Category Archives: Internet

Can you tell whether The scandal of Olivia Newton-John: 12 surprisingly controversial Wikipedia pages is parody or reality? And does it matter?

You can't make this stuff up.

Secret Airforce One flight data sent to Suffolk tourist web site:

SINCE 2001, the US air force has been sending highly confidential emails including the flight plan for the presidential jet, Air Force One, to an English factory worker who runs a Suffolk tourism website.

In the late 1990s, Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall in Suffolk, near Cambridge, set up the website www.mildenhall.com, to promote his hometown. He soon became inundated with emails meant for airmen at the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, where personnel email addresses end in mildenhall.af.mil.

It was all harmless enough when the emails were mundane messages to friends and silly videos, but soon Sinnott discovered that he was also getting battlefield strategies and military passwords sent straight to his inbox.

Note: theinquirer.net, a mildly scurrilous but generally well-informed British technology e-rag is not to be confused with a supermarket tabloid of a similar name.

That the internet is fragile is not a new idea. (Remember USENET? “Death of the Internet predicted. Film at 11”?)

Not surprisingly, Wendy Grossman long ago noted the discussion at CFP in 1998(!), and wrote it up as Buy ten backhoes, and Simson Garfinkel listed 50 Ways to Crash the Net.

Update: And how could I forget Staniford, Paxson & Weaver, How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time (2002)?

The internet may be a packet-switching network, but certain paths are in fact critical as they rely on fragile cables. Which break.

Today it's a major Mediterranean cable that's broken.

Egypt, it seems, has pretty much fallen off the Internet, and service to several other countries including Pakistan and India is impacted.

It's an important reminder that while many routes between A and B may be possible, sometimes there are not so many; and sometimes there's only one big pipe.

Which makes wiretaps — and full network monitoring — a lot easier.

I recall setting up a panel at CFP years ago on how one would destroy the internet. One guy described evil worms. Another had a nefarious DNS-killer. And then one fellow just said, “give me a backhoe…”.

If you use Gmail, it might be worth a moment to check your settings to make sure that there are no malicious “forward” instructions there.

Although Google has now apparently patched the bug, it seems that for a time this vulnerability made it possible for hackers to insert instructions to forward some of your mail to them if you had the misfortune to visit a web page that had the right malicious code while you had gmail open in another tab or window..

Here's an account of someone who says his business was sabotaged as a result.

Odds are high that you're fine. But to confirm it, here's what you do in after logging in to Gmail:

… click on the ’settings’ tab in the upper right of the screen. Then check both the ‘Filters’ and the ‘Forwarding and POP’ sections.

Examine what's listed there to make sure there's no forwarding instruction you didn't put there yourself.