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Daily Archives: February 19, 2017

Botnet attack analysis of Deflect protected website blacklivesmatter.com

Deflect Labs report #3. Seamus Tuohy and eQualit.ie View the report with 3D rendering (5mb)

This report covers attacks between April 29th and October 15th, 2016. Over this seven-month period, we recorded more than a hundred separate denial-of-service incidents against the official Black Lives Matter website. Our analysis shows a variety of technical methods used in attempts to bring down this website and the characterization of these attacks point to a “mob” mentality of malicious actors jumping on board in response to callouts made on social media and covert channels. Our reporting highlights the usage of no-questions-asked-hosting and booter services used by malicious actors to carry out these attacks. We describe the ever growing trend of Internet vandals who, searching for a little bit of infamy, launch denial-of-service attacks against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) website. Our analysis documented attacks that could be accomplished for as little as $1 and, with access to public documentation and malicious software within easy reach, only required basic technical skill. Some of the larger attacks against BLM generated millions of connections without relying on huge infrastructure. Instead, traffic was “reflected” from legitimate WordPress and Joomla sites. We compare public attribution for some of the attacks with the data coming through our networks, and present the involvement of purported members of the Ghost Squad Hackers crew in these events.”

Working Without a Net: Supreme Court Decision Making as Performance

Gedicks, Frederick Mark, Working Without a Net: Supreme Court Decision Making as Performance (February 17, 2017). BYU Law Research Paper No. 17-09. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2919682 “A Depression-era Justice once suggested that in constitutional challenges the Supreme Court simply compares government action to the Constitution and decides “whether the latter squares with the former.” Chief… Continue Reading

Report – A Close Look at the Decline of Homeownership

Federal Reserve Bank of New York – Liberty Street Economics – Andrew Haughwout, Richard Peach, and Joseph Tracy, February 17, 2017 “The homeownership rate—the percentage of households that own rather than rent the homes that they live in—has fallen sharply since mid-2005. In fact, in the second quarter of 2016 the homeownership rate fell to… Continue Reading

Report – Humanity’s Garbage Keeps Piling Up in the Arctic Ocean

Less ice and more shipping traffic has left the seafloor looking like the side of a New Jersey highway. John Metcalf, Feb 16, 2017. This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away. “Humanity’s trash has near-universal dominion in the ocean. It swirls in the waves… Continue Reading

OpenCulture – Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World

“…last year, architect and artist Hajime Narukawa of Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Tokyo solved these problems with his AuthaGraph World Map, at the top, which won Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, beating out “over 1000 entries in a variety of categories,” writes Mental Floss. You can view it in a… Continue Reading

How reporters around the world risk their lives for the truth

Via GOOD – “Last May, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss a problem tragically common in the 21st century: dead journalists. In the new millennium, 876 journalists have been killed—with almost 40 percent of those deaths occurring in the last five years. Meanwhile, global press freedom is at its lowest point since 2003,… Continue Reading

A Critique of the Conventional Problematisation of Social Immobility in Elite Legal Education and the Profession

Ferguson, Lucinda, Complicating the ‘Holy Grail’, Simplifying the Search: A Critique of the Conventional Problematisation of Social Immobility in Elite Legal Education and the Profession (February 16, 2017). The Law Teacher, Vol. 51, (Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2919051 “This article challenges the conventional problematisation of and response to insufficient socio-economic diversity in elite legal education… Continue Reading

The real National Treasure: US presidential libraries

Oxford University Press Blog: “…A presidential library is actually two things,” Giller [Melissa Giller, Chief Marketing Officer for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Institute in Simi Valley, California] describes. “It’s a museum that anyone can come and visit and tour through…and it is a library.” The library is, more often than not, the private… Continue Reading

WaPo – Memos signed by DHS secretary describe sweeping new guidelines for deporting illegal immigrants

David Nakamura, The Washington Post – “Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has signed sweeping new guidelines that empower federal authorities to more aggressively detain and deport illegal immigrants inside the United States and at the border. In a pair of memos, Kelly offered more detail on plans for the agency to hire thousands of additional enforcement… Continue Reading