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Submission + - What Does The NSA Deserve?

Submitted by deconfliction
deconfliction writes: Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of government sanctioned industrial espionage in conjunction with the unconstitutional spying on US citizens it has been doing. That seems an inverted way of doing things--in the United States, the government is generally thought to be a police force preventing criminals from profiting from other's private unpublished intellectual property. If further hard evidence comes to light proving that the NSA has incalculably harmed U.S. businesspeople's financial bottom line in connection with its unconstitutional domestic spying dragnets, it begs the question- What Does The NSA Deserve? I tend to think the NSA's crimes against the constitution should be prosecuted immediately, so that Snowden can begin to have a chance to see proper justice ASAP. But even assuming that pipe dream were to come to pass, and with a conviction no less, it then begs the much more complicated question- How can members of the computer and network security industry ever be properly compensated for the damage the NSA did to their careers and businesses? And please consider Snowden's career and Lavabit/SilentCircle's business the exceptional case, while considering the more general case of those whose careers were stunted because it served the NSA's interests to disinform the public — and thus our capitalistic base of investors — about fundamental issues in computer science and security?

Comment Re:Surface in the Enterprise (Score 1) 289

by Clyde Machine (#46059563) Attached to: Microsoft Reports Record Revenue
I would have thought that more standardized devices would be more beneficial given the better/more familiar IT support, the familiarity of updates, better planning for scaling and expansion, etc.? What in your view are the benefits in a working environment of having multiple different devices/platforms?

Comment So... (Score 1) 2

...What makes this different from selling someone your Bitcoins for US dollars (i.e. localbitcoins.com) in the first place? Should I be given a love letter from FINCEN for selling Bitcoins to someone directly? Is it just because he identified his activities as part of a business? In that case, how many transactions would it take for me to be considered a business, to FINCEN? Also, a more neutral stance on summaries would be nice in the future.

Submission + - Maker of Physical Bitcoin Tokens Suspends Operation After Hearing from Federal G 2

Submitted by Austrian Anarchy
Austrian Anarchy writes: Via Reason and Wired: Mike Caldwell ran a business called Casascius that printed physical tokens with a bitcoin digital key on it, key hidden behind a tamper proof strip. He's charge you $50 worth of bitcoin to print a key of a bitcoin you sent him via computer on this token. Cool stuff--a good friend of mine found one sitting unnoticed in her tip jar from an event at which she sold her artisan lamps from 2011 and was naturally delighted given the nearly 1000x increase in value of a bitcoin since then. So, you're making something fun, useful, interesting, harmless---naturally the federal government is very concerned and wants to hobble you. Just before Thanksgiving, [Caldwell] received a letter from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, the arm of the Treasury Department that dictates how the nation’s anti-money-laundering and financial crime regulations are interpreted. According to FINCEN, Caldwell needs to rethink his business. “They considered my activity to be money transmitting,” Caldwell says. And if you want to transmit money, you must first jump through a lot of state and federal regulatory hoops Caldwell hasn’t jumped through.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do I choose an IT college in California?

Submitted by Clyde Machine
Clyde Machine writes: I've studied network technology enough to earn an associate's degree, and am looking to take my tech-related interests above and beyond — and out of the state. This is mostly to fulfill my interest of living in a new environment (I've been in Michigan for a long time), as well as filling my need to be learning something relevant to me. I'm looking specifically to California, but have no idea how to gauge a "good" college from a "bad" one. I'm primarily interested in Information Security as a field for further education.

How do I find good tech colleges to apply to for Information Security? Do you know of any off-hand? And of course, any and all scholarship information would be nice, because loans are the worst.

Submission + - Silk road finally taken down (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by onyxruby
onyxruby writes: The silk road website has finally been taken down and seized by the government. The criminal complaint against 29-year-old owner Ross Ulbricht can be found over at Krebs On Security.

Probably the largest question about the seizure of the Silk Road is what took so long? It can only be assumed that the site was being monitored for a period of time to facilitate additional cases. Other like kind competing sites already offer similar services and of course always lead to the question of, is this a trap?

Comment I'm curious. (Score 1) 1

by Clyde Machine (#44320431) Attached to: When Metadata Analytics Goes Awry
I highly doubt this would lead to false accusations, especially if such "shadowy agencies" know of the issues with the matching algorithms, but I'm curious to see if anyone finds that they're being followed or looked into with more scrutiny than the average Internet user as a result of it.

Granted, someone doing the spying would have to royally slip up before the target suspect would find out...

Submission + - Every Time We Look at Neptune, We Find More Moons (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Though we’ve been exploring space for over a half century, there’s still plenty to find in our own backyard. Case in point: last week, Mark Showalter, a keen-eyed researching with the SETI institute, found a previously unseen moon orbiting Neptune in archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The moon, for the time being, is called S/2004 N 1. Preliminary estimates suggest it’s no more than 12 miles across, so small that from our Earthly vantage point i’s about 100 times as dim as the faintest star we can see. Even Voyager 2—the planet-hopping probe that flew past Neptune in 1989 and caught a brief glimpse of the planet’s moons and rings—didn’t see this moon. It is currently the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system and the 14th one we’ve found.

Submission + - ISPs Monitoring Your Internet Habits (goupstate.com) 1

Submitted by Tokolosh
Tokolosh writes: Are ISPs actively monitoring your web browsing? A man in Anderson, SC, was arrested and and has pleaded guilty to child pornography charges, after his internet provider reported him to authorities. What are the Safe Harbor implications for the provider? What other internet activity is being watched? Are all ISPs doing this?

Mandatory statement despising child pornography here.

Comment Re:Failed? (Score 1) 113

Scientific experiments, as those conducted in these studies, test for a "null hypothesis." In other words, they come up with a hypothesis (in this case, saying that video games do not diminish prosocial behaviour) and then seek to prove the opposite. In this way they are considering the possibility that video games actually do diminish that behaviour, and test for it. They were unable to prove that video games diminish prosocial behaviour - they failed to prove their null hypothesis, leaving their primary hypothesis correct.

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