Virgin Media along with various other ISPs are now actively blocking the Pirate Bay website. Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, and so the censorship by our country of what websites we are and aren’t allowed to visit begins.
In the order, the judge Mr Justice Arnold told Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2 and Everything Everywhere to begin blocking access to The Pirate Bay.
A sixth ISP, BT, requested “a few more weeks” to consider their position on blocking the site.
Virgin Media said in a statement: “Virgin Media has received an order from the courts requiring it to prevent access to The Pirate Bay in order to help protect against copyright infringement.
A Scottish charity – based in Glasgow – breached the Data Protection Act after two unencrypted memory sticks and papers containing the personal details of up to 101 individuals were stolen from an employee’s home.
The information included peoples’ names, addresses and dates of birth, as well as a limited amount of data relating to the individuals’ health. The charity – Enable Scotland (Leading the Way) – promptly reported the incident to the ICO in November 2011 and informed those individuals affected.
The ICO’s investigation found that the information should have been deleted from the memory sticks once it had been uploaded onto the charity’s server. The charity had no specific guidance for home workers on keeping personal data secure, and portable media devices used to store sensitive personal information were not routinely encrypted.
Edinburgh IT Support company, Consider IT, has recently learned that security software publisher Symantec has confirmed it was recently the victim of a cyber attack, resulting in the theft and disclosure of product source code. Via its website, the company affirmed Anonymous’ claims, citing a source code heist dating back to 2006. The post goes on to suggest that users running Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton SystemWorks, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0, or Symantec AntiVirus 10.2 apply the latest maintenance patches.
Earlier this month, the online-collective Anonymous stated, via Twitter, that it possessed portions of the code in question and planned to release it in support of a class-action lawsuit filed by consumers – the suit claims Symantec employed scare tactics to encourage users to purchase its wares.
Lewis Peckover, who set up a little web tool that displays all the “HTTP header information” sent to sites by web browsers, highlighted yesterday that O2 include your mobile phone number whenever you visit a website whilst running over the 3G network.
Users of the social news site, Reddit.com, confirm this problem also happens with Tesco Mobile.
For O2 and Tesco customers browsing on a 3G connection, these headers also include their personal telephone number in an x-up-calling-line-id line. Enterprising website owners can easily keep a copy of the HTTP header information sent over by visiting browsers and tie it to IP addresses and logins, if applicable.
O2 commented on their Twitter feed:
@lewispeckover Hi Lewis. The mobile number in the HTML is linked to how the site determines that your browsing from a mobile device#O2Guru (https://twitter.com/#!/O2/status/161872584634408960)
Edinburgh IT Support company Consider IT reports a few of its clients were left without Internet this morning when BT suffered a major business broadband problem.
BT Business’ Twitter feed said the problem was fixed at 11.30 GMT, and advised users to restart their routers to get connected.
One user of TheRegister.co.uk posts:
Had this this morning.
At first, it was the ADSL Authentication failing on two ADSL2+ lines we have. That went away quite quickly, though, and has been replaced by a completely useless authenticated session that won’t shift traffic at all (literally, even a ping only hears silence). Both lines seem to be the same.
I switched us onto our emergency 3G stick which handles the traffic well for about a day before we hit limits, but the two business ADSL lines are still out of commission.
Edinburgh IT Support company, Consider IT, would like to make clients and visitors aware of a recent McAfee vulnerability that has been confirmed by McAfee themselves.
McAfee is promising to fix a vulnerability in its anti-malware service after it was alerted to a flaw that allows systems where the product was installed to be turned into spammers.
The spamming problem from this software resulted in major inconvenience for some McAfee customers, whose email was blocked after their IP addresses appeared on blacklists. McAfee’s forums show some of these customers complaining here and here.
In a blog post (here), McAfee said:
The patch will be released on January 18 or 19, as soon as we have finished testing. Because this is a managed product, all affected customers will automatically receive the patch when it is released.
Some Edinburgh customers told us they had been affected.
Virgin Media has said that services around the UK are now fully restored following a nationwide failure.
Virgin Media apologised to their customers for Tuesday’s blip and said that the issue had now been fully resolved.
The problems arise just as Virgin Media plans to increase speeds to most of its customers. Over the next 18 months, Virgin Media plans to double most of its customers internet speeds.
If you have still not been able to connect, please try powering down your Cable modem for five minutes and then start it back up and wait a few minutes for the connection to re-establish.
A care provider with offices in Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man has taken action to improve its data protection practices following a joint ruling by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Office of the Data Protection Supervisor (ODPS) for the Isle of Man.
Praxis Care Limited breached both the UK Data Protection Act and the Isle of Man Data Protection Act by failing to keep peoples’ data secure. An unencrypted memory stick, containing personal information relating to 107 Isle of Man residents and 53 individuals from Northern Ireland, was lost on the Isle of Man in August 2011. Some of the information was sensitive and related to individuals’ care and mental health.
The device has not been recovered.
A Scottish advocate breached the Data Protection Act after failing to encrypt a laptop containing sensitive personal data which was later stolen, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today.
The laptop was stolen from the home of Ruth Crawford QC in 2009 when she was away on holiday. It contained personal data relating to a number of individuals involved in eight court cases the advocate had been working on. This included some details relating to the physical and mental health of individuals involved in two of the cases. The device has not been recovered; however, most of the information compromised would already have been released as evidence in court papers.
The breach was only reported to the ICO on 30 August 2011 when the last case relating to information held on the laptop was concluded.
Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council breached the Data Protection Act by losing an unencrypted memory stick containing the details of over 18,000 residents, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The ICO has required the council to put changes in place and will check to ensure the improvements have been made.
The memory stick – which was lost in May and has not been recovered – included, in some cases, residents’ names and addresses, along with details of payments to and by the council. The device did not include any bank account details. The information had been put on a memory stick to compile the council’s financial accounts.
The ICO’s investigation found that the council’s data protection practices were insufficient – specifically that it failed to make sure that memory sticks provided to its staff were encrypted.
