Some time back, Operation Aurora – the most ultra sophisticated hack attack ever was uncovered and the blame game between Google and the Chinese Government followed. While the spotlight shifted to the political picture, the scary part is that these attacks were far more brutal than what Google and others assessed.

It seems that the folks at Foursquare had enough of ‘Please Rob Me’ – the mock service that was setup to expose the danger of privacy invasion caused by tweeting about Foursquare check-ins. In the latest post on its blog, Foursquare has clarified its stand and with all due respect, shown the middle finger to ‘Please Rob Me’.

It looks like Gmail will never see light of the day again in Iran. With the Iranian revolution anniversary around the corner, Iran’s telecommunication agency has ‘permanently’ suspended Google’s popular email service – Gmail, with immediate effect.

A smart hack from 3 good men – Mike Kershaw (Kismet), Mike Baker (OpenWRT) and Chris Paget (TomBom Blogger) has just revealed that in future, you might be able to hook up a USB flash drive, printer or even a video camera to your Motorola Droid phone.

It seems that the Chinese Government has finally started taking action on Google’s allegations over suspected Chinese involvement in the recent cyber attacks code named ‘Operation Aurora’. Chinese Police have shut down the country’s biggest hacker training site – Black Hawk Safety Net in Central China’s Hubei province. Three people have been arrested in this regard and sent to judicial custody.

After categorically denying any involvement in the recent cyber attacks on Google, China has signalled its intent to improve its deteriorating relations with Google. In a recent press release, China has indicated that it would welcome Google Android without any restrictions.

Spam is undoubtedly the greatest evil of the internet and the worst part is that it grows exponentially with the super fast growth of the internet. A team of computer scientists has now come up with a brilliant idea to fight spam – use the spammer’s tricks to counter spam. The idea is simple – decipher the templates being used for creating spam and then feed the intelligence of these templates into spam filters. Since each bot uses the same spam template to generate bulk spam, deciphering the spam filter will help recognize all spam originating from the bot.

China has categorically denied any state involvement in Operation Aurora, the series of cyber attacks that rocked Google and several other technology companies earlier this year. This is in response to United States President Barack Obama’s comment where he mentioned that he was “troubled” by Google’s claims of a Chinese hand in the recent cyber attacks.

With Operation Aurora, professional hackers have taken the hack attacks to ‘never seen before’ ultra sophisticated levels. It’s phenomenal that an attacker can take on not one, not two but nearly a dozen of highly acclaimed companies including the likes of Google and Adobe….

The Ministry of Justice has given its nod to levy fines up to £500K for data protection offences. Unless there are parliamentarian objections (which I doubt will be the case), these fines are all set to become a law with effect from 6th April, 2010.

Christopher Graham, The Information Commissioner has made the message loud and clear – his office will be committed to working with voluntary, public and private bodies to help them comply with data protection rules and for bodies that do not comply, he’d not be shy to impose these fines….