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Submission + - Why haven't we moved to PKI based voting yet? 17

Submitted by t0qer
t0qer writes: Hello Slashdot, Given the current state of affairs with elections, why haven't we gone to an open source, PKI based voting system? SSL.com has a pretty interesting piece on using PKI in voting. There's also a github project that leverages PKI and IBM blockchain technology.
Looking all the way back to the 2000 election with Gore, it just seems like paper at this point has outlived its secureness. A closed sourced voting system doesn't really seem like the kind of thing slashdot would really get behind. (As a side note, my very introduction to the world of OSS came from this site) I'm fairly well versed in PKI technology, and quoting this site, it would take traditional computers 300 Trillion years to break RSA-2048 for a single vote. I just don't understand why the US can demand countries it "Democratizes" into using these types of voting systems, but we do not.

Submission + - MIT Libraries ends Elsevier negotiations (mit.edu)

Submitted by gam
gam writes: Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.

Submission + - Anti-Racism Sites Hit By Wave of Cyberattacks (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cyber-attacks against anti-racism organizations shot up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a leading provider of protection services says. Cloudflare, which blocks attacks designed to knock websites offline, says advocacy groups in general saw attacks increase 1,120-fold. Mr Floyd's death, in police custody, has sparked nationwide civil unrest in the US. Government and military websites also saw a notable increase in attacks. Cloudflare says that after Mr Floyd's death and the ensuing violent clashes between police and protesters, it saw a noticeable jump in the amount of requests it blocked — an extra 19 billion (17%) from the corresponding weekend the previous month. That equates to an extra 110,000 blocked requests every second, it said.

The problem was particularly acute for certain types of organizations. One single website belonging to an unnamed advocacy group dealt with 20,000 requests a second. Anti-racism groups which belong to Cloudflare's free program for at-risk organizations saw a large surge in the past week, from near-zero to more than 120 million blocked requests. Attacks on government and military websites were also up — by 1.8 and 3.8 times respectively.

Submission + - Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning (bbc.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: A post by US President Donald Trump has been given a fact-check label by Twitter for the first time. Mr Trump tweeted, without providing evidence: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent." Twitter put a warning label in the post and linked to a page that described the claims as "unsubstantiated". President Trump responded by tweeting again, saying the social media giant "is completely stifling free speech".

The notification on Mr Trump's tweet shows a blue exclamation mark and a link suggesting readers "get the facts about mail-in ballots". It directs users to a page on which Mr Trump's claims are described as "unsubstantiated", citing reporting by CNN, the Washington Post and others. The pandemic is putting pressure on US states to expand the use of postal voting because people are worried about becoming infected at polling stations.

Submission + - Flat earther meets Darwin. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Mike Hughes known for his belief in a flat earth came crashing down to earth today when his steam-powered rocket crash-landed shortly after take-off.

Hughes well-known for his belief that the Earth is flat hoped to prove his theory by going to space.

Submission + - Amazon's Ring doorbell confirmed as spyware by the EFF (eff.org) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.

An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.

Our testing, using Ring for Android version 3.21.1, revealed PII delivery to branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com and facebook.com. Every action is logged, from opening the app to how you interact with it to when it gets closed because you locked the phone. Even data such your full name and email address, timezone, screen resolution and more is collected and shared.

Submission + - SPAM: Are Cloud Services for home appliances really a good idea?

Submitted by szymon
szymon writes: The Honeywell Remote Heating System is down yet again. Honeywell of course claim it isn't (see the tweet thread, "The app is not down at the moment") but as can be seen from the many responding tweets, and my own experience, yes of course it is down. This is a pain for me personally — one of the big drivers for buying the system was that I can control it remotely. When I'm away from home, I get calls to say "could you make it a little warmer/cooler in my room please?" from family members who wouldn't be able to work out how to do it themselves (or can't be trusted not to just turn it on full and open the windows when it's too hot). Of course, while the system is down, I can do nothing. At least the heating itself keeps working, and can be adjusted in the house using the (complex and hard to use) programmer, but a whole bunch of key functionality is missing.

This situation got me thinking. I have an Amazon Ring doorbell. I have a home alarm with a RISCO alerting system. The heating is with Honeywell. My speakers are with SONOS. Hell, even my washing machine talks to something out there called "SimplyFI" (I don't even remember who makes it!). All of these systems rely on external cloud based services — and they aren't just simple subscription services like Netflix where it would be easy to swap to an alternative. No, these are pretty fundamental parts of the house, with a big investment in hardware and a high cost to change. What happens when those services fail? My house stops working! What about if one of those companies just goes bankrupt? Or if they decide arbitrarily to stop supporting the services (as recently happened with older SONOS speakers — I'm lucky to not be affected by that)?

Is it really a good idea to rely on cloud-based services for fundamental parts of our homes?
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:Require open sourcing of "abandoned" APIs? (Score 2) 133

by dexotaku (#59643308) Attached to: Smart Scale Goes Dumb As Under Armour Pulls the Plug On Connected Tech
This. So much this. (Saying this as someone who has bought hardware that was then orphaned by its makers, rendering it useless despite the fact that it would have otherwise just stayed working had they not intentionally broken it or the means to access it).
Key thing there is hopefully -API-, not the full device firmware which may contain proprietary binary blobs that you can't legally distribute.
Providing access for the API it communicates with can obviate that, can't it? All people need to be able to do is -talk- to the device, not modify it (assuming it worked properly to begin with).
Or maybe Oracle will get their way (re: JRE API lawsuit).
United States

'Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security' (wired.com) 772

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The network's furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month: Monday's split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department's inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI's handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump's campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States. The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there's conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump's dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president's enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016. Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the "deep state," had a simple message for his viewers during Fox's Monday night prime time: "Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate," he said. "It is all there in black and white, it's all there." Except they weren't right and it wasn't there. But Fox News' viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths -- they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI's investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state. John Harwood, long one of Washington's most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox's approach Monday night simply: "Lunacy." It's worse than lunacy, though. Fox's bubble reality creates a situation where it's impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News' "memory hole," as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984. The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia's Internet Research Agency or China's Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America's democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer. The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it's clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America's foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

Comment Re:Color me confused (Score 0) 21

by dexotaku (#59514720) Attached to: Cisco Outlines Silicon, Software Roadmap For Next Generation Internet
Exactly.. I keep thinking - if Americans want us to distrust Chinese companies because they might do what the world knows the USA have been doing for decades..
Why should we trust Cisco or any other American company when we know they enable the exact behaviour for the USA that they want us to worry about Huawei enabling for China? Seriously?

Submission + - China Tells Government Offices to Remove All Foreign Computers (theguardian.com) 3

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: In a tit-for-tat retaliation, China has ordered that all foreign (read American) computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports. The government directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft and mirrors attempts by Washington to limit the use of Chinese technology, as the trade war between the countries turns into a tech cold war. “Cutting off technical services to Huawei will be a real turning point in China’s overall research and development and use of domestic chips,” Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times newspaper in China, said in a social media post. “Chinese people will no longer have any illusions about the steady use of US technology.” According to documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA infiltrated Huawei and Tsinghua University.

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