Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 30, 2008 – 1:44 am
Zee M Kane, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
In an ironically hypocritical turn, India’s terrorists used Western made technology to highlight their hatred for the West and what it represents.
Amongst granades, ammunition magazines, credit cards, food rations and thousands of dollars of cash found in terrorists backpacks lay one vital piece of tracking equipment - Blackberry’s.
After all cable television feeds had been cut to the two luxury hotels and office block, the gunmen had planned ahead and used Blackberry’s to monitor the situation and global reaction. The terrorists used the smartphone to track the status of their other planned sites of terror and the police/army response. Also however, the used the now iconic device to see first hand the public reaction to the atrocities, both locally and worldwide.
It’s difficult to be certain as to whether the Blackberry’s were a well planned pre-thought or a clever after-thought once the television feeds had been cut. Either way, the young assassins were tech savvy enough to know that amongst thousands of foreigners probably lay hundreds of blackberry devices - all perfectly powerful enough to give them real time updates of the horrific action & anti-terrorist re-action around them.
RIM, all publicity is good publicity?
via Courier Mail
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Written on November 27, 2008 – 9:42 pm
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai are the most popular topic on Twitter since they started. Every second some tweets about the attacks are posted. But according to The Times Indian authorities asked Twitter users to stop tweeting about the attacks for security reasons. Although the newspaper says it can’t confirm the rumour that Indian authorities want Twitter users to stop tweeting, The Times refers to a tweet saying: “Police reckon tweeters giving away strategic info to terrorists via Twitter”. The newspaper doesn’t link to the exact tweet but I think this is the one:
Written on November 27, 2008 – 1:19 pm
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
You don’t need to be a big news corporation like CNN or BBC to cover breaking news. Dutch journalism students Loek Essers and Peter van der Ploeg proved that last night. The two used live blogging tool CoverItLive to cover the terrorist attack in India.
Twitter
Loek and Peter started their live blog by adding some breaking news Twitter feeds. They added CNN, BBC and BreakingNewsOn. To enrich the coverage they posted some news themselves and added tweets of Twitter users in Mumbai. Later on the students found out that Indian news channel IBN was the source of most off the coverage news corporations like CNN used. IBN posted photo’s and video’s on their website which Loek and Peter embedded on their live blog. Photo’s posted on Flickr were shown on the live blog too.
Dutch newspaper
Journalism students Loek and Peter showed how easy the web and (live) blogging made it to cover breaking news. And although the two started their live blog as an experiment they got rewarded. Dutch free newspaper De Pers used the live blog on their website.
Written on November 24, 2008 – 8:47 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might have noticed, I wrote a post last week about my three-week stay in Kathmandu, Nepal. After describing the beautiful country and its not so beautiful political problems, I invited every reader to drop me a line if he or she knew somebody in Kathmandu. Two people did.
Kathmandu Koding
One of them was Mark Townsend. He introduced me to Ayush Bajracharya, a 26-year old PHP developer from Patan, a gorgeous satellite city of Kathmandu. Ayush works for Samma Ajiva Limited, a company involved in several outsourcing projects. When I told Ayush about my Dutch nationality, he told me he functions as a cupid in my country since he developed a dating site called Zullenwij.nl.
Alternative to India and China
After spending a week here I got to know a lot of people like Ayush who are working on outsourcing projects. So while Tim Ferriss advises you to give your developer work a spin in India and Chinese companies desperately try to catch up with the outsourcing giant - Nepal might be an interesting alternative. One minor side note, it seems like the best way of finding a developer is actually visiting the country (which is no punishment at all).
Meeting locals through blogging
If outsourcing doesn’t concern you, then please learn one thing from this post. Traveling and blogging is one fine combination. When I went to Berlin earlier this year, I met up with some great music 2.0 fellows thanks to a post on this blog. And now it turns out that this strategy also works in more exotic places like Nepal. I realized this when drinking tea with Ayush and his younger brother Raz in a house that doesn’t even look a bit like mine. Our languages, habits, and religious beliefs are all different, but it was blogging that connected us. Pretty cool, eh?
[Photo credit: Sacha Post]
Written on August 25, 2008 – 5:15 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
According to the Sunday Herald, an international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-heists ever by stealing the identities of an estimated 8 million people - who have all been guests in at least one of the 1300 existing Best Western Hotels in the past 12 months - in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than 3.5 billion euro in illegal funds.
A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.
It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007.
Update: Neville Hobson was kind enough to Twitter-point me to a statement issued by Best Western (PDF), wherein they claim the newspaper is being sensationalist, and that most of the facts presented in the article are inaccurate, exaggerated, unsubstantiated or false, although they fail to provide more insight as to what the extent of the damage really is.
Update 2: Best Western provided more feedback on the issue:
“We can confirm that on August 21, 2008, three separate attempts were made via a single log-on ID to access the same data from a single hotel. The hotel in question is the 107-room Best Western Hotel am Schloss Kopenick in Berlin, Germany, where a Trojan horse virus was detected by the hotel’s anti-virus software. The compromised log-in ID permitted access to reservations data for that property only. The log-in ID was immediately terminated, and the computer in question has been removed from use. “
The Sunday Herald alerted Best Western, who promptly closed the security breach on Friday afternoon, but experts fear that information seized in the raid is already being used to pursue a range of criminal strategies. Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx, has even been quoted saying “In the wrong hands, there’s enough data there to spark a major European crime wave.”
The stolen data included private information like home addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.
The initial hacker succeeded in bypassing the system’s security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations. The next tume a member of staff logged in, her username and password were collected and stored.
If you’ve stayed in a Best Western hotel at some point during the past year, you might want to consider hooking up with their customer service department to see what’s up. Use the number 0800 528-1238.
(Image courtesy of hiten mistry @ Flickr)
Written on August 4, 2008 – 5:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You might support an obscure terrorist clan without even knowing it. Ok, I know this sounds a bit like propaganda from the Bush administration. But it actually happened to 48-year-old American expat Kenneth Haywood. He was just chilling in his apartment last week, when an anti-terrorist squad raided his house. These cops probably scared the living daylights out of him before they asked an explanation for emails sent by the Indian Mujahideen from his IP address.
These Indian Mujahideen are a dangerous group from Mumbai who probably hacked Haywood’s wireless network. After communicating via this network, they killed 42 people with 22 separate bombs in Ahmedabad, India.
The business consultant Haywood told the Hindustan Times that the technician who set up the web connection had insisted he wouldn’t change his default password. How easy do you want to make it for these fundamentalists?
So if you’re sensitive to all this code orange/ red BS you might wanna have another look at your wireless network. If you’re not, check your network anyhow. Your neighbor might be using it for his torrent addiction…
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