60011915
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The UK’s High Court ruled yesterday that HM Revenue and Customs acted “unlawfully” when it declined to detail how it was investigating the export of digital spy tools created by a British company. Human rights group Privacy International is celebrating the decision of Mr. Justice Green, which means HMRC now has to reconsider releasing information on its investigation into controls surrounding the export of malware known as FinFisher, created by British supplier Gamma International. The widespread FinFisher malware family, also known as FinSpy, can carry out a range of surveillance operations, from snooping on Skype and Facebook conversations to siphoning off emails or files sitting on a device. It is supposed to benefit law enforcement in their investigations, but has allegedly been found in various nations with poor human rights records, including Bahrain and Ethiopia.
59973029
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Earlier this year, in the black heart of the City of London, Europe’s financial capital, I talked to a group of penetration testers (ethical hackers who poke holes in their customers’ systems to figure out where they are weakest), who agreed to create some new honeypots and demonstrate their use for me. I wanted to understand more about how honeypots were built, and whether we could glean any patterns if we added fresh traps in new locations.
Honeypots are normally created on virtual private servers—rentable places to host things on the internet. Once you’ve bought your plot of land for a couple of quid, you download honeypot software; in our case, we used programs known as Dionaea and Kippo. This process is essentially like installing a new operating system onto a dumb machine, and creates what appears to hackers to be a genuinely vulnerable server. In reality, none of the features of the systems work, but they look real enough.
59972845
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Twenty days into a 30-day mission, seven hours into a nine-hour deep dive, scientists aboard the Thomas G. Thompson research ship the lost contact with their remotely operated robotic submarine.
The unmanned vehicle, Nereus, was exploring the Karmadec Trench northeast of New Zealand, going as deep as 11,000 meters—almost seven miles below the surface. After emergency recovery protocols failed to bring Nereus back, the scientists began searching near the dive site. From the Thompson, the scientists spotted debris floating on the surface. It was from Nereus. At 2PM Saturday, the robo-sub was confirmed as lost.
59796383
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a major update to its mobile app, Google Maps will now integrate Uber's on-demand car service. That means when you're looking up the route from point A to B in certain cities, the app will show you the best way to drive, bike, walk, or Uber there. Choose option four, and a single tap launches your Uber app and hails you a black car. That's an entire fourth mode of transport there folks, which speaks to what the Silicon Valley darlings may have in mind for the future—aside from being a smart and obvious PR move. Google Ventures is a major investor in Uber, so it's in the both companies' best interest to promote the app. It'll be interesting to see if the maps integration is a sweetheart deal for Uber, or if Google incorporates its competitor apps too: Lyft, Sidecar, and Hailo. The venture firm poured $258 million into the startup last summer, propelling the company to its $3.5 billion valuation. That's Google's largest deal ever, sparking a swirl of speculation about Google's future intentions with the transportation startup.
59719981
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Look at Norway, where the Army has started using Oculus Rift to drive tanks with increased visibility, according to the Norwegian TV station tu.no. Four VR cameras are mounted on the sides of the tank to give the soldier inside donning the headset a full 360 degree view of what's going on outside, like X-ray vision. Using cameras to "see through" a vehicle isn't a new concept; when the hatches are down tanks are notoriously hard to navigate. But the Oculus Rift dev kit is just a fraction of the price of traditional 360-degree camera equipment: Lockheed Martin's F-35 helmet for pilots can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
59717949
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
How risky is it to use the words "bomb," "plague," or "gun" online? That was a question we posed, tongue in cheek, with a web toy we built last year called Hello NSA. It offers users suggested tweets that use words that drawn from a list of watchwords that analysts at the Dept. of Homeland Security are instructed to search for on social media. "Stop holding my love hostage," one of the tweets read. "My emotions are like a tornado of fundamentalist wildfire." It was silly, but it was also imagined as an absurdist response to the absurdist ways that dragnet surveillance of the public and non-public Internet jars with our ideas of freedom of speech and privacy. And yet, after reading the mounting pile of NSA PowerPoints, are all of us as comfortable as we used to be Googling for a word like "anthrax," even if we were simply looking up our favorite thrash metal band? Maybe not. According to a new study of Google search trends, searches for terms deemed to be sensitive to government or privacy concerns have dropped "significantly" in the months since Edward Snowden's revelations in July.
59628199
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Here’s some more evidence that sexuality is an innate characteristic: Gay men are more likely to respond to male sex pheromones than they are to female ones. Chinese researchers studied the pheromones naturally given off by men and women in things such as semen, sweat, and urine. Scientists have been aware of the existence of two distinct pheromones—androstadienone (found in male semen and sweat) and estratetraenol (present in female urine)—for some time, but it’s been unclear whether they’ve had much of an effect on the opposite gender. It turns out that they do, and how they do depends on a person’s sexuality. To test their hypothesis, Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences set up an experiment in which participants looked at a video in which human figures rendered in a connect-the-dots style (shown above) were shown walking. Participants were then asked to guess whether the figures were masculine or feminine. When exposed to androstadienone, heterosexual women were more likely to suggest that the wire figure was a man—but the pheromone had no effect on heterosexual men.
59547405
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Edward Snowden's NSA revelations will likely cost the US tech sector tens of billions of dollars. The same anxieties causing foreign clients to pull out of contracts with American tech companies, are also fueling a wave of venture capital investment in Silicon Valley into anonymity apps like Whisper and Secret. But whether or not they can deliver on either promise—profits and privacy—remains in question. Whisper, released two years ago, has led the charge of anonymity apps that now include Secret, Rumr, Backchat, and Yik Yak, which is already ruining lives across middle schools everywhere. The precocious app has been wildly successful in growing its userbase—it has millions of users and billions of monthly pageviews—and in raising funds. “There is a real desire to be more authentic online,” Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which led a $21 million investment into Whisper last fall, told Business Week . “Most people have more to say than just, ‘Here I am not the beach looking great.’”
59522147
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true—Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. "After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death," Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs.
59505453
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever. The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps. The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (embedded below), was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a “discussion draft,” and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced.
59501191
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If the Silk Road was a “crack house,” Ross Ulbricht, or “Dread Pirate Roberts," was the kingpin, not a mere "digital landlord," the Federal Government charged in new documents relating to his case. Last year, Ulbricht was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics, operating a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering, all based on his alleged position as owner and operator of the deep web’s Silk Road drug marketplace. Last month, Ulbricht and his attorney, Joshua Dratel, filed a motion to dismiss all charges based on the argument that Ulbricht operated as a “digital landlord” who is not liable for what was happening in his digital house—in this case, Silk Road. US District Attorney Preet Bharara just filed his opposition to the motion to dismiss, and Ulbricht's defense does not look sturdy, provided the government actually has the evidence it alleges.
59452123
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket', a new system being touted as a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. Although running in a similar fashion on the face of things—some users buy drugs, other sell them—DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as user names are added to the blockchain by including it in very small transactions, meaning that its impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger. Andy Greenberg has a good explanation of how it works over at Wired . The prototype includes nearly everything needed for a working marketplace: private communications between buyers and sellers, Bitcoin transfers to make purchases, and an escrow system that protects the cash until it is confirmed that the buyer has received their product. Theoretically, being a decentralized and thus autonomous network, it would still run without any assistance from site administrators, and would certainly make seizing a central server, as was the case with the original Silk Road, impossible.
59448939
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
At the digital currency Dogecoin’s first ever conference, a 14-year-old girl explained how she’d gone from rags to riches, and back to rags, all in Dogecoin. After her witty comments on Reddit generated dogecoin tips—usually in the 100s, or about five cents a time—she bet her fortune on a League of Legends battle waged against a friend. And lost. Much sadness. The girl, Victoria, was attending Dogecon San Francisco to see what the hoopla over the meme-themed digital currency actually was (other than tipping people on Reddit). “[My family] thinks it’s weird, but it’s serious business,” she told me. And from the looks of things at the conference, Victoria is right. Dogecoin is for real. Back in February we wrote that Dogecoin is worth taking seriously, and it's been more successful than Bitcoin’s first several years, at least if you measure it by market capitalization (the total dollar value of the currency). Now, the digital currency based on a dog meme distinguished by grammatically absurd broken phrases in the Comic Sans font is the fifth largest digital currency in the world (with a market cap of about $33 million). It was touted at the conference as the most “widely traded virtual currency in the world,” and it’s not hard to see why.
59304683
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You stand in the dark facing a mirror; before you appears a digitized reflection. As you move, the reflection moves with you. It is you, but as you have never been seen before. Skin removed, the image shows the organs, muscles, and bone structures that lie beneath. It’s an experience that leaves you feeling utterly exposed and redefines what it means to be naked: You are seeing yourself inside-out for the very first time. This was the reality presented to participants at the trial of an interactive artwork called Primary Intimacy of Being. Developed by Xavier Maître, a medical imaging researcher at the University of Paris South, the mirror makes use of the university's latest technology in imaging and processing. It combines information from a series of PET/ MRI scans and x-rays with Microsoft Kinect motion capture technology to produce a mirror that seems to reflect the individual without skin. It moves with them and appears to be a true reflection.
59258437
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In 2000, a post on Slashdot introduced the concept of a new GPS-infused sport for nerds and hikers called geocaching. "Take some item and hide it somewhere in the world," the poster explained, "record the latitude and longitude using your GPS receiver, post the location to the Web so that others can find your stash." I've passively stumbled upon a couple of geocaches while walking on trails in the Czech Republic and Northern California, but wasn't actually engaged in the coordinate-hunting sport. But a group of hackathon-winning students from New Jersey might have just changed geocaching forever—with dogecoin. Yes, the meme-based virtual currency bearing the image of a Shiba-Inu is the central object of Dogecache.
