Last year, Maqsood Lodin was being interviewed by police after he’d travelled to Pakistan. When his questioners found a memory card in his underwear, they were suspicious—but it seemed only to contain porn. Later investigation, however, reveals that one film was actually encoded with more than 100 secret al Qaeda documents.

CNN reports that Lodin had travelled back to his home in Austria, from Pakistan, via Budapest, Hungary and Germany, which is what aroused suspicion. When police found the memory stick, all they could find on it was a pornographic video called Kick Ass and a file marked Sexy Tanja.

It has now come to light that, after several weeks of analysis, German investigators discovered more than 100 al Qaeda documents encoded inside the porn video—including an inside track on some of the terror group’s future operations and PDF terrorist training manuals in German, English and Arabic. CNN reports that US military sources have told it that the trove of files are “the most important haul of al Qaeda materials in the last year”.

Future attacks detailed in the documents include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. Lodin is now on trial in Berlin, where he’s pleading not guilty to terrorism charges. [CNN]
POSTED FROM GIZMODO 

For as much as we try to ignore and segregate it from our daily surfing, the fact remains that porn is the life-blood of the Internet. But how much sexy sex is actually moving through the series of tubes?

The answer is: tons. The world’s top porn sites—XVideos, LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8, Pornhub—are on par with Google and Facebook. XVideos alone averages 4.4 billion page views per month, double what Reddit pulls over the same time and triple what CNN can do. And it’s not just the amount of traffic that these sites generate, it’s the length of individual visits as well. Most sites, Gizmodo included, average three to six minutes per visit. Porn sites average five times that—15-20 minutes per visit.

In terms of actual data usage, porn sites are behemoths. Most sites average 50 - 200 TB of material, which individually really isn’t all that much. But during peak times, when the site’s loading image galleries, downloading content and streaming video, its data usage soars. According to ExtremeTech,

YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month. It gets better! At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.

That’s one, single site—and not even the largest of its kind—driving 800Gbps. And given that there are more porn sites than there are stars in the sky, it’s obvious what we’re all really here for—and it ain’t for the articles. [ExtremeTech]

POSTED FROM GIZMODO

Aliyah Shahid reports in the NY Daily News Rick Santorum is declaring a war … on porn. The Republican presidential candidate and staunch social conservative wants to ban hard-core pornography. He calls it “toxic to marriages and relationships” in a new statement posted on his official website. “America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” the former Pennsylvania senator writes. “It contributes to misogyny and violence against women. It is a contributing factor to prostitution and sex trafficking.”

He demands a crackdown on the distribution of hardcore pornography on the Internet, in addition to material on cable/satellite TV, hotel/motel TV, retail shops and through the mail.

What qualifies as “hardcore” remains unclear. Santorum points to a “wealth of research” showing pornography causes “profound brain changes in both children and adults,” and rips President Obama for not doing enough. Image: “A Portrait of Rick Santorum Made of Gay Porn Stills” via Jezebel

Read more: NY Daily News

Do as we say, not as we do…

The U.S. House is currently debating the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261), better known as SOPA.  As mentioned in our previous analysis, SOPA has the potential to create devastating harm to internet businesses, as it allows sites to be taken down if any user posts links to infringing content.  

For example, if a site’s user policy explicitly forbid posting links to copyrighted material and one rogue user posted such content, the entire business could be effectively killed for however many weeks or days it took to remove the offending links and pass a complaint through the gears of bureaucracy.  The solution appears to be sort of like chopping your leg off to fight an ingrown toenail.

I. All Onboard the Congressional Pirates Train

Now a particularly ironic fact has come to light — it appears that IP addresses belonging to the offices of members of Congress have been downloading content illegally via BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak used Hurricane Electric’s handy list of assigned IP blocks (found here) to track down which IP addresses belong to the offices of members of Congress.  And lo and behold, when those addresses were compared to results on YouHaveDownloaded, a torrent tracking site, they yielded over 800 hits.

Now to put this in context YouHaveDownloaded tracks only a tiny portion of torrent traffic, so it appears that Congress — even as they look to punish lesser mortals for file sharing — are themselves gleefully committing a “smash and grab” as Vice President Joe Biden (D) once put it.

Much of the pirated materials appeared to be adult self-help or education books such as “Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High” and “How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want”.

READ FULL ARTICLE AT DAILY TECH