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Submission + - Google Vault saves every Gmail draft you've ever written (scmagazine.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Every variant of every draft email an employee has written in Gmail can be made available to businesses thanks to a little known forensics feature called Google Apps Vault.
The subscription feature retained all emails written, sent and received by staff within organisations that use Google's Apps and made them accessible without the need for staff Google credentials.

Comment Re:Logistically impractical (Score 3, Informative) 621

by pregister (#43638533) Attached to: Former FBI Agent: All Digital Communications Stored By US Gov't

From what I've read, the legal argument against this being an illegal search is that the entire dataset isn't searched, it is stored. They store the communications. When they want access to the data on a particular person they get a search warrant to access the stored data. I don't agree with that, but that seems to be the theory.

Here is a short video on an NSA whistleblower about the Utah datacenter and the types of things they can do with that much data.

Submission + - 'Focus Aware Marketing' Startup Helped Identify The Boston Bombers (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: There was lots of buzz this week about how Redditors and 4Chan were crowdsourcing the identity of the Boston Marathon bombers. In the end though, those efforts didn't amount to much. Sure, the collective eyeballing and Google dorking of the Internet masses yielded some clues — once images of the bombers had been released. Folks identified the brand of clothing worn by the suspects, as well as new and unseen photos of the two at the scene of the bombing.

Mostly, though, they sowed chaos and confusion, accelerating the spread of inaccurate information and fingering innocent spectators as possible bombers. None of the “suspects” singled out by crowdsourced analysis as “suspicious” are believed to have played a role in the attack.

So how did authorities pick out the two bombers to begin with? That was accomplished, in no small part, with technology by the startup firm CrowdOptic (http://crowdoptic.com), a purveyor of what it describes as “focus-based services.”

CrowdOptic's software correlates geospatial and compass data from smart devices and combine that with photos and other metadata (i.e.photo EXIF information) associated with images. Built in analytics then use triangulation and other algorithms to identify “points of focus” in a crowd.
“Send me 100k images of the Super Bowl and in 1 second (of) server time I can send you the picture/s containing (for example) the halftime show wardrobe malfunction representing the most views,” CEO Jon Fisher told The Security Ledger back in October.

With the Boston bombings, CrowdOptic’s technology played a key role in helping authorities to sift through the photo evidence and metadata collected from the bombing scene. (http://technorati.com/technology/article/crowdsourcing-approach-leads-to-arrest-of/) In that situation, the bombs’ locations acted as a magnet for all other photos containing bomb location in the photographs of the area before and after the explosions. CrowdOptic’s technology was used to piece together that visual information and give investigators a time lapse not just of the scene, but of people who could have captured an image of the points of interest – even from some distance. That’s information that wouldn’t show up just by collecting geospatial data of those around the bombing site at the time of the blast. That, in turn, quickly revealed the figures of the alleged bombers: Dzhokhor A. Tsarnaev, 19 and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26.

Comment Re:Open Source information? (Score 1) 346

by pregister (#42332021) Attached to: Hacker Behind Leaked Nude Celebrity Photos Gets 10 Years

On a lot of email providers have security questions. Click the handy "I forgot my password" link and they ask

1) Mother's Maiden Name
2) FIrst Pet
3) Name of your high school

or whatever other type of information that would be reasonably difficult to find out WITHOUT the internet but is trivial with it, even for non celebrities. For celebrities...

Comment Re:Ugh (Score 3, Insightful) 597

by pregister (#42217347) Attached to: RMS Speaks Out Against Ubuntu

Right. The freedom to modify. The freedom to have the code so you can change the software to do things you want and to stop doing the things you don't want. As long as THAT freedom is there, this is a side issue.

Do I want my local searches going to the net? Nope. Still isn't a free software issue. RMS is arguing from an ideological point of view...but its not the FSF's main ideological point of view.

Comment Re:Sounds like American textbooks (Score 2) 409

by pregister (#42010015) Attached to: Indian School Textbook Says Meat-Eaters Lie and Commit Sex Crimes

This is 2012, not the early 1970s. I don't know a single racist person that is not over 70 years old and retired. Those men don't make decisions anymore anyways, and their ideals are marginalized. Everybody else I know is actually quite progressive to use that ridiculous term, and does not make decisions like that. I operate in diverse environments, where in fact, I am the only person that does not speak multiple languages.

Well, there is your disconnect right there. The people you hang around with...the diverse ones who speak multiple languages...those are the people the racists are racist against. They're probably not so hot on you, either, the racists. Association, and all...

Comment Re:India (Score 1) 409

by pregister (#42009975) Attached to: Indian School Textbook Says Meat-Eaters Lie and Commit Sex Crimes

Those who speak something other than English as a second language are all-too-well aware of the challenge. Just imagine how you would sound trying to order a meal in a foreign land.

I would sound inexplicably slow and unreasonably loud. Probably mostly in English. I guess it is not inexplicable, I'm American.

Comment Re:PETA agrees! (Score 1) 409

by pregister (#42009941) Attached to: Indian School Textbook Says Meat-Eaters Lie and Commit Sex Crimes

PETA doesn't believe in people period, hell they labeled fish as "sea kittens" to try to get people not to eat them, and I have even seen a PETA person arguing against FLU shots because the flu is "alive".

The Jains would likely agree. Beliefs in the 'sanctity of life', for lack of a better term, typically have a level of life they respect. For a lot of religions, its a fetus. For a lot of PETA followers its animal life. The problem is you usually end up having to defend where you decide to draw the line and there don't seem to be any scientific arguments for a particular view, it comes down to whatever your faith or your gut or your conditioning tells you. Unless you refuse to draw the line...and then you get a virus with a right to life. One way off of a slippery slope is to slide all the way to the bottom. On a toboggan. With bells on.

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