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Submission + - True Stories by Methamphetamine: Carthage Missouri (28SEP14) (carthagepress.com)

Submitted by sckirklan
sckirklan writes: Original Source

According to a sworn statement from CPD investigators, the victim told police that earlier on Tuesday he was given $80 to buy drugs, but the seller gave him fake drugs and he didn't figure that out until after the sale. He couldn't find the person who sold him the fakes and couldn't find drugs to replace the fakes, then he started receiving threatening text messages from a phone number he was not familiar with saying he owed that person $80 and needed to pay or they would have their sons find him.

Submission + - Google and NASA are getting a new quantum computer (theverge.com)

Submitted by sckirklan
sckirklan writes:

The famous Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is getting some powerful new hardware. A joint project between Google, NASA, and the Universities Space Research Association, the Quantum AI Lab today announced a multi-year agreement to install a D-Wave 2X, a state-of-the-art quantum processor released earlier this year. With over 1,000 qubits, the machine is the most powerful computer of its kind, and will be put to work tackling difficult optimization problems for both Google and NASA.

Submission + - Quantum Computing Kills Encryption (hackaday.com)

Submitted by szczys
szczys writes: Quantum computers are going to happen and in the near future too: 10-30 years away. When the quantum computing revolution does take hold, almost all of our currently known encryption techniques will be void. The doom and gloom of this isn't that encryption will be non-existant, one would assume that better computers will bring with them better encryption algorithms. What is chilling about this revelation is that our data is already being harvested and archived in various ways. What you think is encrypted safely today may become an open book tomorrow. Elliot Williams makes a great point:

Anyone storing your (or your government’s) data now will likely be able to read it when today’s toddler is enrolling in college.

Submission + - Uber raided by Dutch authorities, seen as "criminal organization" (www.rtlz.nl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Uber offices in Amsterdam, the Netherlands have been raided by Dutch authorities, as reported by several local media sources (here in dutch or google-translated). This follows intimidatory deterrence practices in that country, with Uber drivers being fined in the past months, and fresh allegations that the company would act as a "criminal organization" by offering a platform for taxi rides without license (read: without the authorities earning money from the practice). Time to leave the Netherlands and move your tech-company European offices elsewhere?

Submission + - How the FBI Hacks around Encryption (theintercept.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: To hear FBI Director James Comey tell it, strong encryption stops law enforcement dead in its tracks by letting terrorists, kidnappers and rapists communicate in complete secrecy. But that’s just not true. In the rare cases in which an investigation may initially appear to be blocked by encryption — and so far, the FBI has yet to identify a single one — the government has a Plan B: it’s called hacking.

Hacking — just like kicking down a door and looking through someone’s stuff — is a perfectly legal tactic for law enforcement officers, provided they have a warrant. And law enforcement officials have, over the years, learned many ways to install viruses, Trojan horses, and other forms of malicious code onto suspects’ devices. Doing so gives them the same access the suspects have to communications — before they’ve been encrypted, or after they’ve been unencrypted.

Submission + - IoT In The Warehouse - How Amazon's Robots Move Everything Around

Submitted by dkatana
dkatana writes: Amazon's drones have a long way to become reality, but the real magic of the Internet of Things (IoT) is already happening at Amazon's vast fulfillment warehouses in the US.

Amazon runs a fleet of thousands of small robots moving storage pods around so orders can be fulfilled in record time. They are so efficient that they can move an entire warehouse and have ready to operate again during the weekend.

All together the small robots have traveled over 93 million miles — almost the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Submission + - Creative Wired editor's take on John Deere's DMCA madness (wired.com)

Submitted by sckirklan
sckirklan writes: This guy isn't creative and hopes whomever looks through these is and makes adjustments... Basically, Microsoft is to John Deere as Windows/Office/etc is to the tractor. Thanks for your dollars, it's ours but you can use it. Next we put soil moisture/ph sensors in your field and say you don't own it but if you pay taxes you can use it, btw that was in your eula when you bought your, err our tractor (or we updated it just because we can and you agree to it because you already agreed to it.)

Submission + - GitLab acquires Gitorious (gitlab.com)

Submitted by sckirklan
sckirklan writes: QUOTE:
As reported by the Next Web GitLab and Gitorious announce today they are joining forces in an effort to strengthen the development of GitLab’s open source Git management application and provide Gitorious customers with an enhanced user experience.
Crime

Submission + - Crooks install keyloggers while working temp jobs, then steal from the IRS (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper has the story (http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/police-id-thief-filed-hundreds-of-bogus-tax-return/nWsbm/) of accused identify thief Erkes Antwon Green, whom the Atlanta Police Department believes is part of an identity theft ring. Police arrested Green on Feb. 28 on bank fraud charges, saying Green allegedly opened a SunTrust bank account online using a stolen ID, deposited a stolen check for $46,000 and was able to get about $14,000 from the ATM before the bank realized that the check was no good.

Green profited by filing false tax returns, a type of scam that slashdot reported on back in August (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/08/03/214231/identity-theft-may-cost-irs-21-billion-over-next-5-years). According to Detective Ken Stapler with the Atlanta Police Department’s major fraud unit, Green either filed or attempted to file bogus income tax returns in the name of some 150 or more victims, mostly from Georgia and Florida. When he was arrested, Green was driving a $60,000 Mercedes E-550 that he had purchased with a stolen identity. Police believe Green used keystroke grabbers to obtain personal identity information. According to Detective Stapler, “You plug this thing into the back of a computer where the USB cable would go. He can leave it there for as long as he wants, and nobody’s going know unless they look on the back of their computer.”

Detective Stapler also says “A lot of times, what these people do is get hired on with a temp agency. A temp agency may work in an office building cleaning up after hours. Once (one of the would-be ID thieves) gets in the door, he’s got access to those computers. Anytime nobody is looking, he could put the keystroke grabber on.”

Submission + - Another arrested in Japan for using anonymous P2P (animenewsnetwork.com)

Submitted by
renrutal
renrutal writes: "A 43-year-old man is the second known person arrested in Japan for using Perfect Dark to share copyrighted material in its encrypted P2P network.

According to the [Kyoto-based] High-Tech Crime Task Force, the Okayama police, and the Saga police, the Osaka-based suspect uploaded about a thousand files, including anime. The suspect admitted that he thought he would not get caught because he was using Perfect Dark.

Perfect Dark is the third generation of japanese anonymous P2P network clients, developed with the intent to fix the security flaws found in its predecessors Winny and Share, in spite of also adopting a "Secure through Obscurity" closed-source model. In 2004, Winny's developer, Isamu Kaneo, was charged 1.5 million yen for assisting in copyright infringement, but he was acquited last October. Since 2008, at least 15 people were arrested in Japan suspect of uploading copyrighted material to those "secure" networks."
Privacy

Federal Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches 359

Posted by timothy from the oh-you-wanted-the-fourth-amendment-here-too? dept.
Declan McCullogh is reporting at CNET that a federal district court judge has rebuked the Department of Homeland Security, "which had claimed it can seize a traveler's laptop and search it six months later without warrant." As described in the article, DHS policies have been stacked against travelers entering the US, including citizens returning from abroad: "There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets." This ruling does not address immediate searches at the border, but says that DHS cannot hold computers for indefinite searching, as in the case to hand, concerning a US citizen returning from a trip to Korea, whose laptop was seized and held for months before a search was even conducted on it.
Software

Submission + - AI Astronomer Aids Effort To Analyze Galaxies (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Scientists are teaching an artificial intelligence how to classify galaxies imaged by telescopes like the Hubble. Manda Banerji at the University of Cambridge along with researchers at University College London, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, has succeeded in getting the program to agree with human analysis at an impressive rate of more than 90%. Banerji used data from Galaxy Zoo, a massive online project which has used more than 250,000 volunteers to analyze more than 60 million galaxies. The new automated astronomer will help with even larger analytical projects on the horizon, taking care of trivial classifications and leaving the tough cases to humans.

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