Hacker-anarchists make Guy Fawkes design a best seller – swelling the coffers of the Hollywood studio it is battling
They call themselves "Anonymous", and they are the world's most famous group of hacker-anarchists. When they have left the glow of their computers to protest in public – against anti-piracy laws, perhaps, or the imprisonment of Julian Assange – they have taken, very wisely, to wearing masks. Since 2008, the mask of choice has been the eerie "Guy Fawkes" design made famous by the film of Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta.
In Moore's story, the mask is worn by a lone freedom fighter against government iniquity. Yet it is a measure of the allure of hacktivism that the real-life replica has now become one of the most popular masks worldwide. Its manufacturer, Rubies Costume Company, sells well over 100,000 every year, and the product is the best-selling mask on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. In the words of one reviewer on the site, it is "very useful to hide your identity from the public while you go about your anonymous deeds".
Now, it is not nice to sneer – nor is it wise, when one's target is a rather touchy criminal collective. But there is a tasty irony about the fact that the V mask is itself a copyrighted product. Every time that Rubies sells one – for $6.49, £5.16 or €10.50 – a cut of the profit goes to Warner Bros, which made the film. That's Warners as in one of Hollywood's six big studios, a subsidiary of TimeWarner, and a member of, yes, the Motion Picture Association of America – Anonymous's adversary in the fight over online piracy. It just goes to show. The battle for copyright may be lost, but no one flouts the law of unintended consequences.
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While Sabu and Topiary are firmly on the inside, the likes of The Jester and LulzSec Exposed are most certainly not
Inside
Sabu Apparent founder and leader of LulzSec, he is a long-time hacktivist associated with senior Anonymous members. Decides who can join the group and who should be targeted. Attempts by rivals to uncover details about his real-life identity suggest he is a 30-year-old IT consultant skilled in the Python programming language who has lived in New York. The timing of some his tweets – tweeting "goodnight all" at 0700 BST, or 0200 New York time – implies he is on the US's eastern seaboard.

Topiary Believed to be second-in-command, and the public face of LulzSec. An eloquent writer with a sharp turn of phrase, Topiary manages the main LulzSec Twitter account and has a hand in most of the group's rare public pronouncements. Well-known among hackers due to long links with senior Anonymous members. Chat logs taken over five days from May and June show Topiary to be oddly self-conscious – he said of a Wikipedia page about himself: "can we delete it somehow?" – and not beyond his own reproach: "Sabu and I got a bit carried away and gave LulzSec away a bit." Little is known about his identity, though he has been informally addressed as Daniel in leaked transcripts.

Kayla Thought to be the only senior female member of the hacking community, with lengthy involvement in the top command of Anonymous and, latterly, LulzSec. Apparently owns a powerful botnet used to take down targets. May have been instrumental in the attack in February on a US security firm, HBGary. In logs, referred to as LulzSec's "assassin/spy".

Storm Another senior hacker apparently controlling a large botnet of infected computers. Known for targeting rival hacker forums, and acting on Sabu's instruction. Appears to be a veteran in the world of taking down websites, privately disclosing this month in logs seen by the Guardian that his denial of service tool is "over 10 years old".
Joepie92/Joepie91
Fringe member who spends much of the time "idling" in the group's chatrooms rather than actively co-ordinating or supporting attacks. Helps identify rival hackers. Little is known about his real-life identity.

Neuron One of the most technically able members of LulzSec, Neuron builds tools for the group and is occasionally involved in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Little is known about Neuron's real-life identity, although his use of "aye" for "yes" suggests he is in or from the UK.

Tflow Credited with creating LulzSec's famous Friday song, a comical skit denouncing other hackers and warning its rivals. Tflow also appears to be involved in maintenance for the main LulzSec website, protecting it from incoming attacks. Claims to have been around since the start of LulzSec towards the end of May.
Outside
The Jester Emphatically not a member of LulzSec. A lone-wolf hacker, self-described as a "hacktivist for good". Believed to be ex-military, The Jester appears to have considerable firepower, which he principally employs against jihadist websites. A thorn in the side of the sprawling collectives Anonymous and, latterly, LulzSec for some time: publicly mocking their "childish" pursuits and threatening to expose key members by releasing their "Dox": documents and information that would identify them in real life. Most believe the Jester to be based in the US, a product of his military background. He also attacks what he calls "terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, and other general bad guys". Brought down the WikiLeaks website in November, hours before it released the US diplomatic cables, with an enormous DDOS attack.

LulzSec Exposed Group of unknown size of self-described "web ninjas" who say they are unaffiliated to The Jester, but share his desire to out members of LulzSec. Claim to be angry on behalf of victims; English may not be their first language (or perhaps not that of the person(s) writing their blog. "We are not doing this for [the] sake of publicity or media attention," they say on their blog. "We just thought we could help and we did it."
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Trying to figure this out forever.

Have you ever wanted to send mail as another email address in Apple Mail, especially if you’re using Google Apps and Google Mail (Gmail)? I looked for a solution everywhere and there wasn’t any really great help to simply use one email address but be able to send from multiple email addresses.

The reason I wanted to do this was because I was trying to migrate a Google Apps account into a Google Mail account but not lose the ability to Send As the Google Apps account. I had come to a point of having to require to purchase the business account but I was already paying for my Gmail account… 200+ GBs! So, there was no point in upgrading my Google Apps account (@John.do) when I could move all the email (120,000 emails) into Google Mail (GMail) and still have plenty of space to spare.

I just figured this out and the solution was so insanely easy:

Of course make sure that you’ve enabled in your account settings to Send mail as the alternate address. Confirm this account.

Then, in Apple Mail, just add the email addresses in one account but in the Email Address section on the right just separate emails via a comma.

Wow, was it really that simple? You can add more than just two as well! Add as many as you’d like.

Now you can easily send mail as another address without having to add another full account.

Curious about the Migration part? That was easy except it’ll just take a week or so. I know there are faster ways than doing a POP3 import via Settings but this is the most comprehensive and safe way to do it without room for failure:

After a few days I’ve already got 10,000 emails migrated, so it’ll take a week and a half. I can wait, no problem.

Sweet, right?

 

You just finished reading ‘Send Mail As,’ Email Address in Apple Mail, Migrate Google Apps to Gmail! and you survived!

Being a good host in the 21st century isn't what it used to be. Your guests have to deal with Wi-Fi passwords, confusing home theaters, and more. Next time you've got guests, blow them away with your sophisticated, 21st-century hosting skills. More »

Our privacy on Facebook has been steadily eroding but the networking site is so powerful many people find it hard to leave
If you want to surf the zeitgeist, then look at the most common queries on Google. When I looked the other day, "How do I delete my Facebook account?" was fourth on the "How do I...?" list. Just to put this in context, number two was "How do I know if I'm pregnant?" You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to twig that something's up.
What's happened is that Facebook's latest tweak to its default privacy settings has sparked a firestorm. Four US senators have voiced their concern. Fifteen privacy groups have filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. On this side of the Atlantic, the EU's data protection working party has written to Facebook, saying recent changes that made previously private information publicly viewable by default were "unacceptable". And many online commentators, influential and otherwise, have joined the fray.
If you think that privacy is an abstract concern of EU bureaucrats and libertarians with too much time on their hands, then might I suggest that you consult youropenbook.org. This is an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook "status updates" and displays what it finds.
A search for "I cheated", for example, brings up all kinds of intriguing stuff. A nice young woman from Baltimore posted "dam right i cheated i coulnt get it from u wen i needed it". There's also the odd potentially embarrassing reference to cheating in exams. A search for "I lied" brings up updates like "I'm sorry, I lied before when I said I used to make lots of bets. My therapist tells me I should try lying a lot to help get through my... gambling problem". Another writes "im not gonna bother anymore...theres no point hiding the truth.....iv lost too much and all because i lied to the one i love...im such a fukin dick head, i fucked up the best girl i've ever had".
I could go on but you will get the point. All of these people are instantly identifiable. Millions of Facebook users are posting embarrassing or damaging messages which can be read by the entire internet. My guess is that most of them think they are just writing to their "friends" because they don't understand how to fix their privacy settings and have simply accepted the defaults provided by Facebook. There's a trend here. Privacy on Facebook has been steadily, inexorably eroding. To track the erosion, see the timeline posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or a sobering animation created by IBM researcher Matt McKeon. What we're looking at is the implementation of a corporate strategy designed to maximise return for Facebook's owners.
The response of the company's PR flacks is predictable. Users are free to set their privacy settings, they say, and if people don't like what Facebook's doing then they can always leave. Nobody's forcing them to join the network.
On the face of it, both assertions are true. It is possible permanently to delete a Facebook account, but doing so involves quite a palaver and takes about a fortnight. A bigger problem is that because the service has become so ubiquitous, many users are discovering it's become essential to their professional lives. "Don't think I don't think about [leaving]," wrote one on her blog. "I don't like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.... The rewards are concrete and immediate. The costs are abstract and ideological. When I try to balance the two, the rewards win, but that is because of my friends and despite Facebook... Telling people with complaints to leave ignores the very real value of the networks they have built and what should be their right to continue those networks on the grounds on which they were built."
Welcome to Metcalfe's Law – the idea that the value of a network increases dramatically the more people belong to it. It's the same phenomenon that keeps people using Microsoft Office – not because they love the software, but because their professional lives would be impossible if they couldn't share Office documents with workmates.
It's one of the great ironies of information technology – that the aggregate effect of billions of free choices made by independent agents results in a kind of tyranny imposed by the winner that took all. We first saw it with Microsoft, and then with Google. Is it now Facebook's turn?
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Analysis suggests the hacker was in east coast of America and operated over a number of days, but much remains unknown
Figuring out who was behind the hack of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia requires some digital forensic skills – and an insight into the mindset of those who were trying to get at CRU's files at the time.
Analysis by the Guardian and digital forensics experts suggests that an outside hacker gained access to a server at the UEA which held backups of CRU emails and a collection of staff documents. It also suggests the access occurred over a period of days, if not weeks, and was carried out from a computer based on the east coast of north America.
The release of hacked emails and documents came just months after climate change sceptics had filed more than 50 freedom of information requests querying the CRU's refusal to release of raw data and program code during the summer.
Egged on by a group of sceptical bloggers, the requests almost all began with the words "I hereby make a EIR/FoI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries." Others sought "a copy of any digital version of the CRUTEM station data set that has been sent from CRU to Peter Webster and/or any other person at Georgia Tech". All were refused under FoI exemptions because of commercial confidentiality.
Into that silence came the release of the archived "zip" file by someone with clear hacking skills: first they grabbed the files, then they broke into the RealClimate blog to upload the archive and prepare a draft post; then, when that was thwarted, they uploaded it to a Russian website, and posted links to it on climate sceptics' blogs using web servers located in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
That sequence of events led Sir David King, the government's former chief scientist, to say that it must have been "carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States". But he quickly backed away from that statement, admitting he had no inside information.
The Guardian's analysis shows that a small group of just four of the scientists from among the dozens employed at the CRU were targeted in the sifting of email. They are: Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Professor Keith Briffa, who studied tree rings; Tim Osborn, who worked on climate modelling for modern and archaeological data; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. All are either recipients or senders of all but 66 of the 1,073 emails, and almost all the rest are sent from mailing lists, such as the Met Office's "scenarios" listing, to which at least one of the four would certainly belong.
A few remaining emails are sent by, or to, other CRU staff – indicating that the hacker had access to a backup server holding CRU emails dating back to 1996. That it is a backup is confirmed by the presence of a duplicate sent to Osborn: separated by one second, both have the same document attached, but from different machines. That suggests that the UEA's system administrators had backed up emails from CRU staff's machines onto a server – and that the hacker got into it, and also at a set of documents held on the same machine.
Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Hulme had been the focus of sceptics' ire because their high-profile scientific papers had been used to back the IPCC's reports on global warming. At the same time they had declined to release either the data (citing commercial agreements with suppliers) or the computer code they had used to analyse that data and draw their conclusions, to the frustration of many outside academia who wanted to repeat – or discredit – the work.
Early speculation that the release of the emails and documents came from a one-off hack also appear to be wrong. Digital forensic analysis shows that the zipped archive of emails and documents was not produced on a single date. Instead it was created by copying the files over a number of weeks, with bursts on 30 September 2009, 10 October and 16 November. On the last date a folder of computer analysis code by Osborn was added to the package.
The digital forensics on the files indicate that they were created on a computer set at some times four hours behind GMT, and at others five hours behind – plants the hacker on the eastern seaboard of Canada or the US.
Then early on 17 November, RealClimate's blog was hacked, locking out legitimate administrators, and the hacker tried to create a blogpost claiming that global warming was a myth, and enclosing the emails and documents.
Gavin Schmidt, one of the RealClimate administrators, says that "my information is that it was a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server".
But who was the hacker, and what were they after? Jeff Condon, who runs the climate-sceptical Air Vent blog – which posted one of the links to the archive – told the Guardian that the content of the emails and documents actually points to someone who is not expert in the topic.
Referring to an email it includes from Tim Osborn which says "we usually stop the series in 1960", Condon says that: "The only interesting detail in that email was the data, but that's not what the person wrote. What that means to me is that whomever posted these emails doesn't have a terribly deep understanding of the issues in paleoclimate science. Although the emails themselves featured some scientists who do know the issues and had some very nice details in them.
"Therefore if it's an inside job, it's likely not by a paleo or climate grad student, definitely not by a scientist," Condon said, adding: "If it's an international conspiracy I would have guessed someone on the team would know the science better than that."
But how would an outside hacker get in? Although UEA has security in place, it has seen a number of accidental security breaches of the UEA system in the recent past. On one occasion a server was configured wrongly, so that anyone outside doing a search would "fall through" to directories of files. (UEA closed that hole after being alerted about it.) A misconfigured server could have left just the hole that a capable hacker with a determination to find the data being denied via FoI requests could have exploited. But they are not government-class skills.
So what was the hacker looking for, and how? Besides the clear targeting of the four scientists, it is obvious that this is not the entirety of the CRU's emails: there are none of the routine administrative messages about fire alarms, holiday reminders and so on. Therefore the emails have been filtered. One quick way to see into the hacker's mind is to use "concordance analysis" - examining what the common words or phrases are in the emails and documents. Though usually used in linguistics to compare translations or the frequency of words, concordance software can be used to demonstrate authorship of papers, by combining a "stoplist" of words to be ignored (such as "the" or "and") with a straight analysis of the frequency of words in the text.
Concordance analysis of the emails suggests that the hacker did some careful sifting. But working out precisely what is complicated by the fact that this is the wheat – not the chaff. For instance, the hacker has clearly removed standard words such as "holiday" – except where they appear in emails to or from Jones, Briffa, Osborn or Hulme. There's no other way to explain how such a comprehensive catalogue has so few emails about time off.
Instead, emails with the words "data", "climate", "paper", "research", "temperature" and "model" prevail, according to a concordance plot. That may have been precisely what the hacker was looking for – and the fact that he also ignited a controversy over techniques might have been a surprise to him as well as the rest of the world.
(Note 5 Feb 12:42GMT: the concordance analysis that was here has been moved to a separate file. We will also post a graphic of the analysis in due course.)
Hacked climate science emailsClimate changeClimate change scepticismHackingInternetCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds