Is it still Cyberwar if the battles are between a government and its own citizens? Would it be Civil Cyberwar or Cyber Civilwar?

The EFF “calls for immediate action to defend activists”. Tunisian authorities are reported to have blocked HTTPS access to Facebook, Google and Yahoo! in order to attack or track down dissenters and compromise their on-line identities.

…last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government has used these stolen credentials to log in to Tunisians’ email and Facebook accounts, presumably downloading their messages, emails, and social graphs for further analysis, and then deleting the accounts entirely.

The EFF gives the following recommendations, which are a good idea all the time and not just when in Tunisia:

* If HTTPS is available, use HTTPS to login to Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. If you are using Firefox, EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plug-in will do this for you automatically.
* EFF has received reports that the Tunisian government is periodically blocking HTTPS access to Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. If that is the case and you must login over HTTP, install the following Greasemonkey script to strip out the JavaScript which the Tunisian government has inserted to steal your login credentials.
* If you have logged in to Facebook, Google, or Yahoo recently over HTTP, login using HTTPS and change your password.

Interesting thoughts from No africom:

In terms of security, [Michael Battle, the US ambassador to the AU] confirmed America’s dedication to working with the AU and the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) to militarise the continent’s coastlines. While he claimed that the goals of this mission include responding to increased maritime piracy and breaking cartels that traffic illegally in drugs and humans, he made it clear that the primary military objective is to protect US oil interests in the Gulf of Guinea, suppress local resistance movements like MEND in Nigeria, and secure a favourable climate for returns on investment for American corporations. When pressed, Battle justified his call for militarisation by invoking the vague and poorly substantiated spectre of ‘terrorism’.

The owner did not find it amusing at all.

A mum has received an apology from police after officers swooped on her Bradford home, wrongly suspecting she had turned her garage into a cannabis farm.

The officers, who had obtained a search warrant, went away empty-handed after finding nothing more sinister than an electric heater to keep Pam Hardcastle’s two pet guinea pigs warm.

Police forced entry and brought in a helicopter, yet they found only pigs.

Tempting, but I’ll skip the puns. Their search warrant was from evidence of melting snow on the roof. Heat has become a sure sign, as I have mentioned before, of something nefarious. The British obviously are not expected to use heat to keep themselves warm, at least not enough to melt snow.

Drug growers might be tempted to take a lesson and try adopting their own pigs as a precaution (couldn’t resist) and so the security race continues. When police see a sudden up-tick in guinea pig orders, they might bring cause for another warrant. The good news is that they now might think to question a local pet shop or vet before calling in air-support.

The bands used to study penguins have been proven to significantly harm the birds.

…the results of a ten-year study of free-ranging king penguins provide convincing evidence that banding is harmful. Banded birds had a markedly lower survival rate, with every major life-history trait affected, and they were more affected by climate variation than birds without bands. As well as raising doubts over marine ecosystem data based on banding, this work has implications for the ethics of animal tagging.

In other words the study data on penguins with bands on their wings is biased by the effects the bands themselves are having on survivability.

One of our major findings is that responses of flipper-banded penguins to climate variability (that is, changes in sea surface temperature and in the Southern Oscillation index) differ from those of non-banded birds.

Some scientists had argued that bands had no impact or that birds would adapt to the bands over time. Instead it now is known that they can not fly as well, they mate less successfully, forage longer and die sooner. The only time they fared the same was when “conditions were so good that penguins might have been able to compensate from the disadvantage of having a flipper-band”. How was a study performed on non-banded penguins to notice the difference? Embedded tags were used instead of bands.

ornithologists have been calling for an end to banding for over a decade

Thus, a solution to risk already existed but the problem had to be proven irrefutably.

How does this band make my wing look?
Photo by Benoît Gineste