54440747
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Andy Greenberg writes at Forbes that an NSA staffer who contacted Greenberg last month and asked not to be identified offers a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agency’s Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent. “That kid was a genius among geniuses,” says the NSA staffer. “NSA is full of smart people, but anybody who sat in a meeting with Ed will tell you he was in a class of his own. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The NSA co-worker adds that Snowden’s superiors were so impressed with his skills that he was at one point offered a position on the elite team of NSA hackers known as Tailored Access Operations, a secretive unit that gathers vast amounts of intelligence on terrorist financial networks, international money-laundering and drug operations, the readiness of foreign militaries, even the internal political squabbles of potential adversaries. Snowden unexpectedly turned it down and instead joined Booz Allen to work at NSA’s Threat Operation Center. One hint of Snowden's whistleblower conscience was that Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk to cite when arguing against NSA activities he thought might violate it. Snowden’s former colleague says that he or she has slowly come to understand Snowden’s decision to leak the NSA’s files. “I was shocked and betrayed when I first learned the news, but as more time passes I’m inclined to believe he really is trying to do the right thing and it’s not out of character for him. I don’t agree with his methods, but I understand why he did it,” he or she says. “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”
54435511
submission
wannabegeek2 writes:
check for dupes.
in an article which purportedly was carefully verified, a former coworker states that the NSA's current PR blitz amounts to a smear campaign against Mr. Snowden. Further, he describes him as a genius among genius's, who was given the access he needed by the NSA, and did not need to steal or dupe his coworkers to obtain passwords to accomplish his task.
50723419
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
The world’s first 3D-printed gun known as the Liberator has been treated as a technological marvel and a terrorist threat. Now it’s officially become a work of art. On Sunday, London’s Victoria & Albert museum of art and design announced that it’s buying two of the original Liberator printed guns from their creator, the libertarian hacker non-profit known as Defense Distributed, and will display them during its Design Festival. Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed's founder, calls the museum's acquisition of the gun a victory for his group: "It will now be this curated, permanent cultural provocation."
50402299
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
"It should come as no surprise to Bitcoin users that despite the pseudonymity the cryptocurrency offers, its transactions can be tracked. But University of California at San Diego researcher Sarah Meiklejohn proved that privacy problem more clearly than ever by showing a reporter that she could detect a specific point in Bitcoin's blockchain record of transactions where he had spent Bitcoins in exchange for marijuana on the Silk Road, the most popular online Bitcoin-based black market for drugs.
To simulate a law enforcement subpoena, the reporter for Forbes began by giving Meiklejohn a Bitcoin address associated with Forbes' account. But with just that information, Meiklejohn was able to draw on a "clustering" analysis she had performed to identify Silk Road addresses and match them with the one used in the .3 BTC drug buy. She admits that a user who took more efforts to obscure his or her Bitcoin address through a laundering service or other unidentified Bitcoin wallets would be harder to track."
49293691
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
General Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, may not have enjoyed being heckled during his keynote address last Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. But he almost got hit with a much messier form of criticism. An anonymous member of the Black Hat audience has revealed that he smuggled six dozen eggs into Alexander's talk and attempted to distribute them to five rows of the crowd in front of the stage, hoping to incite Black Hat's hackers and security professionals to start a yolk-spattered protest of the NSA's newly-confirmed mass surveillance programs.
The egg agitator says that he planned to throw the first egg himself, in order to inspire everyone else to follow suit. But to his disappointment, no one in the audience dared to even take an egg, not to mention throw one, and the cartons were instead confiscated by the conference hall's security guards.
49268553
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
At the Def Con hacker conference Saturday, MIT students David Lawrence and Eric Van Albert released a piece of code that will allow anyone to create a 3D-printable software model of any Schlage Primus key, despite Schlage’s attempts to prevent the duplication of the restricted keys. With just a flatbed scanner and their software tool, they were able to produce precise models of Primus keys that they uploaded to the 3D-printing services Shapeways and i.Materialise, who mailed them working copies of the keys in materials ranging from nylon to titanium. Primus high-security locks are used in government facilities, healthcare settings, and detention centers, and their keys are coded with two distinct sets of teeth, one on top and one on the side. That, along with a message that reads "do not duplicate" printed on the top of every key, has made them difficult to copy by normal means. With Lawrence and Van Albert's software, anyone can now scan or take a long-distance photo of any Primus key and recreate it for as little as $5.
48888141
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
At the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas early next month, security researchers Justin Engler and Paul Vines plan to show off the R2B2, or Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher, a piece of hardware they built for around $200 that can automatically punch PIN numbers at a rate of about one four-digit guess per second, fast enough to crack a typical Android phone's lock screen in 20 hours or less.
Engler and Vines built their bot, shown briefly in a preview video, from three $10 servomotors, a plastic stylus, an open-source Arduino microcontroller, a collection of plastic parts 3D-printed on their local hackerspace's Makerbot 3D printer, and a five dollar webcam that watches the phone's screen to detect if it's successfully guessed the password. The device can be controlled via USB, connecting to a Mac or Windows PC that runs a simple code-cracking program. The researchers plan to release both the free software and the blueprints for their 3D-printable parts at the time of their Def Con talk.
In addition to their finger-like R2B2, Engler and Vines are also working on another version of their invention that will instead use electrodes attached to a phone’s touchscreen, simulating capacitative screen taps with faster electrical signals. That bot, which they’re calling the Capacitative Cartesian Coordinate Brute-force Overlay or C3BO, remains a work in progress, Engler says, though he plans to have it ready for Def Con.
47071997
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
At the upcoming Black Hat security conference in late July, three researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology plan to show off a proof-of-concept charger that they say can be used to invisibly install malware on a device running the latest version of Apple’s iOS.
A description of their talk posted to the conference website describes how they were able to install whatever malware they wished on an Apple device within a minute of the user plugging it into their malicious charger, which they’re calling “Mactans" after the scientific name of a Black Widow spider. The malware-loaded USB plug is built around an open-source single-board computer known as a BeagleBoard, sold by Texas Instruments for a retail price of around $45. The researchers have contacted Apple about their exploit but haven't heard back from the company and aren't sharing more details of their hack until they do.
46691993
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
When the high-tech gunmakers Defense Distributed demonstrated earlier this month that they could 3D print an entire working gun, it was only a matter time of before that printed weapon's price and practicality dropped into the realm of normal consumers. Just a few weeks later, a couple of Wisconsin hobbyist gunsmiths have already managed to adapt Defense Distributed's so-called Liberator firearm and print it on a $1,725 Lulzbot 3D printer, a consumer grade machine that's far cheaper than the industrial quality Stratasys machine Defense Distributed used. They then proceeded to record their cheaper gun (dubbed the "Lulz Liberator") firing nine .380 rounds without any signs of cracking or melting. Eight of the rounds were fired from a single plastic barrel. (Defense Distributed only fired one through its prototype.) In total, the Lulz Liberator's materials cost around $25 and were printed over just 48 hours.
46353681
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
The battle for control of dangerous digital shapes may have just begun. On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org, while it reviews the files for compliance with export control laws for weapons known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
Of course, the files have already been downloaded 100,000 times and found there way to the Pirate Bay, so the State Department's data control attempts are likely futile.
Cody Wilson has agreed to take down the files from his website, but compares the move to the State Department investigation of Phillip Zimmermann for putting encryption software online in 1993, which was based on the same arms export laws. "It's PGP all over again," he says.
46330279
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
The promise of a fully 3D-printable gun is that it can spread via the Internet and entirely circumvent gun control laws. Two days after that digital weapon's blueprint first appeared online, it seems to be fulfilling that promise. Files for the printable gun known as that "Liberator" have been downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days, according to Defense Distributed, the group that created it. Those downloads were facilitated by Kim Dotcom's startup Mega, which Defense Distributed is using to host the Liberator's CAD files. And it's also been uploaded to the Pirate Bay, where it's one of the most popular files in the filesharing site's uncensorable 3D printing category.
46224551
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
For the last eight months, a group called Defense Distributed has been seeking to create the world's first entirely 3D-printed handgun. Now they have. The "Liberator," as the group calls its printable firearm, is made of sixteen components, fifteen of which were printed in plastic on a Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The only non-printed part is a common hardware store nail that serves as the gun's firing pin.
Last week, the Liberator was fired for the first time at a firing range and successfully shot a .380 caliber bullet using a remote firing setup. Over the weekend, Defense Distributed's founder, the anarchist and radical libertarian Cody Wilson, was bold enough to try firing it by hand. The results of that test, witnessed by a reporter, indicate that the era of the 3D-printed firearm may be upon us, for better or for worse.
45824441
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
In a cautionary tale for the coming "Internet of Things," hacker HD Moore gave a talk at the Infosec Southwest conference in Austin, showing how he was able to locate and access a hidden layer of vulnerable machines via 114,000 devices known as “serial servers” or “terminal servers”–systems that allow outmoded hardware to be accessed remotely over the Internet via their serial ports.
Analyzing a database of a year’s worth of Internet scan results he’s assembled, Moore discovered that thousands of devices had no authentication, weak or no encryption, default passwords, or had no automatic “log-off” functionality, leaving them pre-authenticated and ready to access. Moore says he could have in some cases switched off the ability to monitor traffic lights, disabled trucking companies’ gas pumps or faked credentials to get free fuel, sent fake alerts over public safety system alert systems, and changed environmental settings in buildings to burn out equipment or turn off refrigeration, leaving food stores to rot.
45702261
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
Bitcoin, despite what many users think, isn't really anonymous. Every transaction can be traced in the Bitcoin blockchain, making it in some ways even more difficult than traditional money to spend privately. But a group of cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University have come up with Zerocoin, an extension to the cryptographic currency that could make it truly anonymous and untraceable. If enough users adopted Zerocoin, it would represent an upgrade to Bitcoin's code that would allow any user to swap out his or her Bitcoins for Zerocoin tokens at any time and then redeem them for Bitcoins at will, using some clever cryptographic tricks to prevent anyone from tracing the tokens between those two transactions.
Until now, users who wanted to use Bitcoins for anonymous purposes (such as on the drug site Silk Road) have had to run them through a Bitcoin laundry service that mixes Bitcoins randomly to foil surveillance. But that's required depending on potentially shady third parties. Zerocoin would essentially build a laundry system into Bitcoin at the protocol level, without the need to trust anything other than the distributed code itself.
45590085
submission
Sparrowvsrevolution writes:
Bitcoin's recent spike and then collapse in value has convinced many that it's too unstable to use as a practical currency. But not the founder of Silk Road, the black market drug site that exclusively accepts Bitcoin in exchange for heroin, cocaine and practically every other drug imaginable. Silk Road's creator, who calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, broke his usual media silence to issue a short statement that Silk Road will survive Bitcoin's bubble and bust. The market's prices are generally pegged to the dollar, with prices in Bitcoin fluctuating to account for movements in the exchange rate. And Roberts explained that vendors on the site have the option to also hedge the Bitcoins that buyers place in escrow for their products, so that they can't lose money due to Bitcoin's volatility while the drugs are in the mail. As a result, only about 1,000 of the site's more than 11,000 product listings were taken down during the recent crash.
