LulzSec Releases Arizona Law Enforcement Data, Claims Retaliation For Immigration Law

Hacker collective of the moment LulzSec has just released a torrent of data it claims to belong to Arizona law enforcement, in what it calls “Operation Chinga La Migra” (or literally translated ”Fuck the border patrol”).

They claim that the information, widely available via BitTorrent, includes hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers. I’ve confirmed by phone that at least one of the addresses posted in the initial release belongs to someone who works in the Arizona police department.

The hacker group says that the Arizona Department of Public Safety was targeted specifically because of the controversial SB 1070 law, which is currently the strictest anti-immigration measure in the US and requires Arizona immigrants to carry registration documents at all times.

From the LulzSec press release:

We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.

The documents classified as “law enforcement sensitive”, “not for public distribution”, and “for official use only” are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements.

Every week we plan on releasing more classified documents and embarassing [sic] personal details of military and law enforcement in an effort not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities fighting an unjust “war on drugs”.

Hackers of the world are uniting and taking direct action against our common oppressors – the government, corporations, police, and militaries of the world. See you again real soon! ;D

This adamantly anti-SB 1070 political agenda seems like somewhat of a pivot for the hacker group, which up until now has been adamant about being motivated primarily by “lulz.” It is also probably the grandest actualization yet of its Operation Anti-Security, which it has positioned as a war against all governments.

In any case, taking a stance against racial profiling by “doxing” or dumping personal data like this is a decidedly more serious endeavor than hacking into online gaming communities or even briefly taking down the websites of the Senate and the CIA.

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Microsoft claims that we are moving towards a “post-virtualization era”

It’s jargon Wednesday here on TNWmicrosoft, so strap in your Googling (Binging?) skills and let’s talk about virtualization.

Satya Nadella, the current head of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, which is usually shortened to STB, is quoted by Microsoft as saying that the technology industry is moving towards a “post-virtualization era.”

What does that mean? It means that single machines, severs for example, are losing their sheen to grouped units that work together without such individuality. In the words of Microsoft:

First, the notion of a modern operating system is shifting from software running on a single, physical server, to software running across an entire datacenter of servers. Services traditionally managed by a machine – storage, networking, compute – are no longer bound to a particular machine. This notion of an “elastic” infrastructure can have significant business benefits for customers. Moreover, he [Satya] says, the data itself is becoming a platform developers can build on that leads to a whole new set of innovative application scenarios.

The argument appears to be, and sound off in the comments if I bend this a touch, that as the cloud heats up and becomes the standard infrastructure architecture, the need to virtualize individual machines will fade to black, thus putting us into a post-virtualization era simply due to market changes.

Satya has more to say on the matter: “Our strategy in a nutshell is to cloud-optimize every business,” he said, which Microsoft followed with “That means offering businesses on-demand, scalable infrastructure and the ability to tap massive amounts of data for new business insight.”

But this does not mean that virtualization is dead and over today; Microsoft continues to invest in its virtualization products. As Mary Jo Foley notes on ZDNet:

Microsoft officials have said repeatedly that virtualization alone does not a cloud strategy make. However, virtualization in the form of Hyper-V is at the crux of Microsoft’s private and public cloud offerings, as this slide from the company’s recent TechEd conference made clear.

Microsoft is expected to include a new version of its Hyper-V hypervisor in Windows 8 client, along with Windows 8 Server.

That aside, Microsoft has proclaimed the future, and it is not one in which virtualization will play a large roll. If you read this far, shout in the comments if you agree.Top Image Credit

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RIM trims internal PlayBook sales estimates, report claims

Despite respectable sales in its first quarter of availability, RIM has reportedly slashed internal sales estimates for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. RIM announced during its earnings call last week that it had shipped 500,000 PlayBook tablets to retail partners during the fiscal first quarter of 2012. The figure didn’t quite match the 1 million mark that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab crossed after just two months, but it outsold Motorola’s XOOM tablet and beat estimates issued by several analysts. According to DigiTimes, however, RIM had very high hopes for its virgin tablet offering. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company had an internal goal of shipping between 2.4 and 2.5 million units during the second quarter. In light of lower than expected sales between the tablet’s launch in mid-April and the end of the fiscal first quarter, RIM has reportedly revised its second-quarter estimates down to 800,000 – 900,000 units.

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