No they are back with a vengence not called diplock any more they have been rebranded and now used in Organised Crime cases in the UK where only a Judge sits no jury, the excuse being that the jury can't be intimidated.

Normally I would agree because I've seen witness intimidation up close but I do have problems with the concept because I investigated corruption in the legal and law enforcement area and it does make you distrustful. I'll send you over something privately so you'll get the idea.

I thought diplock had generally been abolished now?

With a strongly controlled press as in the UK where the 'DA' notice is used and the Terrorism and Security Act 2000 hacking almost with the defense of 'In the public interest' can be the only way to stop government abuses especially when diplock courts are used.

Jack, do you mean that hacking would be the only way people could avoid censorship?

Companies are blackmailed that if they don't pay a certain amount to a third party their company's computers will go down or worse their customer accounts list will be hacked

F-Secure's blog post: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001915.html

That is interesting, and the translation is readable.

There was a documentary on Swedish television where a journalist answered a Nigeria letter to see what happened, with hidden cameras and everything.

It was scary, the guys he met were so good at playing on emotions that he almost bought it, even though he was there knowing that it was a scam.

I had a friend who's parents were with Jehovas witnesses. When I read their literature something dawned on me, you don't have to be stupid to fall for their ruse, you just need to be in a bad place emotionally. The texts are so obviously written with this in mind, the guys knocking on doors doesn't know this, but the guys on top has made sure that the only people that will fall for it are broken people with shattered confidence. Those are the guys that won't analyse their situation and suddenly start bringing the organization down from within. It has nothing to do with how intelligent you are, and everything to do with how broken and desperate you are.

It's impossible to verify these kinds of stories so we don't know if it's real.

But it sounds real, and that's what matters if you're creating a work of fantasy fiction. :)

It's quite a frightening thought, that the very best and brightest would be recruited into crime precisely because they're the talented ones.

The Western Union thing sounds familiar, a lot of scammers on ebay etc always ask to use it.

What is interesting in the systems like this is that hacking into them is hard, but messing up the input like in drone case creating a lot of bogus targets would make the drone insecure and useless.

Just read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which is an entertaining book. This hack sounds lot like the hacks in the book. You can mess up with big military stuff with cheap hardware if you just have enough imagination.

true - there has been a rash of accidental 'hero's
or heros manipulated by computers / programs /
robots / puppets / accidents / prophecies / luck / etc.

perhaps a hero that is pro-active is in-order...
:)
someone to admire and learn from -

as immature and arrogant as most of the military lobbyists,
you'd like someone would have yelled SKYNET! or SEATECH ASTRONOMY
to dead any ideas as offensive to human ingenuity as predator drones...

but noooo :

nobody yelled SKYNET! or even TOO MANY SECRETS!

this world needs a hero for the 'information age' -

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

It's all very odd, as the researchers have apparently confirmed they're genuine. I agree that climate scientists shouldn't be worried about one-day records, but who knows what is going on here...

I have a hard time seeing those emails published as genuine. It doesn't fit. The thing that strikes out the most is; why would these researchers discuss a localized cold record?

"where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low."

I did some reading about the science of global climate a while ago. It doesn't take much knowledge to understand why that quote is so very unlikely to have come from a climate research panel. If you consider global warming from a global perspective, and consider what all of us learnt 15 years ago in school, that heat equals movement, it's easy to see that localized low temperature records would be a logical effect of Global warming. Why? More heat means a atmospheric system with more movement and with less global balance. Which means in turn more extremes and more unpredictability. Localized low temperature records can very well be a sign that our atmosphere is heating up with more movement as a result. So there would be low temperature records at some places when the entropy of the system shuffles air around in ever more erratic patterns. And if you read the infopages of the climate researchers themselves they tell you this. Which is why it is so strange that they would discuss a localized low temperature record as something that would need to be kept under wraps...

It's an interesting idea for a film, definitely. :)

And if the second link's claims are true then this ought to be a huge news story really...

However, some of the logic of the second link is a bit dubious though, for example they assume that the leak was an inside job because the university cancelled all existing passwords. Actually cancelling passwords is a standard procedure for all major hacking incidents like this, whether the attack was from the outside or inside.