with Invasion

Bloggers in Communist China

China still sucks. Here's proof. To slip past Internet censors squashing reports of a weekend riot in China's Guizhou province, some bloggers have started writing backward. Some 30,000 rioters set fire to government buildings over the weekend to protest the way authorities handled the death of a teenager in the province's Weng'an County. While state-controlled media provided immediate coverage, government censors moved fast to delete online posts providing unofficial accounts and deactivate the accounts of those users. China's sophisticated censorship regime -- known as the Great Firewall -- can automatically track objectionable phrases. FULL STORY at Wall Street Journal Online...

14 and 6

Congrats to Uptown Update, good neighbor and friend just down the road a piece. You're number 14. Say, The Bench is on that list too! Welcome to the Top 20, kids. See: Uptown Update Named 14th Most Influential Political Blog In Illinois NOTE: "BlogNetNews' Blogosphere Influence Rating combines a variety of data sets to determine which blogs are most powerfully influencing the direction of the Illinois political blogosphere. The exact method BNN uses to calculate influence scores must remain proprietary in order to prevent attempts to game the system. BNN's methodology takes into account the fact that all Internet data is profoundly limited in its reliability by using multiple data sets that, when combined, reveal a fair picture of activity in the blogosphere." ~BlogNetNews