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Submission + - DEA steals life savings of innocent man

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In another example of civil forfeiture, DEA agents confiscated the life savings of a man heading to California based on no evidence.

There was no evidence of a crime, the man was never charged, but three weeks later he still has not gotten his money back.

Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race. Waite said that in general DEA agents look for "indicators" such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person's story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.

"We don't have to prove that the person is guilty," Waite said. "It's that the money is presumed to be guilty."

Read the whole article. This is entirely unconstitutional. The fifth amendment to the Bill of Rights expressly forbids the taking of private property "without just compensation."

Submission + - Meet The FBI's Secret 'Eye In The Sky' Overseeing The Baltimore Riots (zerohedge.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: As Benjamin Shayne settled into his back yard to listen to the Orioles game on the radio Saturday night, he noticed a small plane looping low and tight over West Baltimore — almost exactly above where rioting had erupted several days earlier, in the aftermath of the death of a black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody.

The plane appeared to be a small Cessna, but little else was clear. The sun had already set, making traditional visual surveillance difficult. So, perplexed, Shayne tweeted: “Anyone know who has been flying the light plane in circles above the city for the last few nights?”

That was 9:14 p.m. Seven minutes later came a startling reply. One of Shayne’s nearly 600 followers tweeted back a screen shot of the Cessna 182T’s exact flight path and also the registered owner of the plane: NG Research, based in Bristow, Va.

As it turns out, Shayne had unwittingly uncovered a secret FBI overhead surveillance campaign carried out over Baltimore during the riots that set the city ablaze late last month. The operation involved two planes circling the city, and as WaPo notes, if equipped with the latest technology, the aircraft would have been capable of monitoring “dozens of city blocks” at a time. The revelations have prompted the ACLU to demand answers as to the legality of what an unnamed official calls FBI “aerial support”

Comment Re:Spot-the-Nerd game (Score 2, Insightful) 102

by countSudoku() (#49634219) Attached to: FBI Releases Its Files On DEF CON: Not Amused By Spot-the-Fed

This is the same FBI who in the 1950's spent two years investigating the song Louie Louie and the performers and fans of The Kingsmen and came up with what they usually come up with; nothing of interest. Scully and Mulder are a fantasy. The FBI comes to DEF CON because they are about 10 years behind the rest of the world in cybersecurity ops. Plain and simple, the private sector is many years beyond what we currently think of as their current state. i.e. they are hiding any really new ideas and gear for "security purposes" but that's just a bullshit call to hide their questionable and possibly illegal intentions and devices. No, they are genuinely embarrassed at just about every turn these days. Consider this; if you are a top cybersecurity chap are you going to waste your career by working at a shitty gubment shop that activity undermines you, pays you a fraction of real world pay, and generally pushes you into questionable activities and/or makes you go Snowden, or are you going to work at a fun company and do interesting work for better pay for possibly less hostile bosses? Join the US Cybersecurity Forces Today(if you are a low-level script kiddie looking for crap-work)!

Submission + - What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them 3

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that first of all, police shouldn’t ask. “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, a 21-year veteran of DC's police force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.” What you don’t have a right to do is interfere with an officer's work. "“Police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations,” according to Jay Stanley who wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant and police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

What if an officer says you are interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations and you disagree with the officer? “If it were me, and an officer came up and said, ‘You need to turn that camera off, sir,’ I would strive to calmly and politely yet firmly remind the officer of my rights while continuing to record the interaction, and not turn the camera off," says Stanley. The ACLU guide also supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer: "The right question to ask is, ‘am I free to go?’ If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal."

Submission + - Carbon dioxide hits 400ppm

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA’s latest results.

http://research.noaa.gov/News/...

Submission + - Self-destructing virus kills off PCs (bbc.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: A computer virus that tries to avoid detection by making the machine it infects unusable has been found.

If Rombertik's evasion techniques are triggered, it deletes key files on a computer, making it constantly restart.

Analysts said Rombertik was "unique" among malware samples for resisting capture so aggressively.

On Windows machines where it goes unnoticed, the malware steals login data and other confidential information.

Rombertik typically infected a vulnerable machine after a booby-trapped attachment on a phishing message had been opened, security researchers Ben Baker and Alex Chiu, from Cisco, said in a blogpost.

Some of the messages Rombertik travels with pose as business enquiry letters from Microsoft.

The malware "indiscriminately" stole data entered by victims on any website, the researchers said.
And it got even nastier when it spotted someone was trying to understand how it worked.

"Rombertik is unique in that it actively attempts to destroy the computer if it detects certain attributes associated with malware analysis," the researchers said.

Submission + - Rubio is wrong: the United States IS modernizing its nuclear arsenal (politifact.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: PolitiFact calls out Marco Rubio on his claim that the US is the only nuclear weapons state that is not modernizing its nuclear weapons arsenal. According the Nuclear Notebook, which a month ago posted an update on US Nuclear Forces 2015: 'Over the next decade, [the US] also plans to spend as much as $350 billion on modernizing and maintaining its nuclear forces.' Rubio seems to be the only one who doesn't know what's happening with the US nuclear weapons budget.

Submission + - Surveymonkey CEO Dave Goldberg's death highlights treadmill dangers (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The tragic death of Dave Goldberg, Surveymonkey CEO and husband of Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/05/03/1943245/surveymonkeys-ceo-dies-while-vacationing-with-wife-sheryl-sandberg) is bringing attention to the dangers of high-powered treadmills and digital distractions that make the machines even more dangerous.

According to CNN, Goldberg fell and hit his head while using a treadmill. He was found shortly thereafter, still alive. He was then transported to a hospital, where he was declared dead. Goldberg suffered from traumatic brain injury and hypovolemic shock, a condition tied to severe blood and fluid loss. [http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/04/technology/dave-goldberg-cause-of-death/index.html?iid=Lead]

The freakish accident actually isn’t that rare. Treadmills account for the majority of such exercise equipment injuries, according to Janessa M. Graves, a professor at the College of Nursing at Washington State University. In a study of 1,782 injury reports from 2007 to 2011, she found that “treadmill machines comprise 66% of injuries but constitute approximately only one-fourth the market share of such equipment.”

Graves says she was shocked not only by the proportion of injuries caused by treadmills but also by the victims. “We were surprised by the number of pediatric injuries that we saw,” she says. “There was a pretty high incidence among kids, especially 0 to 4 years old, also 5 to 9 years old.” In many cases, kids turned on their parents’ treadmills, only to burn their hands on the fast-moving tracks or, worse, get their fingers caught in the powerful machines.

According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) [http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Safety-Education/Safety-Guides/General-Information/National-Electronic-Injury-Surveillance-System-NEISS/], roughly 19,000 people went to emergency rooms in 2009 because of treadmill injuries, including nearly 6,000 children.

Submission + - Prenda Law's 9th Circuit Appeal Does Not Go Well (techdirt.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: In May 2013, US District Court Judge Otis Wright issued a blistering and Star Trek referencing sanctions order against copyright troll Prenda Law fining them for $80,000 for conduct and referring them for criminal action. Since then the firm has dissolved but their lawyer appeared before three judges of 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to have them overturn the decision and the now $250,000 fine ($80,000 plus accrued penalties). It did not go well for their lawyer Daniel Voelker who at times evaded basic questions about who ran the firm and a forged document irking judges Pregerson and Tallman. Mr. Voelker kept repeating his argument that since Judge Wright threatened criminal penalties and denied a witness to appear, his clients were denied due process and thus everything should be remanded back for criminal contempt. Judge Nguyen seemingly rebuffed this argument stating that the fines were civil and not subject to criminal proceedings and tried to focus Voelker on legal arguments on the amount of the fines. Judge Tallman also expressed incredulity that Voelker was asking the court for criminal contempt as the maximum penalty for that was life imprisonment and not the $250,000 fine that was owed. Judge Pregerson at one point explicitly stated that Prenda had engaged in extortion.

Part of Prenda's Law problem was that Judge Wright had written much about their operations in his Findings of Fact which is rarely overturned by higher courts as opposed to the Findings of Law which can be scrutinized by higher courts. The court's first question to Voelker expressly asked that for the appeal court to rule in his client's favor they would have to find clear error in the Findings of Fact which he characteristically dodged again and again.

Morgan Pietz representing the opposing side did better on answering the Judges' questions. For example in doubling the original fine which may have crossed the line between criminal and civil, Pietz responded that deterrence is an important element of sanctions and doubling the fine was justified. Pietz also argued that a separate criminal proceeding could still be held without voiding the civil result.

Submission + - Ancestery.com caught sharing DNA database with government (eff.org)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police collected DNA from semen left at the crime scene, they haven’t been able to match the DNA to existing profiles in any criminal database, and the murder has never been solved.

Fast forward to 2014. The Idaho police sent the semen sample to a private lab to extract a DNA profile that included YSTR and mtDNA—the two genetic markers used to determine patrilineal and matrilineal relationships (it’s unclear why they reopened the case after nearly 20 years). These markers would allow investigators to search some existing databases to try to find a match between the sample and genetic relatives.

The cops chose to use a lab linked to a private collection of genetic genealogical data called the Sorenson Database (now owned by Ancestry.com), which claims it’s “the foremost collection of genetic genealogy data in the world.” The reason the Sorenson Database can make such an audacious claim is because it has obtained its more than 100,000 DNA samples and documented multi-generational family histories from “volunteers in more than 100 countries around the world.”

Sorenson promised volunteers their genetic data would only be used for “genealogical services, including the determination of family migration patterns and geographic origins” and would not be shared outside Sorenson.

Despite this promise, Sorenson shared its vast collection of data with the Idaho police. Without a warrant or court order, investigators asked the lab to run the crime scene DNA against Sorenson’s private genealogical DNA database. Sorenson found 41 potential familial matches, one of which matched on 34 out of 35 alleles—a very close match that would generally indicate a close familial relationship. The cops then asked, not only for the “protected” name associated with that profile, but also for all “all information including full names, date of births, date and other information pertaining to the original donor to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy project.”

Comment Re:Is this Google's fault? (Score 0) 434

by countSudoku() (#49625291) Attached to: Google Can't Ignore the Android Update Problem Any Longer

Thank you, good ser! You and the other "earliest adopters" are my heroes who barge into the latest releases and expose all the ugliness at your own sanity's expense! Thank you!^3

I think we can all glean from the mini-article that this is a problem with the many manufacturers out there just sitting on their last OS release/update like that's all they'll ever need to do... And it's so easy to pick on Android, Apple does all their own hardware so natch' there is going to be tight integration with their in-house OS, guy.

Also, there is no easy porting tool for Android/iOS apps to compile into WinX, er I mean Win10. What the HELL am I smoking?! They are just making the various native languages available to their OS API. There is NO magic tool to port the mobile OS apps to WinX. You'll be doing this by hand, good luck with your new friend DirectX or whichever graphics libs they offer now, as I will be doing with the counting of how many "ports" get ported to WinX10, bros! That's zero so far.

Submission + - Astronaut drink the first home-brewed coffee in space

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In addition to drinking the first home-brewed coffee in space, the astronauts also used a 3-D printed mug, though the printing took place not in space but on Earth.

Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, dressed in a "Star Trek" captain's uniform, became the first person in space to sip from a freshly-made cup of coffee on Sunday (May 3), using the International Space Station's newly-installed espresso machine.

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