Johnny Long has posted on this HFC Site that PayPal has frozen his account for investigation. This is the charity and his survival money, and without it they are pennyless.

I had a subscription system running under WP-MEMBER for about a year before that software flaked out on me. Multiple domains caused problems that were irreconcilable. I had donations for our work in Africa coming in (not through wp-member) and a few hundred subscribers to Informer through wp-member. All said, when I switched to Suma, I had 10,000$US in my personal paypal account. That was my family’s support money as well as money for our food program in Kenya.

So I shopped around and picked up Suma. In the process, we had to switch to a business account (although I don’t understand why…wp-member was happily doing recurring payments without a business account). That’s when all hell broke loose. Paypal required a proof of non-profit status (we’re not a non-profit yet, no 501c3 paperwork from IRS) which we don’t have (I selected the wrong box I guess) a printed bank statement (harder to get than you might realize, being overseas) which because a REAL problem because the account was in my name, not the business name and other information. Because I couldn’t provide some of the info (501c3 paper) and the other info (bank stuff) took a LONG time, PayPal restricted my account, meaning my subscription payments are bouncing, and I can’t transfer money out of my account.

PayPal has frozen my assets. We have no source of income beyond the car money we just spent in Kampala on Monday. I may very well have to return to Kampala and get the car payment money back to live off of. We are stranded financially and physically without a vehicle because of PayPal.

I’ve called (Contact PayPal Customer Support toll-free at 1-888-221-1161) to lift the restrictions, but they tell me to email service. Emailing service is ridiculous, and a week goes by between responses.

Come on PayPal, I am sure there is somone with some sense that can help Johnny out and get this sorted, and get his family and Hackers For Charity back on the road.

So you may or may not have heard of the Anti-Sec movement. Most people will be familar due to their hack on ImageShack recently.

Their Manifesto from the image is as follows:

Anti-sec. We’re a movement dedicated to the eradication of
full-disclosure. We wanted to give everyone an image of what we’re
all about.

Full-disclosure is the disclosure of exploits publicly – anywhere.
The security industry uses full-disclosure to profit and develop
scare-tactics to convince people into buying their firewalls,
anti-virus software, and auditing services.

Meanwhile, script kiddies copy and paste these exploits and compile
them, ready to strike any and all vulnerable servers they can get
a hold of. If whitehats were truly about security this stuff would not be
published, not even exploits with silly edits to make them slightly
unusable.

As an added bonus, if publication wasn’t enough, these exploits are
mirrored and distributed widely across the Internet with a nice
little advertisement embedded in them for the crew or website which first exposed the vulnerability to the public.

It’s about money. While the world is difficult to change, and
money will certainly continue to be a very important in the eyes of many, our battle is that of the removal of full-disclosure for the purpose of making it harder for the security industry to exploit its
consequences.

It is our goal that, through mayhem and the destruction of all
exploitive and detrimental communities, companies, and individuals,
full-disclosure will be abandoned and the security industry will be
forced to reform.

How do we plan to achieve this? Through the full and unrelenting,
unmerciful elimination of all supporters of full-disclosure and the security industry in its present form. If you own a security blog, an exploit publication website or you distribute any exploits…

“you are a target and you will be rm’d. Only a matter of time.”

This isn’t like before. This time everyone and everything is
getting owned.

Signed: The Anti-sec Movement
“No images were harmed in the making of this… image.”

Now I am all for people being able to speak their mind, and thats fine. The thing that I find a contradiction is that they are hacking sites to spread the word. Isnt this the pot calling the kettle black?

Sure this movement will be interesting to follow.

So I ordered a BU-353 GPS Receiver from Taiwan and it arrived in 4 days, not bad going if I do say so myself.

I plan on hooking this up to my laptop to do some tracking, and perhaps do some wardriving mapping, so lets see how it goes.

I guess anyone visiting this blog knows we dont have any privacy, but just to add to this a new service is being setup called 118 800. This service is going to be a directory of every UK mobile number. The idea is that you type in the name and home location of someone whos mobile you would like to contact, they then search the database and then offer to connect you to this person for £1. Apparently they dont share the actual number with the requestor, but send a txt to the owner of the number with the details of the requestor asking you to contact them, or they call you directly and ask if you want to accept a call from the requestor if you were to dial the number (like when you call the operator and reverse the charges I guess).

I am probably being overly paranoid as I guess its no different to the fact landlines are registered and you can be ex directory, but just feels abit odd to me with it being a mobile. You can become ex directory from the service by texting E to 118 800, or completing an online form. They say they wont be handing out numbers or selling them to anyone (hmmm), time will tell I guess.

How about they set up a service with no information, and if I want all my information shared with the world I will submit it to them 🙂