Whitedust
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Whitedust is an independent computer security news portal that is run by Mark Hinge and Mark Anderson (One of the founders of the Hivercon Security Conference and Creator of the spam blocking software Whitemail). It started on March 18, 2005 with the goal of giving an independent view on security from an impartial point of view. Its impartiality has been strongly disputed by commenters of sites such as slashdot and digg although its founders maintain they publish material in the spirit of "free publishing" and with no underlying agenda.
Whitedust specialises in computer security news and publishes articles on related topics and interviews with various figures from the 'underground' and infosec 'scene'. It contains background information about the topic of Hacking.
Its conspiracy theories, technical articles, papers and interviews have been quoted by a number of popular new sources such as Slashdot, digg, msnbc, eweek, zdnet, BBC Radio5 LIVE (Audio) and The Guardian.
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[edit] Content and motivation
Whitedust does not seem to shy away from hacktivism in any of its forms; indeed one of its better known and more widely linked and distributed publications was an article claiming that Wal-Mart had been editing its wiki page to present a more favourable light that was perhaps actually the majority public view. This incident led to the Wiki page for Wal-Mart being restricted for quite some time. Whitedust has been involved in various other such campaigns cantering around "righting" what certain hacktivists would claim are internet "wrongs" - although the motivation of Whitedust's staff is not always crystal clear to say the least.
Interesting technical articles published by the site included the outlining of what is now known as "Darkmail" attacks some time before the phrase itself was used to describe such attack vectors.
Figures that have been interviewed include Simple Nomad (A senior security analyst at Vernier Networks), Fyodor, Elonka Dunin, Paul (Tony) Watson, Jason Scott Sadofsky and Richard Thieme.
Aside from all the controversy of its home grown articles Whitedust is a well maintained aggregator of third party news, serving as a daily, sometimes hourly, round up of the day’s computer security and hacking news.
Whitedust also host, run and maintain an IRC server which is based on the small "Rage Emo Alliance" IRC Network. The official channel for the site is #Whitedust, the unofficial channel for the site is #RWM.
[edit] Expansion
As of August 2006 most of the primary Whitedust staff have launched a video games news portal much in the style of Whitedust.net. Although not officially part of Whitedust, the site is run, maintained and promoted in exactly the same manner - as well as advertised on the Whitedust.net site by the same team. The site is called Games @ soljo.org.
