[NetBehaviour] Blog Menace.

[marc]

Blog Menace.

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet.

There's a new threat to free speech, and it comes from the software that 
lets you read blogs.

Creating or supporting an element engagement when collaboration is one 
of the ingredients , instead of the more singular function of demand and 
control is,

Last week at the infamous computer security conference Black Hat in Las 
Vegas, Bob Auger announced what should have already been obvious: 
reading blogs isn't safe.

A security engineer with SPI Labs, Auger quietly revealed that the mere 
act of checking out somebody's RSS feed could allow bad guys to steal 
money from your bank account, post Web spam from your computer, and 
snoop on everything you've written anonymously in that online porn 
community you secretly visit. This is the new dark side of all that nice 
free speech that's been enabled by bloggish technologies.

Generally, free expression advocates worry about how businesses and 
governments censor the confessional, unedited style of bloggers. And 
they're right to be concerned. People posting personal rants have gotten 
fired for writing mean things about their bosses and been sued for 
criticizing litigious maniacs. These bloggers are receiving traditional 
retributions for speaking openly: They say bad things about someone or 
some corporate entity, and that person or entity smacks them down.

But as Auger and other researchers demonstrated at Black Hat, we're 
about to see a new threat to free expression. Massive groups of people 
will be punished not for what they say online but for using particular 
tools to say it. Auger investigated several popular RSS readers -- 
programs used to pull blog content onto your computer -- including 
Bloglines, RSS Reader, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader, and discovered that 
many of them could be turned into delivery systems for malicious code 
designed to force computers to, for example, post spam on other people's 
blogs.

more...
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/40006/