Suspected Lulzsec spokesperson, charged

Last week, as part of a pre-planned operation an 18 year old male from Shetland was arrested. Jake Jarvis was accused of being ‘Topiary’, the spokesperson for Anonymous and Lulzsec and was transferred to London for questioning. Most recreantly Topiary was considered to be the one behind the Lulzsec Twitter account which now only shows one tweet: “You cannot arrest an idea”.

Shortly afterwards a group named the Web Ninjas announced that Topiary was not a teenager from Scotland but a 23 year old Swedish man instead. This was considered to be simply misinformation spread about by the hacktivist groups and Jake was to appear before court this Monday.

Oddly enough, the evidence that incriminates Jake are the 750K ID’s on his PC along with drafts of the fake Murdoch death tweets. After all the sites Anonymous and Lulzsec have hacked, don’t you think that a member of that group wouldn’t keep his own information secure?

The court released him on bail. He has been ordered to live with his mother and is banned from accessing the Internet. He faces a curfew from 10pm until 7am each night, and he must wear a monitoring device to verify his compliance. His next court date is set for August 30.

Recent Tech articles – 20th-26th June 2011

A lot of news this week centers around security issues.. We will start with it, and end with it… We started the week with two biggish issues from Dropbox and WordPress; On the Monday it was reported that a programmer’s error in a code update at Dropbox caused a temporary security breach that allowed any password to be used to access any user account. This was followed in the Tuesday with a release from WordPress when it announced it was forcing users to reset their passwords at WordPress.org after several popular plugins were compromised by hackers.

In Adobe news, to try and get beyond critics comments on their reliance on Flash and the Desktop, released one new product and put out on Preview another; At the beginning of the week they announced that Flash Builder 4.5.1 was ready for release and would allow IOS and Playbook development on top of the already existing Android platform. They then ended the week by announcing the preview of Edge – an HTML5 animation design tool.

On the Wednesday I started hearing on Twitter about an [at that point] unverified story from Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing which was suggesting that the UK Copyright lobby was in closed talks with the British Government on national web censorship… If you are a Net Neutrality follower, it’s worth reading including the BBC followup.

As we head towards Microsoft Office365 cloud offering coming out of Beta, I am sure that they could be doing without BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), the suite that 365 will replace, experiencing further outages which was reported midweek last week.

After last weeks release of the Kinect Windows SDK, i picked up some a couple of URLS’s one pointing to a Kinect Hacks site for inspiration on what you can do with it and the other was a series of videos from the Microsoft developers event the previous week.

Gamification is a hot topic at the moment. So what is it and how can it be used in real world situations?

As promised, we end the news of this week with more security news. Firstly, in an international raid called Operation Tribune Herald resulted in multiple equipment seizures of a group spreading scareware malware. And finally after 50 days at sea, LulzSec announces that they are disbanding… Or do they?

Something to play with – I found a new social site last week after hearing it mentioned on Mashable.com. Infostripe – A personal landing page with mobile in mind.

The LulzSec group disbands – or does it?

I haven’t written anything previously about the LulzSec and Anonymous groups specific activities, till now I just haven’t thought it right to give them the notoriety they so wanted… So why mention it now? I think that we are at an escalation point in the activities worth mentioning.