I'm having something similar to Decius' inexplicable Twitter lockout experience a while back. Signed up for LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I've been diligently building out my network like they encourage you to do. I signed in this morning and I got this:

Account Restricted | LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn account has been temporarily restricted

Contact our customer service team to get this resolved as soon as possible.

Clicking the link to the "customer service team" takes you to a generic form that asks for your name and email address. It auto-populates the subject line with "Account High Restricted" and the form says "Your Question"

When you submit you get:

Your question has been submitted to LinkedIn

The ticket reference number for your question is: #

You've successfully submitted your question, and we'll send you a confirmation email soon.

Go to your Support History page to check out your ticket.

What's really funny is when you click the link for "Support History" it loops you back to "Your LinkedIn account has been temporarily restricted.

I love mediated online social mechanisms with arbitrary kill switches!

Some reviews:

My son is very interested in joining the Imperial forces when he grows up. He says he's not sure if he wants to help police the homeland or if he wants to invade foreign countries. So I thought a new Predator drone toy would be a nice gift for him. These drones are used both domestically and internationally, to spy on people and assassinate them at the Emperor's discretion. He just loves flying his drone around our house, dropping Hellfire missiles on Scruffy, our dog. He kept saying that Scruffy was a terror suspect and needed to be taken out. I asked him if Scruffy should get a trial first, and he quoted Lindsay Graham, Imperial Senator: "Shut up Scruffy, you don't get a trial!" I was so proud. I think I'll buy him some video games that promote martial law for Christmas.

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I bought this for my son and he spent countless, blissful hours simulating massacres of weddings, funerals, and other family gatherings of brown skinned foreigners! He even realized that if he circled the drone back around on the first responders, his effective kill rate soared! Neat-o!

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This is the best toy ever. Finally, I can pretend that I'm a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
It's like I'm sitting right there in the White House with my very own kill list!

Training the Next Generation: Predator Toy Drone at Amazon

Our argument, in brief, is that digital technologies have been able to do routine work for a while now. This allows them to substitute for less-skilled and -educated workers, and puts a lot of downward pressure on the median wage. As computers and robots get more and more powerful while simultaneously getting cheaper and more widespread this phenomenon spreads, to the point where economically rational employers prefer buying more technology over hiring more workers. In other words, they prefer capital over labor. This preference affects both wages and job volumes. And the situation will only accelerate as robots and computers learn to do more and more, and to take over jobs that we currently think of not as ‘routine,’ but as requiring a lot of skill and/or education.

...

computers are now doing many things that used to be the domain of people only. The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications. Perhaps the most important of these is that while digital progress grows the overall economic pie, it can do so while leaving some people, or even a lot of them, worse off.

The Great Decoupling of the US Economy

SevOne discussing different ways of deduplicating netflow:

Netflow Deduplication Demystified

Plixer blog about flow stitching and RFC 5103 (bidirectional netflow)

Bidirectional NetFlow or NetFlow Stitching: Implementing RFC 5103

When I was messing around with this stuff the trickiest part to get right was accounting for drift between exports from multiple hops in the path. The export times and bytes of each flow are always going to vary slightly at each hop. My experience is with V5. For TCP packets you get a hint about connection state from the ANDed flags field. UDP was more complicated because you don't get those connection state hints and have to make other assumptions like seeing the source port change on a "different" flow, but not every protocol obeys that. IKE come to mind with both source and dest port being 500. Good luck making any sense of TFTP or some of the RPC protocols with only V5 records.

Deduplication and stitching are fun engineering problems and I think Lancope gets it right for the most part.

Best aha moment for me was discovering how ICMP is reported in flows. The source port field is set to 0 and the high and low bytes of the destination port field are used to encode the type/code tuple: 256*[Type] + [Code]. Clever. A play out of the old FTP protocol book ;)

Here's that decentralized social media project I was talking about at Shmoo

Diaspora

A Muslim businessman in Canada became a terror suspect for telling his sales staff in a text message to "blow away" the competition at a New York City trade show, a religious association said Friday.

Moroccan-born Saad Allami, who works as a telecommunications company sales manager, was arrested three days after he sent the message in January 2011 and detained while police searched his home, said the Muslim Council of Montreal.

Add this to that guy who was refused entry into the US because of a twit that he was going to "destroy" Los Angeles (meaning he was going to party hard.)

The FBI also wants you to report specific ethnicity of people doing suspicious things like using encryption, shielding their screens, using VOIP, paying in cash, and signing into Comcast while at a cafe that provides Internet access.

The global bureau of pre-crime is coming together quite nicely.

'Blow away' text lands Muslim in Canada jail

Academic paper here:

http://courses.isi.jhu.edu/netsec/papers/increased_dns_resistance.pdf

I'm not really on board with this kludge.

Mixed Case DNS Queries

"Where's the rest of life?"

Zing!

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on What's Wrong with Congress

There are reasons why an open debate about the role of money in politics has been stymied. It goes without saying that a truly honest conversation about the formulation of public policy is bound to make the vast majority of elected officials uneasy. The relatively small group at the top of the income spectrum is in a position where they can exert their leverage, directly or indirectly, to muddy the water and silence dissent. In some cases the mere threat of reprisal is enough to quell voices of opposition.

The 1st edition of The Rootkit Arsenal, published back in the summer of 2009, included a short epilogue that raised questions about the underlying integrity of the political system in the United States. It used the metaphor of a malware infestation to discuss aspects of popular participation and means of control. In preparing the forthcoming 2nd edition, this material has been extended and explores territory that has just barely received attention from the major news outlets. Though the publisher has opted not to include this content, it has been made available here.

Passage from essay:

Having compromised a computer, an attacker can embed a rootkit deep inside of the machine's infrastructure and then leverage this foothold to manipulate a handful of key system constructs. The end result of this subtle manipulation is that the rootkit acquires a degree of covert influence. The external party can intercept sensitive information and control what happens while remaining concealed in the background, just like a black-clad stage handler in a Kabuki theater production. All it takes is the right kind of access and a detailed understanding of how things work.

Stepping back from the trees to view the forest, one might postulate that something similar has already taken place in the power structure of the United States. Does this metaphor carry over into the greater scheme of things? In other words, have our political institutions been rooted? Has the infrastructure silently been undermined by people who've acquired the access necessary to manipulate key components and implement their own agenda?

Pluralists would contend that this is not the case. They'd argue that true power in the United States has been constitutionally granted to "the people" through mechanisms like the electoral process, freedom of speech, and the ability to establish interest groups. The traditional view is that these aspects of our political system result in a broad distribution of power that prevents any one faction from gaining an inordinate amount of influence.

Direct link to PDF.

The Rootkit Arsenal - Lost Chapter Now Available

We did it! We raised over $25,000 for @EFF! We're going to match that so the total will be over $50,000! Thanks all for your support! :)

Glad I went with them and glad they hit their target. Will be interesting to hear the final tally tomorrow.

Funny that GoDaddy put out a press release saying their name is now removed from the list of supporters of SOPA:

"Go Daddy is no longer on the U.S. Congressional list of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) supporters."

That with their press releases that say they do not support SOPA and PIPA and Bob Parsons Twitter post that GD is against SOPA plus this:

http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/statement-about-sopa/?isc=smtwsup

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Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

-Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman

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I'd say there was an impact.

Now it's time to take the fight to your Congress critters.

Namecheap raises $50k for EFF