The hacker, who goes by "Hannibal," posted the credentials to Pastebin on Saturday, and also made all details available through 14 sharing sites, including mediafire.com, sendspace.com, wupload.com and zshare.net.

"Jewish people named me as the general of Israel's hackers," writes Hannibal on the Pastebin site. "I have about 30 million email accounts, 10 million bank accounts, 4 million cerdit cards of Arabs from all over the world."

Facebook believes that it was not hacked, and that most of the login credentials are invalid. Last week Facebook officials said that on one of the releases, a third of the credentials were valid and half were not even associated with Facebook accounts. We still suggest checking Hannibal's Pastebin list to make sure and changing your password.

This is just the latest engagement in the recent Arab-Israeli cyber wars. Earlier this month, a Saudi hacker named 0xOmar broke into a popular Israeli sports site, stealing personal information including credit card numbers. He released 26,000 credit card numbers, and threatens to release another one million. Israel vowed to retaliate, and Naked Security discovered that the number of credit cards compromised was closer to 6,000. The hack continued with an Israeli hack of Saudi credit cards.

An Israel hackers told Ynet, "If the leaks continue, we will cause severe damage to the privacy of Saudi citizens."

The Israeli government called the hack and subsequent release of credit card numbers and identities terrorism and said "no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action."

The Israeli hackers claim to have "thousands of lists that include the personal details of citizens in the Arab state as well as the credit card details of those citizens. At the moment, we're holding on to the information and waiting for the right moment to publish it."

One Saudi citizen contacted by the publication confirmed the information they had on him was correct but said no one had told him his credit card information had been compromised.

"We could not stay silent after the pompous boasting of the Saudi hacker," an Israeli hacker told Ynet, adding that "a few Israeli hackers came together and decided on various responses for each cyber activity that would be carried out against Israel, including responses beyond the cyber world."

Does that include physical retaliation? Such a threat does not seem in keeping with a hacker group.

He explained that "if a terror attack were to take place, we will make every effort to publish the terrorist's personal details and those of his family... Sadly, the State of Israel does not support an offensive policy so we are forced to maintain a great deal of secrecy. If we are caught we're facing a harsh punishment."

0xOmer

Haartez has identified one of the Israeli hackers as Omer Cohen, nicknamed 0xOmer, after the alleged Saudi hacker, 0xOmar.

He has released "over 200 Saudi credit card numbers and emails were exposed as well as the details of the citizens of other countries." He told Haartez in an email that he kept some information out of circulation so no one could actually use the card numbers. He further claims to have "the personal information of over 50,000 Arab citizens, including the credit card numbers originating from several Gulf states as well as Iran."

He told the newspaper he is a 17-year-old Israeli immigrant from the Ukraine. But who knows? Perhaps he's a Canadian going to school in Belgium.

Although many Israelis have maintained the Saudi hacker, whom some believe is actually an Emirati attending university in Mexico, is not highly skilled, but it's hard to tell if that is correct or if it is part of an international geek pissing contest.

Riyadh photo by Dennis Harper, radar photo by Joe Lewis, Mall of Arabia photo by Wajahat Mahmood

"(Such an attack is) a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation and must be treated as such," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a speech quoted by BBC . "Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action."

Reuters quoted Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri as calling the hack "a new form of resistance" and encouraged "Arab youth to ignore these cowardly Israeli threats and to use all means available in the virtual space to confront Israeli crimes."

The Arab news network Al Arabiyya has reported that Saudi banks are tightening their security against an anticipated attack by Israeli hackers.

"The security systems departments in several Saudi banks embarked on an extensive campaign on Saturday to increase security on their transactions and guarantee wider monitoring of their websites."

If retaliation comes, whether it will be prosecuted by Israeli government technicians or by independent, or semi-independent, hackers is hard to say. Over the last several years, responsibility for country-to-country cyber-attacks has been hard to track, with some orchestrated by governments directly and others being amateur efforts.

Ayelet Noff, founder of Israeli PR firm Blonde 2.0, whose father was a member of parliament in the Knesset, told ReadWriteWeb she doesn't believe any attack will be conducted directly by the government.

"Israel as a country will not retaliate," she said, "however, it is more than likely that Israeli hackers will retaliate in the cyber space."

Although the hacker claimed to have compromised 400,000 online identities by hacking a sports website, Naked Security said the credit card companies claim the figure is closer to 6,000. Only a couple of hundred dollars was charged on the hacked cards before they were cancelled.

Israeli communications base photo by Adam Jones

The hacker broke into a popular Israeli sports site, making off with hundreds of thousands of accounts' worth of personal information, including some credit card numbers.

group-xp

On Tuesday, in a statement on the sports site, the hacker claimed to have stolen 400,000 identities. The message left on the sport site, according to CNN, included an introduction.

"Hi, it's 0xOmarfrom group-xp, largest Wahhabi hacker group of Saudi Arabia. We are anonymous Saudi Arabian hackers. We decided to release first part of our data about Israel."

Hacker News reported that his group claimed to be a part of the Anonymous hacking collective.

Yoram Hacohen, who heads up the Law, Information and Technology Authority at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, told CNN that "Israeli authorities have begun a criminal investigation, including a computer forensic probe to search for electronic evidence to try to locate the group." He is more worried about identity theft than credit card fraud.

This week, Israeli security companies have taken this opportunity to speak to computer security overall in the country. According to Oren Levy, CEO of ZooZ:

"The core of the problem lies in the fact that payment information, such as credit cards, ID and phone numbers, and other information, is being processed and stored by tens of thousands of different merchants who aren't equipped to handle the information. There is a real need to separate merchants from this critical private data."

Is he or isn't he?

Haaretz reported that a blogger named Amir Fedida claimed to have unmasked the blogger as Omar Habib, a student from the United Arab Emirates "works in a café, and studies computer science in at the 'Hidalguense Cenhies' in Mexico."

In another report from the Jerusalem Post, the hacker denies he is anything other than what he claims, and says he's too well hidden to be unmasked.

Cyber-attacks, both by governmental, and amateur, hacking teams, have become more and more part of the landscape of international relations in the last few years.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of cyber-attacks.

Shekel photo from Ancient Art, Dome of the Rock photo by Allistair | additional information from Jonah Balfour

In a letter sent to Twitter last week, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, threatened legal action and said Twitter and its officers could also face criminal charges if the accounts in question are not taken down.

Matt Graves, a spokesperson for Twitter, declined comment.

"Your provision of social media and associated services to Hezbollah and other foreign terrorist organizations would constitute the type of seemingly innocuous material support that would render your company and you personally criminally and civilly liable," Darshan-Leitner wrote.

The case seems weak at best. The Supreme Court has not directly addressed whether speech supportive of a designated terrorist group is unlawful. But Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN "the government can't force private companies to censor lawful speech just because the government doesn't like the speech or the people making the speech."

And Joe Sellers, a First Amendment lawyer at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, told the Washington Post that Twitter can be compared to a newspaper that provides advertising space: the company is, Sellers said, "providing a public forum" that is "content-neutral."

"I don't see how Twitter's provision of a forum would constitute providing aid and support of a terrorist group," Seller says.

As reported last month, the U.S. government has also put pressure on Twitter to shut down the account used by the Shabab militant group of Somalia. The group has been using its Twitter account to taunt the Kenyan military, which was dispatched to Somalia in October to combat the Shabab.

His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.

Libyan Internet starts to fail. Renesys reported that, after a long, stable summer of nothing much to report, Libya's Internet has now started to fail, probably as a result of infrastructure degradation due to war and neglect. The effects of this failure will be largely negative for the government, as they are the only ones who currently have access.

Egyptian blogger arrested for "defaming the military." In what looks like a frantic race back to the bottom, the Egyptian military, the erstwhile saviors of the people during the revolution, have added another notch to their billyclub with the arrest and probable prosecution in a military court of 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. Admittedly, a statement on one of her social media accounts muddies the waters.

"If the judiciary doesn't give us our rights, nobody should be surprised if militant groups appear and conduct a series of assassinations because there is no law and there is no judiciary."

Egypt seems to have moved on from the confident non-violence of the Arab Spring.

Iranian blogger freed. After a hunger strike that lasted 25 days, the Iranian government released Dr. Mehdi Khazali. He was released on bail. Khazali, son of a conservative cleric, has been arrested three times.

Al Jazeera journalist arrested in Israel. Last week, Samer Allawi, a Palestinian and the Kabul bureau chief for the Qatari news agency, was arrested while journeying from the West Bank to Jordan. He was brought before an Israeli military court Tuesday and charged with belonging to the outlawed terrorist group Hamas. Allawi denies he is a member of the group.

Tunisia upholds filtering decision. According to Reporters Without Borders, "A Tunis appeal court yesterday upheld a 27 May court decision requiring the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block access to pornographic websites. ATI said it would refer the case to the country's highest appeal court because it did not have the 'financial and technical resources' to create the filtering and censorship system needed to implement the ruling."

Filtering regimes start, with few exceptions, with the "protection" of innocent eyes against the scourge of pornography. It never, ever stops there. (There is, after all, so much to protect you from.)

Iranian blogger beaten in prison. Hossein Maleki Ronaghi was beaten by a guard "after writing a letter to Iran's judicary authorities." He required hospitalization afterward. He is serving a 15-year sentence.

International investigation panel closes up shop in Bahrain. The international Bahrain Commission of Inquiry, an international group investigating the violence during Bahrain's protests, has shuttered its offices and hit the road "after angry crowds scuffled with staff members following reports that government officials would be cleared of committing abuses against protesters seeking greater rights."

Argentina blocks websites. The country's judiciary blocked leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com, sites which "linked to allegedly leaked emails from members of the Argentine government." The effect was to inspire the creation of myriad mirror sites to distribute the material.

Anonymous, Telecomix take on Syrian Cyber Army. Declaring an #OpSyria, the groups are targeting the official pro-government computer hackers as well as the suppliers of censorship equipment to the country's violent ruling clique.

Given how deeply social media is twined into contemporary political action, this makes certain types of online actions as illegal in Israel as they are in non-democratic countries.

"Simply put, the law seeks to penalize those who call for boycotting Israel, the settlements, or anyone related to the occupation. If a person, for example, calls for a boycott of academic institutions that participate in the occupation, he could be sued in civil court, and ordered to pay compensation. If a company agrees not to purchase products manufactured in the settlements, it could be barred from government contracts. If an NGO joins the global BDS call, it could be stripped of its non-profit status, and compelled to pay taxes as if it was a commercial firm."

Although boycotts may be conceived of as a tool of those outside Israel to force a change in the country's actions regarding Palestinians, it is, internally, considered a huge obstacle to freedom of speech. Given the increasing movement toward domestic protests against Palestinian policy in Israel, it seems much more likely to effect Israelis than anyone else. It is a huge wrong turn for Israel.

Belarus protestors arrested due to social media. Last week, Belorussian police arrested 200 people in the capital alone for protesting the neo-Stalinist regime. They were able to arrest so many so quickly because this protest is known as "Revolution Through Social Networks." For five weeks, organizers have arranged flash mobs via social networking sites.

Now, those same organizers are faced with the challenge of a police force watching, and sometimes shutting down, the popular sites they have been using. The police have also engaged in disinformation on sites like Twitter, a common tactic of repressive regimes who've woken up to the use of social media by political opponents. They are hoping a combination of more distributed calls for physical protests, along with "older" tech (filming police brutality and distributing it via DVD) will help continue the momentum and attract less techie dissidents to the cause.

Egypt resurrects Information Ministry. In a scene from a mummy movie, Egypt, largely controlled by the military in the wake of Mubarak's departure, has brought the notorious Information Ministry back to life. Though considered a force for change during the protests which chased the long-term president and his clique from power, the military is now regarded by many to be the primary obstacle to reform in the country. It has taken on a rigid and repressive posture it did not seem to have before. The military courts have sentenced a blogger to prison time and remanded many others for interrogation.

The Information Ministry was abolished in February. Now, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi has brought it back and appointed Osama Heikal, former editor-in-chief of the Al-Wafd newspaper, as its minister. Tantawi asked Heikal to "reorganize the Egyptian media and draw up a plan that addresses all the shortcomings that came from abolishing the post of minister of information."

Another blow to the possibilities of change in Egypt. Not a terminal one, but far from trivial.

U.A.E. blogger's trial to resume next week. Ahmed Mansour, a blogger who was arrested in April, went to his initial trial session on June 14. He returns next week. Mansour had created a petition calling for democratic reform in the autocratic emirates.

Tel Aviv photo by ZeHawk, Israel protest photo by Neta

The "Dimona complex" located in the southern Negev desert in Israel, where that country is said to have centered its nuclear weapons program, may for two years have been the proving ground for Stuxnet as well.

Recently, both the U.S. Secretary of State and the head of Israel's Mossad spy agency have stated that Stuxnet has pushed Iran's full nuclear capability start date back several years. The clean-up of the virus, replacement of damaged parts on the centrifuges and other machinery and the hardening of the system against future viral attacks will add as many as three years to the program's birthdate.

At Dimona, says the Times, "Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran's at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium." It's a lot easier to target a virus at a piece of machinery if you've got the machinery to hand, goes the argument.

Among additional evidence that this was a U.S.-Israel attack:

• Idaho National Laboratory conducted tests of Siemens' weaknesses for the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the U.S. nuclear program (the machinery Stuxnet targeted was manufactured in part by Siemens)
• In January of 2009, then-President Bush "authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran's major enrichment center"
• US succeeded in stopping an April 2009 delivery of Siemens controllers to Iran, according to several Wikileaks-released cables

The Times' investigation hardly proves conclusively that Stuxnet was a U.S.-Israel collaboration, but it does strongly suggest it. It will be interesting to find out if future diplomatic cable releases shed any further light on it.

Dimona cliff photo by Hanan Cohen | Natanz photo from OpenDemocracy

Gaza Youth are a group from the Strip who have taken Facebook by storm, printing a manifesto that is so uncompromising and so full of rejection not just for Israeli occupiers but the bullies and schnorrers in their own communities that reading it is like coming up for air.

GYBO

Here's an excerpt from their manifesto. If you're of a sensitive disposition, well, you could probably insert your name in there somewhere.

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16's breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world."

These aren't witless stone-throwers or kids who just want to rage. "We do not want to hate," they say, "we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask? "

They're also smart about how they use social media to get their message out. (Their message, not the creaking, self-defeating message of their bankrupt elders.) Although they also have a blog, their primary online presence is their Facebook page, which is "liked" by almost 12,000 people so far.

As of today, however, Facebook has blocked them from uploading anything more! (Anyone who thinks social media is free by its very nature needs to have their head examined.)

"Pls consider supporting us by taking one or more of the following actions:

1) Promoting our manifesto by sharing it on your profile on Facebook
2) Sending an email to your friends asking them to like our page FB
3) Translating the manifesto to your language and sending it to us (we have it in Arabic, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Estonian)
4) Sending the manifesto to journalists in your country
5) Making organizations in your countries that are concerned with the Palestinian issue and/or youth rights know about our existence
6) Posting links about violation of youth's rights in Gaza on our wall
7) Suggesting us ideas for reaching out to a greater number of people"

Angry Youth

The Brookings Institution describes this group:

"These young men and women often use the Internet and other channels of political discourse to publicly express their critical views. Their hyper-nationalistic and often anti-American sentiments, which first emerged in the late 1990s and are widely disseminated today, stand in sharp contrast to a generation of Chinese youth just 20 years ago."

In his keynote to a Brookings conference on this topic, Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Microsoft Research Asia and founding president of Google China, described them much more completely. He has reservations about the term "angry" (as in "enraged") and prefers to highlight their passionate engagement and impatience; he also credits them with patriotism but disagrees with characterizing them as "nationalistic."

"(W)hen we talk about angry youth, I think we're talking about post- 80's, people born after 1980, that they had access to the internet, and that they often use it to vent their frustrations and that frustration often comes from either their patriotism or their desire to seek which is righteous, fair, true, and transparent. They care about social issues. They're concerned, and they feel they need to be outspoken to have their voices heard, and they often use the internet to gain knowledge and to have their voice heard."

What have angry youth done?

• Descried plagiarism among academics and set up a website to battle it
• Created a help-and-resource platform to assist people and communities crushed by the Chengdu earthquake
• Created a site to list earthquake donor levels among China's rich
• Banded together against the high-powered manager of a multinational who abused his young secretary and got him fired

These were not all positive, as any anonymous group can do things that no sensible person would do in the light of day. They set up a website to help others harass a husband whose wife committed suicide, as well as his lover and their families. They also promoted the rumor that a chain of foreign stores, Carrefour, supported Tibetan independence. People boycotted and protested and the store had to shut down countrywide until the furor died down.

Compare and Contrast

Although China is huge and Palestine small and the fenqing less coherent as a group than GYBO, both share a number of things in common. Although they love their people and their country, they're fed up with what's been done to it. They're not just at their wits end with "the enemy" but with those who have set themselves up as "the opposition." They're suspicious of authority in general. They're devoted to the truth: finding it, embracing it and sharing it, largely online. They're technically literate and impatient with common wisdom. They're young, energetic and growing.

Anyone who ignores or minimizes these groups does so at their peril. These kids are going to either rule the world or wind up in a host of unmarked graves. Anyone who believes in their right "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" will want to step up and get their backs.

But the members of these groups also have a part to play in ensuring they go forward in a way that ensures they don't self-destruct. The American writer Delmore Schwartz famously said, "in dreams begin responsibilities." The responsibilities of the youth in these groups is to carry the reason, empathy and desire for truth forward, even as they are powered by their anger and impatience, to translate their vision to those who aren't part of the digital world even as they acknowledge the social Web's help in defining those ideas. (Lord, I'm André Gide over here.)

These aren't the only groups like this, of course. Nor are Palestine and China the only countries with such groups. So, if you're a part of one, or know of one, in another place, speak up in the comments.

Gaza photo by Free Gaza | China photo by Irish Typepad | Armendian photo from Wikimedia Commons | other sources: Barking Robot

The group works in Israel toward establishing freedom of movement for Palestinians. The blockade by the Israeli government of the Gaza Strip is an object lesson in what they believe is wrong with current Israeli policy. So to express the trials of impinged movement they have leveraged game dynamics to share the experience.

Gilad Baker, the game's chief animator, explained the goal of the game.

"We faced a challenge - how to make military documents accessible to the public. Our solution was to integrate them into the personal stories of real people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, to help people understand the policy".

The three character types are confronted with different obstacles and required to get very creative in surmounting them. The Gazan student has to employ a flying hat to convince a military mailbox to examine her request to study at a West Bank University. The West Bank family man enters play by being catapulted from a bench beside his home in the West Bank into Gaza and has to get back. The Gazan businessman has to avoid or neutralize giant coins that threaten the ice cream factory he is trying to open in the West Bank.

According to Palestine Notes, the characters were composites based on real people.

"The student is based in part on the story of Berlanty Azzam, the 22-year-old Bethlehem University student from Gaza who was seized by Israeli soldiers and removed to Gaza just two months before completing her degree."

Reflecting the membership of the nonprofit and the reality of the people involved in the real-world conflicts the game describes, the game can be played in Arabic, Hebrew or English.

Moses Kahlon, the Minister of Communications, announced the lift in a press release. The original decision to ban the iPad was made without the minister's knowledge, inspiring a governmental squabblefest in Israel.

The Ministry is allowing the importation of only one iPad per person.There is no information explaining this restriction in the press release. If there is no risk, it does not immediately make sense.

"(T)he Communications Ministry has blocked the import of iPads to Israel, and the customs authority has been directed to confiscate them," wrote Bar Ben Ari and Zohar Blumenkrantz.

The ban appears not so much to be the result of a coherent technical decision as a nutcluster of bureaucratic infighting.

"The head of customs at Ben-Gurion International Airport said yesterday they have confiscated 10 iPads, including those their owners declared," Haaretz reported. The owners are being charged a fee for every day their iPads are held in a government warehouse and the government is refusing to say whether the iPads will be approved or how they will need to be altered to conform with Israeli law.

"Paging Captain Yossarian. Paging Captain John Yossarian to the customs authority, please."

Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next?

Traffic shaping is a practice sometimes used by some ISPs to discourage the use of certain applications. A couple of years ago, Comcast caught some heat from users and media for filtering user traffic when torrent files were being downloaded, even causing some to speculate that the ISP was violating U.S. law by prohibiting this traffic. Eventually, Comcast did strike a deal with BitTorrent to allow protocol-agnostic traffic management, but only after the sparring had been brought to the attention of the Federal Communications Commission.

It's currently unclear whether Israeli ISPs are filtering traffic due to piracy concerns or simple due to bandwidth concerns, as shared files can often amount to multi-gigabyte, hours-long downloads. However, traffic-shaping that blocks P2P protocols can also apply to VoIP calls, IM clients and other applications. Although P2P traffic is associated with illegal downloads, nothing about the protocols themselves is inherently illegal. "The element common to all P2P services," reads the Israeli report, "is the lack of economical benefit to the ISP."

Klinger noted that although complaints have been brought to media outlets and ISPs since 2007, the ISPs have typically ignored these criticisms. Netvision and Internet Zahav were the two ISPs determined by this research to be blocking file-sharing traffic. Bezeq International was the third ISP investigated. Although Bezeq was cleared by this particular investigation, a plug-in introduced last year from popular bittorrent client Vuze shows that this ISP, too, throttles and disrupts file-sharing network traffic.

In response to the findings presented by Ynet and Klinger, all three of the investigated ISPs gave typically canned responses claiming to offer users excellent surfing experiences. Israeli Communications Ministry rep Dr. Yechiel Shabi told Ynet, "The research materials relayed to us paint a picture which arouses the need for thorough examination. After we become familiar with the study's findings, we shall consider the need for interference, supervision or regulation of the matter."

So, while we wait to see what results this report will yield in Israel, we are left to ponder the perturbing question: Where will traffic-shaping pop up next to prevent P2P activity? Take another look at the findings from Vuze's traffic-monitoring plug-in. You'll see that ISPs around the world - including Verizon, BellSouth, AOL, AT&T, Charter, Road Runner and ISPs in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, the UK and the Middle East, to name a few locations - are already interrupting traffic.

Vuze's researched was released in April 2008; in August, the FCC declared that ISPs should not be allowed to target and interrupt P2P applications. Still, suspicious Americans and other users around the world should consider using a tool such as the EFF's Switzerland to determine whether torrent downloads and VoIP calls are being interrupted by their ISP.

Do Israeli or other ISPs have the right or the moral imperative to throttle traffic in this manner? Do they have the need or right to examine the applications, files, and protocols being employed by users on their networks? Or do ISPs around the globe need to read the wiki on net neutrality and get their act together? Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments.

There was a myth that Israelis were not very good at creating consumer-facing products. Notwithstanding their creation of ICQ, Israelis were known as engineers and researchers who did well within the confines of a lab but not so well when reaching out to end consumers. Over the last couple of years, though, the high-tech industry in Israel has gone through dramatic changes.

The stars of the Israeli tech scene were once companies like Comverse and Amdocs. Now, we're seeing an influx of great Web 2.0 media and social startups, such as:

• FoxyTunes, the Firefox plugin that allows users to control iTunes directly from their browser, and which was acquired by Yahoo for a reported $30 million;
• MyHeritage , the world's largest family network, which has already documented over 330 million family members and is reportedly bringing in some of the highest revenue of any Israeli Web startup;
• Kaltura, an open-source platform for the creation and consumption of rich-media Web applications, whose clients include Wikipedia, Universal Studios, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi.

So, what's in store for Israel's startup world?

Israel succeeds by blending the old with the new. The country will continue to exploit its innate talent for research and development and continue to make inroads with social media applications, all the while sticking to intensive, customer-driven products.

A few Israeli newborns to keep your eyes on:

• SimilarWeb, an intelligent add-on that sits in your browser and provides easy access to websites with similar content;
• Boxee, a cross-platform freeware media center with social networking features and a 10-foot user interface design for the living-room TV;
• CamSpace, a new interface for computer games that uses innovative computer vision technology that allows everyone with a webcam to play games Wii-style;
• Vetrina's, a virtual window-shopping platform that transforms the online shopping experience.

The glue holding this generation of Israeli startups together is that while the companies are now all consumer- and media-related, they have a more technological edge than can be found in companies elsewhere. You can take the engineers out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the engineers.

Guest author Ayelet Noff is one of Israel's most renowned bloggers. She is also the founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a full consultancy firm whose mission is to help brands understand how to use social media tools (social networks, the blogosphere, and social software) effectively in order to carry their messages across the globe.

The pocket sized MiFi is capable of connecting users and devices

In addition to being a portable Internet hotspot, the EVDO blog notes that the MiFi has an onboard Linux processor capable of hosting software applications and additional content storage capabilities via MicroSD.

Novatel claims the internal battery will provide over forty hours standby and up to four hours of active use on a single charge, and that certain configurations will support applications like auto VPN, automatic syncing of e-mail and remote management capabilities.

The MiFi will be available in the first quarter of 2009 through a variety of retail outlets and Engadget reports the MiFi should be priced under $300.