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Communications

State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified (nbcnews.com) 261

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5,500 more pages of Hillary Clinton's emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state's messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America's top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court's goal because of "the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule." Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton's personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1,274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release.

Comment Corporate Addresses, not abuse@ (Score 1) 265

Your ISP isn't going to do anything about it. The sender's ISP might, if you bug them enough (try contacting their security people, because you're presumably not the only address that sender is port-scanning. Also, it's possible that the address is being spoofed by some third party to DDoS the "sender".) But if the packets are really coming from the sender, and you've contacted their Whois and abuse contacts without success, go for the "Contact Us" on their web page and contact everybody, CEO, sales, marketing, HR, webmaster, and any other @ you can find there. And if that doesn't work, start with phone calls. (I thought about suggesting that you send their IP people a copy of each scan packet, but you need to be really really really sure it's from them, because if they're being spoofed or otherwise attacked, you're helping do a serious DoS/DDoS on them.)

And sometimes it's not the apparent sender, and sometimes it's weirder than that. Many years ago, one of my lab machines was virused and sending a ping every second to a bot-controller address at MIT. MIT's web page didn't have useful help desk contacts that you could access if you weren't a student, but I knew the security director so I emailed him. Turns out the bot-controller was on a Sun machine in Japan, whose IP address was a byte-swapped version of an MIT address. (Yes, my machine was running Linux, one of the very early Red Hat versions, and it would get attacked every week or so. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 machine next to it, because what use would that have been to an attacker?)

Space

Physicists Theorize Out How To Retrieve Information From a Black Hole (sciencemag.org) 82

sciencehabit writes: Black holes earn their name because their gravity is so strong not even light can escape from them. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of hand to retrieve a speck of information that's been dropped into a black hole. The calculation touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: how all of the information trapped in a black hole leaks out as the black hole 'evaporates.' Many theorists think that must happen, but they don't know how.

Comment Eudora support ended in ~2008 (Score 1) 388

I finally bit the bullet and switched from Eudora to Thunderbird this year, because everybody's post-Snowden improvements to their crypto meant that Eudora no longer could make an SSL connection to my main ISPs' mail servers. Thunderbird had the advantage that it could read Eudora's mailboxes, which were in basically traditional Unix mail format for most things, as well as the various address books and such. Now I've got to find something else.

(My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac - with dialup modem, it's still good enough :-)

Comment Noscript. Fonts. User Agents (Score 1) 63

Mine came out much less unique than previous versions, because I had NoScript blocking much of it (even after I temporarily allowed evil-tracker.com and do-not-track.com or whatever their domains were called. User agent string was fairly unique. In the past, fonts have been the big surprise information leaker - my work machines all have a font loaded on them that's used to get $COMPANY_LOGO to render correctly, aside from any other fonts I've randomly added over the years.

Comment Traveling Salesman vs. Quantum Computers (Score 1) 157

Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete, so not only is this machine not going to solve it exactly, neither is Shor's model, even though that one does solve factoring, trashing most of the public-key crypto systems.

But there are lots of heuristics for approximate solutions to TSP, and many of them are "create some complete tour of the network, then randomly perturb it a bunch of times to see if you can get any better results", i.e., simulated annealing, so a quantum annealing machine might turn out to be quite helpful. Until about 5 years ago, Christofides's algorithm, which guarantees a solution that's no worse than 50% longer than the optimum (and usually does better than that) was about the best polynomial-time heuristic there was, so you'd start with that and anneal the results until you were bored.

Comment SD memory card speeds vary widely (Score 1) 99

Somewhere on the Internet(tm) I recently read an article comparing SD memory card speeds with the RPi. They varied by as much as 10x. For the most part, brand-name cards did better, and IIRC, medium-sized cards tended to be faster (small ones are usually cheap, large ones are trading speed for size), but it varied a lot - as long as the card's write speed was fast enough for a typical video-camera to record in real time, that's all the manufacturer cared about, and read speeds have bigger numbers so those are the ones they splash on to the packaging.

Comment D-Wave's problem space is limited, but... (Score 2) 157

No, "Quantum Computer" isn't a really well-defined term - it's basically "Sufficiently Advanced Technology Using Handwavium". It's usually used to mean "Quantum Computer that can execute Shor's Algorithm", which can solve a few problems like factoring which would make it extremely disruptive to cryptography. D-Wave has been upfront for a long time about how their computer doesn't do that - it does something much more specialized and handwavy, and this is the first article I've seen that indicates that there's a problem it can actually solve that is significantly faster than conventional computer technology.

And no, a single-core process isn't the fastest way to solve something that's reasonably parallelizable - you can pile up lots of cores and get a proportional speedup (if you don't have dependencies or too much communication overhead.) But if this is 10**8 times as fast as a single core, and the biggest computers out there are around 10**4-10**5 cores and frightfully expensive, that says there's a problem space for which it might be worth some organization's money to actually buy one to use, instead of buying for speculative research.

Comment Freesync is AMD's Dynamic Refresh Rate Thing (Score 1) 37

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. FreeSync is AMD's answer to nVidia's G-Sync. They're both something about doing dynamic refresh rates, so you can use most of your speed updating things that change quickly instead of updating whole screens including the pixels that aren't changing very fast. It works over DisplayPort, but if you want to use HDMI you'll probably need to buy a new monitor (almost certainly your TV doesn't support it yet.) It's apparently marketed toward gamers.

Comment Real Disruption is Snowden/Manning :-) (Score 1) 452

What Hillary's really looking for (besides speeches that sound good) is approaches like censorship, identifying politically incorrect users without the need for warrants, that sort of thing.

(I'm one of those annoying Libertarians, so I can pretend to be neutral between the two big-money parties, which I'll get around to after the Republicans clean up the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Koch/Norquist/NeoCons/GlobalWarmingDenialism/etc years. But I live in California, where right-wing bigotry against our largest ethnic groups pretty much guarantees a Democratic win, so rather than voting for Kodos\\\\\Hillary, I'll presumably vote for whoever my party comes up with, or if they choke or pick somebody unacceptable, I'll fall back to voting for the Greens or Peace&Freedom.)

Comment FTC has had a bunch of good advisers lately (Score 1) 50

A bunch of good people from the electronic privacy community have been at the FTC (and seem to keep recommending their friends as successors :-) Besides Lorrie and Ashkan, Ed Felten and Steve Bellovin (one of the authors of the original Usenet and the Firewall book), and probably other people we know have been there. Occasionally we also get people into the FCC (like Dave Farber some years ago.)

Censorship

In Kazakhstan, the Internet Backdoors You (csoonline.com) 94

itwbennett writes: Kazakhstan passed a law that would require citizens to install a certificate on their personal computers and mobile devices that would allow the government to snoop and capture web traffic, passwords, financial details. Telecom.kz posted the news to their website on November 30, but by December 4 the press release had been removed from the website. This is just the latest example of government overreaching. Recently we've seen the Turkish government attempt to block access to social media sites. And let's not forget Thailand's attempt to roll out their own man-in-the-middle implementation.

Comment Re:Love my VM - Microsoft Support Scammers (Score 1) 168

Oh, definitely. Ransomware is worse, because could get infected by making lots of different mistakes, not just by believing a phone call. But the defenses against it include good backups as well as good security, and you need backups anyway because hardware can fail and trash your system in lots of creative different ways.

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