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Submission + - Bill allows government to revoke Americans' passports without charges or trial (policestateusa.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would allow the government to restrict Americans' travel through the revocation of passports based upon mere suspicions of unscrupulous activity. This bill represents another dangerous step forward in the war on terror and the disintegration of American due process.

H.R. 237, the "FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization) Passport Revocation Act of 2015," will allow the U.S. Secretary of State the unchecked authority to prohibit individuals from traveling internationally. According to the bill, the Secretary may unilaterally revoke (or refuse to issue) a passport from "any individual whom the Secretary has determined has aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise helped an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189)."

The bill did not bother to define what the terms "aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise helped" actually mean, in legal terms. The power has been left open-ended so that it can mean whatever the secretary wants it to mean. Needless to say, a bill like this would be easily abused.

The travel restriction requires no presumption of innocence for the targeted individual; no explanation; no public presentation of evidence; no opportunity for a defense; no checks and balances on the power. The bill does not outline any appeals process for the targeted individual. The only stipulation is that the Secretary of State must issue a report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs — "classified or unclassified." The bill does not state that either committee can reverse the secretary's decisions.

Submission + - Apple Yanks Nest From Stores in Favor of Fussy HomeKit (programmableweb.com)

Submitted by linkchaos
linkchaos writes: Late Thursday, news broke that Apple had fully removed Nest products from its retail stores and website. Nest, now owned by Google, includes the Nest camera, thermostat and smoke detector. All three are connected devices for the home that can be controlled via smartphone apps. We're talking about the Internet of Things here, folks, and Nest's products have been popular as long as they've been in the market.

Submission + - Notepad++ Leaves SourceForge (notepad-plus-plus.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SourceForge was a good place; unfortunately, sometimes good places don't last.

Recently SF hijacked its hosted projects to distribute their wrapped crapware:

        SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows' account, wraps installer in bundle-pushing adware
        Black “mirror”: SourceForge has now taken over Nmap audit tool project
        What happened to Sourceforge? The full story between VLC and Sourceforge

Obviously, the paid component per installation system is one of their important income generating scams. I would be fine with that, if they were the actual owners of the legitimate software. The real problem is, they are polluting these open source software installations for the purpose of filling their pockets by this scam, and worst of all, without even notifying the authors/creators of this software, while the creators are struggling against such parasitic software in order to keep their installers cleaner and safer.

Such a shameless policy should be condemned, and the Notepad++ project will move entirely out of SourceForge.

I humbly request that Notepad++ users not encourage such scams, and educate others not to download any software from SourceForge. I request as well that the project owners on SourceForge move out of SourceForge, in order to preserve the purpose of the Open Source Community and encourage the works of true authors/creators.

Submission + - How Flight Tracking Works: A Global Network Of Volunteers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If a website can show the flight path and all those little yellow planes in real time, how can they not know where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went down? Answering that involves understanding a little about how flight-tracking sites work, where they get their data, and the limitations of existing technologies. It also involves appreciating a relatively new approach that the two large flight-tracking companies, Texas-based FlightAware and Sweden-based Flightradar24 are rushing to expand, a global sensor system known as ADS-B, which broadcasts updates of aircraft GPS data in real time. ADS-B is slowly superseding the ground-based radar systems that have been used for decades, becoming central not only to flight tracking but also to the future of flight safety. And it's powered, in part, by thousands of dedicated aviation hobbyists around the globe.

Submission + - NASA's Abandoned Launch Facilities

Submitted by trazom28
trazom28 writes: I ran across an interesting slideshow of NASA's abandoned launch facilities. Interesting piece of scientific history. It is described as images from "photographer Roland Miller's upcoming book, 'Abandoned in Place, titled' "Abandoned Space Graveyard Photos". ‘Abandoned in Place’ is a visual study of the deactivated launch and research facilities that played an essential role in early American space exploration."

Submission + - When Social Betrayal Breaks Your Logins 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What do you do when the answers to your security questions are known by someone who dislikes you, such as a stalker or an ex-partner? It's getting hard to remember some of the more obscure factoids about my own life, like where I ate my first reuben sandwich, or things that might change over time, like my favorite TV show. Is it just me or is this a ridiculous security hole? Anyone have good suggestions for workarounds when I'm signing up for a new site?

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Submission + - DOJ Offers $3 Million Reward for Gameover Zeus Botnet Suspect (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of State’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program announced on Tuesday that they are offering a $3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a Russian man suspected of having served as an administrator for the destructive Gameover Zeus botnet. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev is charged in the U.S. with several crimes related to Gameover Zeus, which targeted banking credentials and other personal information over a two-year period.

Submission + - New multi-core Raspberry Pi board launches. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by MicroHex
MicroHex writes: Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. I'm sure there will be more info available on Monday.

Submission + - I'm Done With Twitter 1

Submitted by PainMeds
PainMeds writes: Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has abandoned Twitter, citing intentional ignoring of repeated and widespread abuse complaints involving criminal threatening, death threats, and a myriad of other abuses of the service to harass users. "Twitter’s response was not only insufficient, but downright disgusting." ... "I even managed to find a couple still-live tweets containing death threats. Twitter will make excuses until there are no more to make, and then they will just stop talking to you altogether." Zdziarski also provides a number of tips for responding to such threats, having been through it himself, including contacting the police to alert them of possible SWAT attempts, and planning for good disaster recovery. "If I get hacked some day, I just don’t care You should be this confident – not in your security, but in your disaster recovery. "

Submission + - Computer chess created in 487 bytes, breaks 32-year-old record (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The record for smallest computer implementation of chess on any platform was held by 1K ZX Chess, which saw a release back in 1983 for the Sinclair ZX81. It uses just 672 bytes of memory, and includes most chess rules as well as a computer component to play against.

The record held by 1K ZX Chess for the past 32 years has just been beaten this week by the demoscene group Red Sector Inc. They have implemented a fully-playable version of chess called BootChess in just 487 bytes.

Submission + - Sloppy File Permissions Make Red Star Vulnerable

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, the official Linux distro of North Korea, which recently found its way onto torrents and various download sites in form of an ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like commercial operating systems (currently OS X, earlier versions mimicked the Windows GUI). Hackers are also poking Red Star for security vulnerabilities. An pseudonymous researcher noted in a post to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, that the OS has one significant security hole: Red Star 3.0 ships with a world-writeable udev rule file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules (originally designed for HP LaserJet 1000 series printers) which can be modified to include RUN+= arguments executing arbitrary commands as root by Udev. In the post he also mentions how the older Red Star 2.0 shipped with another schoolboy mistake: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit was world-writeable.

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