Tag: Sweden

Swedish prosecutors want a word with Assange

chiefIt seems that Swedish prosecutors want to talk to Julian Assange who is still holed up in an Ecuadorian embassy.

The Wikileaks founder Assange skipped bail so that he did not have to be extradited to Sweden to face police questioning on sex charges.

Assange insisted that the whole case against him had been fabricated because the US government was desperate to extradite him to the US to face spying charges.

Assange denies all the sexual assault allegations against him. He has previously called on Swedish prosecutors to question him in London, either in person or via videolink. The Foreign Office said it would welcome this possibly, but prosecutors in Stockholm have argued against it as it is not normal practice.

Now it seems that Sweden has changed its mind and are asking to question Assange in London on allegations of sexual misconduct.

The prosecutor on the case, Marianne Ny, also said she wants to take a DNA sample from Assange.

We don’t think it is likely that Assange will agree to that. He is likely to come up with some excuse that if the Swedes have his DNA the US spooks could plant it in various crime scenes to force him to come to the US.

However one of Assange’s lawyers, Per Samuelson, has welcomed the offer. “This is something we’ve demanded for over four years,” he said.

“Julian Assange wants to be interviewed so he can be exonerated.”

Last year, a Swedish court rejected an appeal by Assange to have his arrest warrant over sexual assault allegations revoked.

The British government says it has spent $10 million policing the embassy to ensure Assange does not flee the country.

Swedish pirate tricks security experts

0099413191_LSwedish Pirate Party’s youth wing president hacked Sweden’s leading security and military experts as they searched for ‘holidays’ and ‘forest hikes’ during working hours.

Gustav Nipe set up a Wi-Fi network called ‘Open Guest’ at a security conference earlier this week and several high profile officials used the network to log into their email accounts and surf the internet.

The Wi-Fi network was not encrypted which meant that Nipe could track which sites people visited as well as the emails and text messages of around 100 delegates, including politicians and journalists as well as security experts.

He said it was ironic that the security establishment was in Sälen pushing for more surveillance, but its leading figures go and log on to an unsecure W-Fi network.

Some people were looking at Skype, eBay and Blocket and stuff like that, or looking for holidays and where you could go and hike the forest. This was during the day when I suppose they were being paid to be at the conference working, Nipe said.

Nipe said that the stunt was to draw attention to the problem of network monitoring in Sweden, and says he will not be revealing which sites were visited by specific experts.

With insecure networks like these, you can end up getting access even to secure servers because people so often use the same passwords for different sites. So he could have got into the government’s server or used other information to track people in their everyday lives, he pointed out.

However, some think that Nipe’s stunt might have actually broken Sweden’s Personal Data Act.

Martin Brinnen, a lawyer at the Swedish Data Inspection Board told Dagens Nyheter that Nipe had acted without the “explicit consent” of the Wi-Fi network’s users, despite the fact that they had agreed to join an open network.

Nipe told The Local that all the data he had collected would be encrypted so that no-one else could access it and added that it would be erased after it had been analysed.

 

Swedish cops raid Pirate Bay again

swedish policeInspector Knacker of the Stockholm yard seized servers, computers, and other equipment believed to belong to the P2P outfit Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay and several other torrent-related sites disappeared yesterday, and although no official statement has been made, it is logical to assume that the Pirate Bay’s downtime and the raids were no coincidence.

It is the first time in months that The Pirate Bay has gone offline. A number of concerned users thought that there might have been some technical issues, but Swedish authorities have confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement said that there had been a “crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law. A data centre in Nacka which is built into a “mountain” which suggests that the raid took place at Portlane.

Police are staying quiet on the exact location of the operation and the targets involved but the fact that the national police IP chief is involved at this early stage suggests something sizable.

In addition, expert file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad said that there were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many.

So far, police have fingered the collar of one many who was connected to the site.

Several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker are also down. The Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay.org, Bayimg.com and Pastebay.net are also offline.

Assange still faces extradition

Flag of EcuadorA Swedish court today confirmed that an arrest warrant against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still stands, and the country wants him extradited.

Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London, faces charges of sexual assault, charges that he strenuously denies.

He jumped bail and sought sanctuary in the embassy two years ago.  He claims the reason why he’s avoiding extradition is because he fears he will be extradited to the USA to face serious secrecy charges.

The Stockholm court of appeal said that Assange is suspected of crimes of a serious nature.  It refused to withdraw the warrant because, it said, it fears he will avoid legal proceedings or punishment.

In 2012 he lost an appeal with the UK Supreme Court to avoid extradition and that’s when he took to the embassy, where Sweden, the UK and the USA have no jurisdiction.

The charges relate to accusations of sexual misconduct and rape from two women when he visited Sweden in 2010.

British police are waiting to arrest him and extradite him the moment he leaves the embassy.

Move your datacentres to Scandinavia!

datacenterWhile many multinational and pan-European businesses have their co-location centres in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London or Paris, IT managers should think about moving their datacentres to Norway or Sweden.

That’s according to analysts at the Gartner Group and there’s a number of reasons why Sweden and Norway are attractive.

Tiny Haynes, a research director at Gartner, said that power costs in Norway and Sweden have fallen by five percent since 2010. That contrasts with the EU average power costs that have risen 13 percent in the same period.

Also it’s cold in Norway and Sweden and that can give datacentres efficiencies by using outside air cooling.

Gartner believes that managers can save up to 50 percent by moving their infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.

Haynes said: “It’s likely that most organisations will find some workloads that can be moved to a lower cost location without impacting performance.”

Acer shuffles UK GM, North Europe ops

acer-logo-ceTop notebook peddler Acer has chosen Marco Andresen as general manager in the UK, replacing Neil Marshall who was promoted to looking after North Europe operations.

Both Andresen and Marshall will cooperate on their current and new positions frmo 1 November, 2013.

Andresen is marketing director for the Nordics and country manager for Acer Sweden. He previously held biz dev and marketing roles at retailer Media Markt, as well as HP and IBM.

“The UK is a critically important market for us and one of the most competitive,” Andresen said.