Anonymous minaccia nuovi attacchi informatici per Capodanno

Contro obiettivi da un lato all’altro del paese.
Il collettivo di pirati informatici Anonymous ha minacciato di lanciare nuovi attacchi informatici per l’inizio del nuovo anno, una settimana dopo aver violato il sito di Stratfor Global Security, ottenendo messaggi e dati delle carte di credito dei suoi clienti.
In un comunicato pubblicato su internet da membri di Anonymous, che si fanno chiamare “AntiSec”, hanno annunciato che lanceranno oggi attacchi contro “molteplici obiettivi in seno alle forze dell’ordine, da un lato all’altro” del paese. Il gruppo di pirati informatici aveva rivendicato domenica scorsa un attacco contro Stratfor, consulente per agenzie governative e grosse corporations nel campo dell`analisi strategica, economica e della sicurezza informatica.

California law turns up heat on labor conditions

A new California law will force retailers and manufacturers to disclose from 2012 how they guard against slavery and human trafficking throughout their supply chains, ratcheting up scrutiny over some of the largest U.S. corporations.
From Jan. 1, about 3,200 major companies doing business or based in California, a list that includes Apple Inc and Gap Inc, will be required to disclose steps they take, if any, to ensure their suppliers and partners do not use forced labor.
Companies risk getting sued by the state attorney general if they flout that law. But experts say the real pressure will come from the court of public opinion: consumers who care about ethical working conditions and take an interest in how their favorite brands get made.
Major U.S. consumer companies that have already come under fire include Apple. A group of suicides at supplier Foxconn, which makes the iconic iPhone, raised questions about working conditions at plants in southern China.
Apple declined to comment on the new legislation.
The heightened scrutiny expected under the law, which applies to retailers and manufacturers in the state with over $100 million in global sales, is already spurring companies to take a closer look at practices they follow, and in some cases improve them, lawyers say.
“It’s a law that makes sure that companies who are aware of the issues, but could be managing them better, come to the realization that this is the moment where they better get a better handle on them,” said Jon Sohn, a lawyer at McKenna, Long and Aldridge in Washington, DC.
“Anything that can harm your brand should be taken seriously.” Child labor and slavery, broadly defined as forced labor, run rampant not just in emerging markets like Asia and Latin America, but also within developed economies such as the United States.
The U.S. Department of Labor says children and forced laborers produce 130 kinds of goods in 71 countries, numbers that have likely increased during the economic crisis.
Over 12 million people are victims of forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization.
The Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, a group that helps human-trafficking victims in Los Angeles, often people working in restaurants and the beauty trade, co-sponsored the legislation and wants consumers to reward companies that do the most to prevent forced labor.
“Companies following the policy and going beyond what is required should be congratulated,” said Stephanie Richard, the coalition’s policy director. “We encourage people to support companies that utilize this law to reexamine their supply chains.” MORE AUDITS Justin Dillon, head of advocacy group slaveryfootprint.org, points to Apple and Gap as among the companies that have made major efforts to improve and communicate their policies following high-profile labor issues at their foreign suppliers and manufacturers.
The suicides at the plants associated with Apple cast a harsh spotlight on what critics dubbed a militaristic culture, pushing workers to the brink to meet unceasing demand for the Cupertino, California-based company’s iPhones.
In response, Apple stepped up the number of supplier facilities it audits, to ensure they meet its code of conduct.
Apple has also trained more workers in its supply chain beyond final assembly manufacturers about their rights under the Apple code of conduct.
Gap, whose apparel brands include The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy, over the past decade has been accused benefiting from sweatshops and child labor in Saipan and India.
Anxious to preserve its image, Gap has yanked clothing allegedly manufactured by children from its stores and stepped up monitoring of factories in its supply chain to make sure migrant workers are not forced to hand over their passports to managers or are otherwise coerced.
“What the bill does is beg the question,” Dillon said.
“That’s great that that’s what you’re doing, but what more are you going to do?” Ahead of the new law, expected to largely affect the electronics and clothing industries, Silicon Valley companies including Intel and Agilent Technologies have posted documents on the internet detailing their policies.
Intel said third-party audits of key suppliers cover slavery but not human trafficking, but it plans to specifically address human trafficking early next year.
CRISS-CROSSING THE WORLD A drive to slash costs has quickened in tandem with global trade and industry competition in past decades. Increasingly complex supply chains that criss-cross the world make it harder for executives to scrutinize all the companies that have a hand in producing their products.
Under the new law, companies are required to describe the extent to which they verify risks of human trafficking and conduct independent and surprise audits of their suppliers.
They also have to disclose whether they force their suppliers to certify that the materials they use comply with laws regarding human trafficking and slavery, and whether employees receive training to reduce the risk of slavery.
The anti-slavery law has drawn comparisons to early greenhouse gas emission legislation in California, which began modestly but later drew more supporters and led to more aggressive regulation.
The new California law has already prompted a similar federal bill, introduced in Congress in August. That bipartisan legislation would force companies to disclose measures taken against human trafficking and child labor in reports to the Securities Exchange Commission as well as on their websites.
Keith Bishop, a partner at law firm Allen Matkins, said he advised companies directly affected by the new law, and then received a second wave of inquiries from many of those companies’ suppliers. They wanted to know what measures to take to meet their customers’ requirements.
“The act, rather ingeniously, specifically regulates relatively few companies but impacts a very large number of companies,” Bishop said.

12 giorni di regali da Apple, ecco il quinto – Sonic &Sega All-Stars Racing

SEGA ha appena reso gratuito su App Store Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, la riduzione iOS (universale, dunque compatibile con iPhone e iPad) dell’omonimo gioco di corse arcade, in precedenza venduto a 3,99 euro.
Scaricalo subito da qui

In 2011, the revolution was Tweeted

2011 was a good year for protest and a bad year for government. 2012 will be a good year for both if our political leaders can figure out the connection.
Across the globe, this was a year when people took to the streets, often overthrowing their leaders in the process. That was true in the Arab world, in Russia, in India, in Western Europe, in the United States and even in China.
And everywhere, this year of mass defiance caught off guard those who were supposed to be in the know. The experts had thought the Arabs were getting richer and were too scared of their autocrats, that the Russians were apathetic and quite liked their neo-czar, that the Indian middle class was politically disengaged, that Western Europeans were too old for outrage, that Americans did not care about the class divide and that the Chinese comrades were too effective at suppressing dissent.
But the conventional wisdom was turned upside down around the world by people who turned out to be angrier than their elites had suspected – and better able to channel that dissatisfaction into mass protest and even revolution.
The first surprise was the strength and near-universality of the public discontent. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the motivations of protesters in each country were unique. But there was a common thread to the uprisings and a common reason why the elites were taken by surprise.
The unifying complaint is crony capitalism. That’s a broad term, to be sure, and its bloody Libyan manifestation bears little resemblance to complaints about the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the United States or allegations of corrupt auctions for telecommunications licenses in India. But the notion that the rules of the economic game are rigged to benefit the elites at the expense of the middle class has had remarkable resonance this year around the world and across the political spectrum. Could the failure of the experts to anticipate this anger be connected to the fact that the analysts are usually part of the 1 percent – or at least the 10 percent — at the top?
The second surprise was how easy it has become to transform mass dissatisfaction into mass protest. That was true both in chillingly repressive regimes and in ones where the hurdle to collective action had been thought to be public apathy.
The answer to this puzzle is obvious today: The communications revolution, ranging from satellite television to Twitter to camera phones, has made it easier than ever before to organize protests and to keep them going once they start.
What’s important to remember in hindsight is that one of the most provocative ideas of late 2010 – published just two months before a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, posted his suicide note on his Facebook Wall, and three months before the Egyptian government blocked Twitter in an effort to muzzle its people – was Malcolm Gladwell’s characteristically iconoclastic assertion that, as the subhead to his October New Yorker magazine essay put it, “the revolution will not be tweeted.” At least in public, Gladwell is sticking to his guns, but not too many other people are. In one informed example, consider a recent public interview I conducted with Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications billionaire and liberal politician who backed the Tahrir Square demonstrations.
When I asked him about the Gladwell theory, Sawiris first wondered, “Is he here in the room? Do I have to be polite?” and then went on to explain his criticism: “He has no clue what this technology has done to my part of the world. Ninety percent of the success of this revolution is attributed to it.” The point isn’t to mock the brilliant Gladwell — it is to recall that as late as the autumn of 2010 the impact of the technology revolution on civil society, particularly outside the developed West, was still very much an open question.
So much for the success of the rebels. Inside the citadel of the state, by contrast, 2011 was a veritable annus horribilus.
That was especially true for some pretty vile dictators. But, even in democracies, government didn’t seem to work very well.
Political paralysis was a routine complaint in the world’s richest democracy and in its biggest democracy; it was the diagnosis in presidential systems and in parliamentary ones.
Right-wing governing parties were accused of dysfunction – and so were governments on the left. Some central bankers were attacked for printing too much money; others were criticized for doing too little.
The success of the protesters and the dysfunction of government are the flip sides of one another. They are related in an obvious way – people take to the streets when they think their leaders are doing a poor job. But the widely perceived failure of the state around the world is connected to the effectiveness of the protests in deeper ways, too.
Let’s start with the technological tools that made protesting so much easier. They may have made governing tougher – informed and empowered individuals are probably harder to boss around than ignorant, isolated ones. More important, though, social activists have embraced the technology revolution more effectively than governments have. The revolution is being tweeted, but government isn’t. It’s time for the state to catch up – and hopefully not by emulating the Chinese comrades with their cybercensorship expertise.
As for crony capitalism, this slogan of the street is both a challenge for the state and an opportunity. For some regimes, of course, crony capitalism, with a side order of repression, is the only dish on the menu. For them, the trends of 2011 do not bode well.
But most of today’s troubled market democracies don’t need a revolution to sweep away their cronies. What they do need is a new version of capitalism, designed for the 21st century. That is what the world’s protesters, in their different ways, are all asking for. Here’s hoping that 2012 provides some politicians with some answers.
{via}

La Lega Dilettanti sbarca su Facebook con Tim

Sul social network un nuovo spazio dedicato alla LND.
Dopo la serie A, anche la Lega Nazionale Dilettanti sbarca su Facebook grazie a Tim. A partire dal 30 dicembre, appassionati e tifosi avranno a disposizione sul social network una pagina dove trovare informazioni e curiosità sulle 70 mila squadre protagoniste della LND.
La pagina conterrà una sezione con tutte le news, le informazioni sulle migliori squadre del mese per categoria, ritratti dedicati ai nuovi talenti, storie legate alla passione per il calcio, foto e interviste ai protagonisti. Sarà uno spazio aperto al dialogo e al confronto, principi che animano l’attività della Lega Nazionale Dilettanti, che rappresenta la base del calcio italiano. Tim è sponsor ufficiale della Lega Serie A e delle sue principali manifestazioni dal 1998.
{via}

Nielsen, Google-Facebook regine del web, Apple per gli smartphone

Google il sito americano piu’ visitato. Facebook il social network piu’ popolare. Apple leader come produttore di smartphone. A fare il bilancio di fine anno e’ la societa’ Nielsen, stilando la classifica delle destinazioni online negli Usa.
Google conquista la prima posizione fra i ‘marchi web’ americani piu’ visitati, con una media di 153,4 milioni di visitatori al mese. Facebook e’ il social network piu’ popolare con una media di 137,6 milioni di utenti al mese, seguito a distanza da Blogger con 45,7 milioni e Twitter.com con 23,5 milioni. YouTube con 111,5 milioni di visitatori e’ la prima destinazione online per guardare video. Apple con il 29% e’ il primo produttore di smartphone. La medaglia d’argento va a HTC con il 21%. Al terzo posto Research in Motion.
{via}

Antitrust sanziona la Apple per 900mila euro

Per pratiche commerciali scorrette.
Sanzioni per complessivi 900mila euro al gruppo Apple responsabile di pratiche commerciali scorrette a danno dei consumatori. Lo ha deciso l`Antitrust al termine di un`istruttoria che ha riscontrato la non piena applicazione ai consumatori, da parte delle società del gruppo Apple operanti in Italia, della garanzia legale biennale a carico del venditore, e informazioni poco chiare sugli ambiti di copertura dei servizi di assistenza aggiuntiva a pagamento offerti da Apple ai consumatori.
In particolare, secondo quanto ricostruito dagli uffici dell`Antitrust, anche alla luce di numerose segnalazioni arrivate dai consumatori e da alcune associazioni, le tre società del gruppo, Apple Sales International, Apple Italia S.r.l. e Apple Retail Italia hanno messo in atto due distinte pratiche commerciali scorrette.
La Apple non informava – spiega l’Antitrust – in modo adeguato i consumatori sui diritti di assistenza gratuita biennale previsti dal Codice del Consumo, ostacolando l`esercizio degli stessi e limitandosi a riconoscere la garanzia convenzionale del produttore di 1 anno; le informazioni date su natura, contenuto e durata dei servizi di assistenza aggiuntivi a pagamento AppleCare Protection Plan, unite ai mancati chiarimenti sull`esistenza della garanzia legale biennale, erano tali da indurre i consumatori a sottoscrivere un contratto aggiuntivo quando la `copertura` del servizio a pagamento si sovrappone in parte alla garanzia legale gratuita prevista dal Codice del Consumo.

12 giorni di regali da Apple, ecco il quarto – Best in Travel 2012

Il regalo di oggi è il libro Best in Travel 2012 di Lonely Planet. che potete scaricare gratuitamente cliccando qui
Questo libro può essere scaricato sul tuo iPhone, iPad o iPod touch con iBooks e sul tuo computer con iTunes. I libri devono essere letti su un dispositivo iOS.

12 giorni di regali da Apple, ecco il terzo – Gianna Nannini

Oggi Apple ha scelto di regalare a tutti i suoi utenti il singolo “Ti voglio tanto bene” di Gianna Nannini. Il brano è disponibile sia come traccia audio che in formato video che potete scaricare gratuitamente cliccando qui.

USA, Anonymous accusata di furto dati, è giallo

Rubate informazioni a Stratfor; ma gruppo hacker, non siamo noi.
E’ giallo attorno al furto di dati relativi a carte di credito e informazioni riservate ai danni di Statfor, un think tank americano specializzato nella sicurezza informatica che conta tra i suoi clienti l’esercito e l’aeronautica americana, colossi informatici come Apple e Microsoft.
Gia’ ieri s’era diffusa la notizia su twitter che a rubare questi dati erano stati gli hacker riuniti sotto la famosa sigla Anonymous e che quell’attacco fosse il primo di una campagna in stile ‘Robin Hood’. Il loro obbiettivo sarebbe stato quello di rubare ai ‘ricchi’ per dare ai poveri: in particolare versare questi soldi a organizzazioni come la Croce Rossa in modo da far passare a chi sta peggio un Natale piu’ sereno.
Oggi la smentita. In un comunicato, alcuni attivisti legati ad Anonymous hanno negato di essere stati loro a rubare le oltre 4000 informazioni riservate custodite dalla Stratfor, tra carte di credito, password e indirizzi di casa.
”Il furto a Stratfor non e’ roba nostra. Stratfor e’ una fonte di informazione e di intelligence aperta, che utilizza dati pubblici e rintracciabili sulla rete. Gli autori del furto che si sono dichiarati di Anonymous hanno detto il falso, coprendo i loro veri obbiettivi. Gli analisti di Stratfor – aggiunge la nota – sono persone serie e Anonymous non attacca fonti di notizie”.
Secondo loro, insomma, questi ‘sedicenti adepti di ‘Anonymous’ non sono altro che ‘agenti provocatori’ che hanno voluto coprire il loro crimine utilizzando l’immagine dell’organizzazione. Sulla vicenda interviene anche la stessa Stratfor ridimensionando la portata del furto: ”Contrariamente a quanto diffuso ieri, la falla ha toccato solo una lista di nostri clienti che hanno comprato nostre pubblicazioni, ma non sono in pericolo in alcun modo dati personali su di loro”.
Intanto gli esperti fanno sapere che in nessun modo soldi rubati dai conti potrebbero finire a organizzazioni di beneficenza.
”Questi soldi non andranno mai a finire ai bisognosi. Ogni versamento non autorizzato viene prima o poi bloccato e restituito”, ha chiarito il guru della sicurezza informatica, Mikko Hypponen sul sito Pcworld.com.
{via}

Pagina successiva »