A programmer and system designer by trade, Lord Erroll is giving the government grief about cybercrime. Merlin, the Earl of Erroll, is the spokesman for the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee’s report on personal internet security.
The committee recommended in August last year that the Serious Organised Crime Agency should develop a unified web-based reporting system for cybercrime. It also asked the government to look again at its decision that the public should report cybercrime to the banks and not the police. The Lords asked for a central cybercrime unit to handle low-level internet fraud. In essence, Erroll and his noble friends do not think the government and police take cybercrime seriously.
– The Guardian
Several websites running pro-Tibet campaigns have been targeted by internet criminals, it has been claimed.
Experts at ScanSafe, an internet security firm, said that two popular websites – SaveTibet.org and FreeTibet.org – have been specifically targeted by hackers.
It is not clear who is behind the attacks, or what their motivation is, but the cyberstrikes are believed to emanate from computer servers in Taiwan and used a well-known vulnerability in some websites to link to invisible pages. These then attempt to force computers with inadequate protection to download spying programs, which can be used to track their habits or take control of their machines.
– The Guardian
At the last roll of the dice, sanity has lost out to legal dogma. The Government’s long-drawn-out battle to deport suspected foreign terrorists is effectively over. Yesterday’s two judgments by the Court of Appeal make it extremely unlikely that Britain will ever manage to deport Abu Qatada and other foreign terror suspects, a point tacitly acknowledged by the Home Office’s decision to drop its attempts to deport a further ten Libyans in addition to the two whose appeals were successful yesterday.
These people came in through Britain’s leaky borders and were allowed to stay, in some cases, because of wilful sloppiness by the immigration authorities. Now our human rights laws mean that we are stuck with them. We cannot keep them under arrest much longer after these rulings. So they will soon be free to wreak what havoc they will.
– The Times