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Submission + - UK communications law could be used to spy on physical mail (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that the UK's Draft Communications Bill includes a provision which could be used to force the Royal Mail and other mail carriers to retain data on all physical mail passing through their networks. The law could be used to force carriers to maintain a database of any data written on the outside of an envelope or package which could be accessed by government bodies at will.
Such data could include sender, recipient and type of mail (and, consequentially, the entire contents of a postcard). It would provide a physical analog of the recently proposed internet surveillance laws.
The Home Office claims that it has no current plans to enforce the law.

Submission + - Remotly recording conversations at Canadian airports (edmontonjournal.com)

Submitted by Jazari
Jazari writes: Careful what you say when traveling, since the authorities will soon be able to zoom in on your conversations and record them for an indefinite amount of time. The story is about Canada, but I see no reason to think that this capability will not soon be installed in most places (if it's not already).
Biotech

Submission + - Computers are better than humans at genomics? (bytesizebio.net)

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: Sequencing the genome of an organism is not the end of a discovery process; rather, it is a beginning. It's the equivalent of discovering a book whose words (genes) are there, but their meaning is yet unknown. Biocurators are the people who annotate genes — find out what they do — through literature search and the supervised use of computational techniques. A recent study published in PLoS Computational Biology shows that biocurators probably perform no better than fully automated computational methods used to annotate genes. It is not clear whether this is because the software is of high quality, or both curators and software need to improve their performance. The author of this blog post uses the concept of the uncanny valley to explain this recent discovery and what it means to both life science and artificial intelligence.
Government

Submission + - Zero-Day exploit market sells mostly to US government (forbes.com)

Submitted by
mpol
mpol writes: "Forbes magazine published a profile of French exploit-selling firm Vupen last April. Now there's a blog article about a broker from South Africa, complete with a price-list of zero-day exploits and their platform. iOS is the highest valued here.
The article also claims most exploits are being sold to agencies of the US government.
It does raise a concern though. What if black-hats got more serious, and the US government would become a victim. When shit hits the fan, how will they react."
Space

Submission + - Swedes Discover Spherical Object Embedded in Baltic Sea Floor (www.cbc.ca) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Swedish sea scavengers revealed a curious discovery — a disc-shaped object, roughly 60 metres in diameter, and rising about 4 metres out of the seabed, with a 400-metre trail leading to its position.
A lack of detailed photographs has caused speculation that this may be nothing more than a hoax, or information campaign, but there is a promise of more details, from the crew, as they uncover their find with better equipment.
Space

Submission + - It's Baaack! XB-37B finally lands. (af.mil)

Submitted by ColdWetDog
ColdWetDog writes: The US Air Force / DARPA 'baby shuttle', the Boeing built XB-37B has just landed after 469 days in orbit. No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days other than 'because we could'.

I, for one, welcome our long duration, unmanned orbital overlords.

Comment Re:Not content (Score 1) 312

by frostilicus2 (#40334269) Attached to: Online Activities To Be Recorded By UK ISPs
Two problems: (i) feature creep (ii) Traffic analysis is a well developed field and logs can be easily data-mined.
Once you have access to the logs, you're eventually going to start storing them. Maybe not now, but how about in 10 years? Sooner or later, another attack will occur and, of course, existing powers will be deemed insufficient. Next step: store the logs, combine them with other existing databases and start to data-mine them. Given that the hardware and legislation are in place, this will be an almost trivial step.
Then you'll have a algorithm performing automated traffic analysis: who connects to who? Is the other person vaguely suspicious? Are they communicating in a suspicious way? Perhaps deep packet inspection will also be used and keyword scanning will be used (as it is in the USA). There's a large immigrant population in the UK. How many of those who have been born into the UK and raised in its culture are going to produce false leads based on routinely examining their communications data and then having the algorithm worry when it notices that their last name sounds foreign? Computers are dumb but people are always happy to put their faith in a black box. How many will be wrongly interrogated? How many will have undue suspicion placed upon them? Maybe the system flags suspects with a 1% false positive rate. There are 1.2 million people of Pakistani origin living in the UK so potentially you have 12 000 false suspects. That's a lot of people to investigate and a lot of people who will potentially experience a major disruption to their life.
Security

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is HTTPS snooping becoming more acceptable? 4

Submitted by
jez9999
jez9999 writes: "I recently worked for a relatively large company that imposed so-called transparent HTTPS proxying on their network. In practice, what this means is that they allow you to use HTTPS through their network, but it must be proxied through their server and their server must be trusted as a root CA. They were using the Cisco IronPort device to do this. The "transparency" seems to come from the fact that they tend to install their root CA into Internet Explorer's certificate store, so IE won't actually warn you that your HTTPS traffic may be being snooped on (nor will any other browser that uses IE's cert store, like Chrome). Is this a reasonable policy? Is it worth leaving a job over? Should it even be legal? It seems to me rather mad to go to huge effort to create a secure channel of communication for important data like online banking, transactions, and passwords, and then to just effectively hand over the keys to your employer. Or am I overreacting?"

Comment Re:Mixed feelings ... (Score 1) 312

by frostilicus2 (#40330577) Attached to: Online Activities To Be Recorded By UK ISPs
Most people are politically apathetic. Half of those who aren't politically apathetic aren't willing to think very hard and become anti-intellectual populists (tea party et al) and the half that are willing to think find that most of the apathetic population don't understand them (the other half can't be bothered to understand them) as they haven't been paying close attention to the potentially complex political ideas. What can be done? People say that they're not apathetic: they get angry and demand lower taxes, but how many can truthfully claim to be involved? How many understand why it's hard to provide lower taxes? How many genuinely understand that some economic suffering, say, might be completely unavoidable? How many understand that the government isn't the source of all good?

Result:
Majority of Population: "Down with pedos! Down with terrorists! Down with risk!"
Government: "Time to monitor your internet"

Comment Re:Mixed feelings ... (Score 1) 312

by frostilicus2 (#40330467) Attached to: Online Activities To Be Recorded By UK ISPs
"They are responsible for enforcing the law and creating an effective justice system"
Firstly accept risk: supervise you kids and accept that it is not impossible for you be killed by a madman. Perhaps the individual should take some responsibility for their own protection and entrust less of it to the warm bosom of the government.
Secondly accept that if you decide to give a government huge amounts of powerful you must also watch to see that they do not misuse their power. If they ever did misuse their power, have you already given them so much that you are unable to do anything about it?

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