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Submission + - Linus Torvalds Admits He's Been Asked to Insert NSA Backdoor (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: At the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans today, Linus Torvalds joined fellow kernel developers in answering a barrage of questions about Linux development. One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux.

Torvalds responded "no" while shaking his head "yes," as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.

Torvalds also admitted that while he as a full life outside of Linux he couldn't imagine his life without it.

While Torvalds has a full life outside Linux, it is at the core of his existence, he said. "I don't see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux," Torvalds said. "I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux." /blockquote.

Submission + - NSA Monitoring Inter-Bank Transfer and Credit Card Transactions

Submitted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: NSA surveillance of private financial activity is a big story in Europe, co-authored by Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who was first contacted by Edward Snowden for the release of his information. "Classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of SWIFT, used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. A document from the year 2011 clearly designates the SWIFT computer network as a "target." Late last week, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs said that the Americans should "immediately and precisely tell us what has happened, and put all the cards on the table." If it's true "that they share information with other agencies for purposes other than those outlined in the agreement we will have to consider ending the agreement."" NSA also has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard — as well the Internet currency Bitcoin.

Submission + - Can You Solder?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at EE Times, Max Maxfield is horrified to learn that some new electronics engineers cannot solder. "What do they teach electronics students at college these days?" Maxfield asks. "Isn't soldering one of the core skills one is expected to know? In my day — when dinosaurs roamed the Earth — all the students on my university course already knew how to solder before they'd even set foot on the campus." So, throw down your breadboard crutches, kids — Maxfield advises you get with the soldering program (or book), pronto!

Submission + - Feds aren't 'knowingly' weakening encryption, says U.S. official (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A U.S. official Tuesday defended the government's encryption efforts in response to disclosures that the National Security Agency (NSA) has the ability to crack encryption protections. Patrick Gallagher, undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology and director of NIST, said that the leaks "would appear to attack our integrity." Gallagher, speaking at an Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit here, said that NIST's role "is to support a technical understanding of the strongest, most secure computer security, including encryption that we can. We are not deliberately, knowingly, working to undermine or weaken encryption technologies," said Gallagher.

Submission + - The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From the Guardian:

A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain?

Submission + - Spider Silk Turned Into Electrical Wire Lead To 'Green' Electronics

Submitted by ewolfson
ewolfson writes: Florida State University scientists have crafted microscopic wires out of spider silk that can conduct electricity.

The goal is to create new electronics that are as tough as they are eco-friendly. Spider silk is supposedly as strong as steel and as "impenetrable as Kevlar" — but now it can also conduct electricity. To give the spider silk this effect, the scientists coated each silk thread with carbon nanotubes.

The results are super strong conductors that are also fully biodegradable.

Submission + - "Oddball" asteroid is really a comet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: An international team of scientist s today said a the third largest near-Earth object-believed for 30 years to be an asteroid, is actually a comet. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope operated by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the team — led by Michael Mommert of Northern Arizona University and Joshua Emery, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee — looked at images of the rocky object known as 3552 Don Quixote taken in 2009 when it was in orbit closest to the Sun and found it had a coma and a faint tail.

Submission + - Linux health given the reveletion of NSA crypto-subverting attacks? 4

Submitted by deepdive
deepdive writes: I have a basic question. What is the privacy/security health of the Linux kernel (and indeed other FOSS OS's) given all the recent stories about the NSA going in and deliberately subverting various parts of the privacy/security sub-systems. Basically, can one still sleep soundly thinking that the most recent latest/greatest ubuntu/opensuse/what-have-you distro she/he downloaded is still pretty safe. Or do people need to get a little worried and start burning some extra night oil over this?

Submission + - Why Not Replace SSL Certificates With PGP Keys? 9

Submitted by vik
vik writes: The whole SSL process has been infiltrated by the NSA, GCSB and other n'er-do-wells. If governments want a man-in-the-middle certificate they simply issue a secret gagging order to the CA to make them issue one. Consequently "certified" SSL certificates can no longer be trusted. Ironically self-issued certificates are more secure, but not easily verified.

However, PGP/GPG keys can be trusted and independently verified. They are as secure as we can get for now. Why not replace the broken SSL CA system with GPG/PGP encryption keys? Make the NSA-infiltrated stuff obsolete, and rely on a real-world web of trust?

Submission + - Top Factor In Successful IT Projects: Speed (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: There's a new trend in CIO circles: The need for speed. Whether they achieve that speed by adopting Agile development, cloud computing, or predictive analytics, the fact is that, increasingly, the only way for IT to deliver business advantage is to be faster than the competition. Or maybe it's just that IT is finally realizing that in business it's better to be fast than to be perfect. As my piano teacher used to say, 'if you can't play it right, play it loud.'

Submission + - Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The federal judge presiding over the U.S. electronic books case against Apple has barred the company from striking deals that would ensure that it could undercut prices of other retailers in the e-book market and also prohibited Apple from letting any one publisher know what deals the company is striking up with other publishers. For its part, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling, denying that it conspired to fix ebook pricing. Meanwhile, Amazon is alerting customers of their potential payout, which could be as much as $3.82 for every eligible Kindle book.

Submission + - Beijing Says That 400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: China's Education Ministry says that about 400 million people — or 30% of the population — cannot speak the country's national language. Of the 70% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. The admission from officials came as the government launched another push for linguistic unity in China. China is home to thousands of dialects and several minority languages. These include Cantonese and Hokkien, which enjoy strong regional support. Mandarin — formally called Putonghua in China, meaning "common tongue" — is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. The Education Ministry spokeswoman said the push would be focusing on the countryside and areas with ethnic minorities. For decades, the ruling Communist Party has promoted Mandarin in an attempt to unite the most populous nation in the world. But government efforts have been hampered by the sheer size of the country and a lack of investment in education, particularly the rural areas, says the BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing.

Submission + - Genetic Evidence Found That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The study of social networks has long shown that people tend to pick friends who are similar to them--birds of a feather stick together (pdf). Now a study of the genomes of almost 2000 Americans has found that those who are friends also share remarkable genetic similarities. “Pairs of friends are, on average, as genetically similar to one another as fourth cousins,” the study concludes. By contrast, strangers share few genetic similarities. The result seems to confirm a 30 year old theory that a person’s genes causes them to seek out circumstances that are compatible with their phenotype. If that’s the case, then people with similar genes should end up in similar environments and so be more likely to become friends.

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