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Security

The Startling Array of Hacking Tools In NSA's Armory 215

Posted by samzenpus from the pick-your-poison dept.
littlekorea writes "A series of servers produced by Dell, air-gapped Windows XP PCs and switches and routers produced by Cisco, Huawei and Juniper count among the huge list of computing devices compromised by the NSA, according to crypto-expert and digital freedom fighter Jacob Applebaum. Revealing a trove of new NSA documents at his 30c3 address (video), Applebaum spoke about why the NSA's program might lead to broader adoption of open source tools and gave a hot tip on how to know if your machines have been owned."
Privacy

Former CIA/NSA Head: NSA Is "Infinitely" Weaker As a Result of Snowden's Leaks 572

Posted by samzenpus from the spying-used-to-be-easy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Huffington Post reports, 'Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said Sunday that he used to describe leaker Edward Snowden as a "defector," ... "I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason," Hayden said ... Some members of Congress have also ... accused him of an act of treason. Hayden said his view of Snowden has grown harsher in recent weeks after reports that Snowden is seeking asylum in Germany and Brazil in exchange for assisting their investigations into NSA programs. Hayden said the NSA is "infinitely" weaker as a result of Snowden's leaks. "This is the most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage," he said. "What Snowden is revealing ... is the plumbing," he added later. "He's revealing how we acquire this information. It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures."' — More in the Face the Nation video and transcript, including discussion of the recent legal decisions, and segments with whistleblower Thomas Drake, Snowden legal adviser Jesselyn Radack, and Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman who recently interviewed Snowden."

Submission + - RHEL 7 will be a KDE Desktop

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the 2013 linux Kernel summit Redhat spokesperson Lisa Truman revealed that the upcoming RHEL 7 will be based on the KDE Software Compilation desktop environment. "As you know we have been working on implementing Gnome 3 classic mode for RHEL 7. But after early feedback from our customers we have decided to switch to a KDE/QT based desktop for our flagship product". On what feedback Redhat received from their customers, Ms. Truman responded: "We at Redhat appreciate that many of our customers use non accelerated or legacy hardware for their workstations, and software rendering with llvmpipe may not fit the bill for them". "Also gnome-classic-mode is an emulation of a classic desktop and is lacking many important areas". When Ms. Truman was asked if the switch to KDE is the reason for the delay in the release of RHEL 7 she stated: "We are still on track to release RHEL 7 by the end of 2013".

Submission + - Silent Circle, Lavabit unite for 'Dark Mail' encrypted email project (computerworld.com.au) 2

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Two privacy-focused email providers have launched the Dark Mail Alliance, a project to engineer an email system with robust defenses against spying. Silent Circle and Lavabit abruptly halted their encrypted email services in August, saying they could no longer guarantee email would remain private after court actions against Lavabit, reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
Medicine

How Big Data Is Destroying the US Healthcare System 507

Posted by Soulskill from the optimizing-for-profit-does-not-optimize-for-health dept.
KindMind writes "Robert Cringely writes on the idea that technological advances have changed the health care system, and not for the better. The idea is that companies now rate individuals instead of groups, and so move to a mode of simply avoiding policies that might lose money, instead of the traditional way that insurance costs were spread over a group. From the article: 'Then in the 1990s something happened: the cost of computing came down to the point where it was cost-effective to calculate likely health outcomes on an individual basis. This moved the health insurance business from being based on setting rates to denying coverage. In the U.S. the health insurance business model switched from covering as many people as possible to covering as few people as possible — selling insurance only to healthy people who didn't much need the healthcare system.'"
Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth Complains About the 'Open Source Tea Party' 419

Posted by Soulskill from the we-are-the-knights-who-say...-NIH! dept.
slack_justyb writes "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers for the recent release of 13.10 and talks about 14.04's codename (Trusty Tahr). He also takes aim at what he calls 'The Open Source Tea Party.' He writes, 'Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)' He cites all the complaints about Mir and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control. Shuttleworth continues, 'And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we'll get it done, and it will be amazing.' However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. He even goes so far to show some love for Linux Mint: 'So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"
Yahoo!

Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide 403

Posted by Soulskill from the failing-at-a-last-request dept.
New submitter digitalFlack writes "Apparently Martin Manley has been a popular blogger and newspaper journalist for many years. For his own reasons, no indication of illness, he decided sixty years on this planet was enough. He designed a 40-page website with sections such as: 'Why Suicide?' and 'Why Age 60?.' Martin planned his suicide meticulously, but to manage his legacy, he picked Yahoo. He even pre-paid for five years. After he left this mortal coil on his 60th birthday, Yahoo decided they don't want his traffic, so they took the site down. Sorry, Martin."
Transportation

Transport Expert Insists 'Don't Dismiss Wacky Hyperloop' 385

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
DavidGilbert99 writes "Since Elon Musk announced the details of Hyperloop earlier this week, we've seen a number of experts debunking the technology involved, but at least one is more upbeat about the possibility of 600MPH train travel. Speaking to Alistair Charlton at IBTimes UK, professor Phil Blythe from the Institute of Engineering and Technology said: 'My gut feeling is, don't dismiss it out of hand just because it sounds a bit wacky,' adding 'You're always going to have long distance travel, and if there was something that could replace air travel between cities and hubs, and is low carbon [with] low energy requirements, it make sense to explore it, it really does.'"
Movies

Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite 344

Posted by Soulskill from the because-fans-wanting-to-understand-your-movies-is-terrible dept.
Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge reports that a fansite providing subtitles for movies has been raided by Swedish police at the behest of the copyright industry. "The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se, literally meaning subtitles.se, is a site where people contribute their own translations of movies. This lets people who aren't good at the original language of a movie or cartoon put those fan-made subtitles – fansubs – on top of the movie or cartoon. Fansubbing is a thriving culture which usually provides better-than-professional subtitles for new episodes with less than 24 hours of turnaround (whereas the providers of the original cartoon or movie can easily take six months or more). What’s remarkable about this raid is that the copyright industry has decided to do a full-out raid against something that is entirely fan-made. It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art."

Comment Seize wallet or real coints? (Score 1) 198

by freakingme (#44209097) Attached to: Bitcoins Seized In Drug Bust
I wonder if the DEA transferred the money to own of its own accounts, or if they merely seized a drive that contained the wallet. If the latter is the case, I wonder what will happen if there's a copy of that wallet, that now starts sending money. That'd be one hell of a way to accuse the DEA of fraud with seized goods...
Idle

Submission + - Boeing 747-8 Extreme Braking Test Video (nycaviation.com)

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "How does Boeing test the braking limits on the largest aircraft they've ever built? File the brake pads down to the rivets, load up the plane to nearly a million pounds, gun the engines to 200 mph, then mash the brakes as hard as possible and watch them burst into flames."
EU

European Commission Paints Itself Into ACTA Corner 90

Posted by timothy from the no-no-you-are-twisting-mein-woerter dept.
Halo1 writes "Last week, the European Commission published a rebuttal to an extensive and strongly condemning opinion document about ACTA by prominent European academics. Ante Wessels from the FFII went through the Commission's reply and discovered that after correcting the mistakes they made, they actually confirm the opinion they were trying to refute. The Commission primarily appears to suffer from a lack of reading comprehension, amnesia regarding what it said earlier, and not being fully aware of its competences."

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