61692353
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A terrible number of words have been written about Breaking Bad , yet none have struck upon the irony at its core. For all of the cult hit’s vaunted fine-brush realism and sly cultural references, the show never even winked at the real world “blue” that grew up alongside it. During the five years Heisenberg spent as a blue-meth cook, the nation experienced a nonfictional explosion in the manufacture and sale of sapphire pills and azure capsules containing amphetamine. This other “blue,” known by its trade names Adderall and Vyvanse, found its biggest market in classrooms like Walter White’s. As this blue speed is made and sold in anodyne corporate environments, the drama understandably focused on blue meth and its buyers, usually depicted as jittery tweakers picking at lesions and wearing rags on loan from the cannibal gangs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
61588603
submission
hypnosec writes:
The ICO has issued a mildly toned reminder about how people and organisations need to be mindful about privacy laws in the UK while they are using Google Glass. Andrew Paterson, Senior Technology Officer at ICO notes that the primary issue with Google Glass is whether people have been given notice if they are filmed. Citing instances of Google Glass bans in some bars in the US, Paterson notes that companies in the UK will also be considering their own responses and we anticipate that there will be quite a few businesses which may ban Google Glass. Paterson reminds users that use of such wearable devices should be in compliance with the law and that they should be operated in line with the requirements with the country’s Data Protection Act.
61529113
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a ruling anticipated for years, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that police must have a warrant to search a person's cell phone. The ruling, which is strong in its defense of Fourth Amendment rights in the digital space, is a landmark decision for the treatment and protection of individuals' data.
"Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience," reads Chief Justice John Robert's opinion. "With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans 'the privacies of life.'"
"The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," it continues. "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant."
61459995
submission
hypnosec writes:
Cisco has released a new experimental block cipher dubbed FNR or Flexible Naor and Reingold, which it claims is suitable for data with less than 128 bits or where preservation of input length is a must. Sashank Dara, software engineer at Cisco, explains that traditional block ciphers including AES work well with data of sizes greater than 128, 192 or 256 bits, but in cases wherein data transmission involves small chunks of data like IP addresses and MAC addresses and AES is used, the small blocks of data get bloated because of the padding requirement. This is where FNR comes in handy as it proposes “invertible matrices to provide a neat and generic way to achieve pair-wise independence for any arbitrary length”. Cisco has offered the code at github under the LPGLv2 and has also provided an application demoing IPV4 address encryption.
61392777
submission
hypnosec writes:
A new movement dubbed the Open Wireless Movement is asking users to open up their private Wi-Fi networks for total strangers – a random act of kindness – with an aim of better securing networks and facilitating better use of finite broadband resources. The movement is supported by non-profit and pro-internet rights organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, Open Rights Group, and Free Press among others. EFF is planning to unveil one such innovation – Open Wireless Router – at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference to be held next month on New York. This firmware will allow individuals to share their private Wi-Fi to total strangers to anyone without a password.
61387315
submission
hypnosec writes:
Google has forked OpenSSL to create its own cryptography library dubbed BoringSSL – something that Mountain View reveals was done because maintaining the different patches Google created over years was getting difficult to manage over different code bases. Adam Langley, a widely respected cryptography engineer and Google employee, revealed that he started tidying up the OpenSSL code long before Heartbleed was discovered. Google had been busy applying a series of patches on top of OpenSSL, few of which have already been into main OpenSSL repository, but as multiple Google products including Chrome and Android have been dependent on the patches they had built, it was becoming complex to handle these patches “across multiple code bases is getting to be too much”. For this reason they decided to switch to a model where they import changes from OpenSSL instead of the other way around.
61369347
submission
hypnosec writes:
Security researcher over at CARI.net has revealed that thousands of servers fitted with Supermicro motherboards are just waiting there, storing admin passwords in clear text, to be probed by hackers and attackers. The plain text password threat is to do with the baseboard management controller (BMC) – a motherboard component – using which administrators can monitor physical status of servers including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. Wikholm notes that it’s not just the password file that you download via the port, but the entire /nv directory is up for grabs and anyone can download “server.pem file, the wsman admin password and the netconfig files”.
61297429
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Weeks after he started working quietly as an FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his online alias "Sabu," led a cyber attack against one of the bureau's very own IT contractors.
In July 2011, at Monsegur's urging, members of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacking collective Anonymous, took advantage of compromised log-in credentials belonging to a contractor with a top secret security clearance employed at the time by ManTech International.
According to chat logs recorded by Monsegur at the behest of the FBI and obtained by Motherboard, the informant directed hackers to pilfer as much data as possible from ManTech's servers as investigators stood by. Stolen data was published as the third installment of AntiSec's "Fuck FBI Friday" campaign: a collection of leaks intended to embarrass the same federal agency that presided over the hack and others.
61268635
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
It hopefully doesn't come as a surprise that your friends shape who you are. But we tend to think of that on a micro level: If your close circle of friends tends to have tattoos, wear polo shirts, or say "chill" a lot, it's quite possible that you'll emulate them over time—and they'll emulate you too.
But what happens on a macro scale, when your friend circle doesn't just include the dozen people you actually hang out with regularly, but also the hundreds or thousands of acquaintances you have online? All of those feeds may seem filled with frivolities from random people (and they are!) but that steady stream of life updates—photos, rants, slang—are probably shaping you more than you think.
A massive Facebook study recently published in PNAS found solid evidence of so-called emotional contagion—emotional states spreading socially, like a virus made of emoji—on the social network.
61178389
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You're likely familiar with the theory of how the Moon formed: a stray body smashed into our young Earth, heating the planet and flinging debris into its orbit. That debris coalesced and formed the Moon. The impact theory still holds, but a team of geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France has refined the date, finding that the Moon is about 60 million years older than we thought. As it turns out, that also means the Earth is 60 million years older than previously thought, which is a particularly cool finding considering just how hard it is to estimate the age of our planet.
61160847
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The intelligence firm at the center of a notorious cybersecurity breach that affected top government officials failed to institute standard security measures prior to the attack, according to a newly leaked report. In December 2011, a group of skilled hackers broke into the network of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), compromising the personal data of some 860,000 customers, including a former U.S. vice president, CIA director, and secretary of state, among others. For Stratfor, a Texas-based geopolitical intelligence and consulting firm, the incident was an international embarrassment that caused roughly $3.78 million in total damages—and all of it could’ve been avoided by meeting common fraud prevention requirements.
61054725
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
When HBO host John Oliver called for Internet trolls to deluge the Federal Communications Commission with comments about net neutrality, he may not have expected for the FCC's site to get shut down. That, however, is exactly what happened, but it wasn’t because Oliver’s viewers overwhelmed the site with public comments, as was widely reported. In fact, shortly after Oliver’s 13-minute rant last Sunday, the FCC’s website was compromised by attackers who effectively shut down the site’s commenting system using a database Denial of Service attack, the FCC confirmed to Motherboard on Tuesday.
61054545
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Following broad security scares like that caused by the Heartbleed bug, it can be frustratingly difficult to find out if a site you use often still has gaping flaws. But a little known community of software developers is trying to change that, by creating a searchable, public index of websites with known security issues. Think of Project Un1c0rn as a Google for site security. Launched on May 15th, the site's creators say that so far it has indexed 59,000 websites and counting. The goal, according to its founders, is to document open leaks caused by the Heartbleed bug, as well as "access to users' databases" in Mongo DB and MySQL. According to the developers, those three types of vulnerabilities are most widespread because they rely on commonly used tools. For example, Mongo databases are used by popular sites like LinkedIn, Expedia, and SourceForge, while MySQL powers applications such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, and are even used by Twitter, Google and Facebook.
61040657
submission
hypnosec writes:
Starting today businesses and individuals in the UK will be able to register a new national web address ‘.uk’ and drop their existing ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.com’ suffix in favour of a shorter and snappier domain name. The entire process along with the transition is being overseen by private yet not-for-profit organisation Nominet, which has already started notifying existing customers with a ‘.co.uk’ domain of their chance to adopt a ‘.uk’ domain. Nominet will reserve all ‘.uk’ domain names, which already have a ‘.co.uk’ counterparts, for the next five years offering registrants the chance to adopt the new domain and to keep cyber squatters at bay.
61030237
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Regardless of the hobby's legality, flying drones have been a touchy subject with some members of the public—namely, those worried about being filmed or photographed in public. In at least one case, that fear has turned violent: A woman was recently arrested in Connecticut for assaulting a hobby drone pilot. The whole thing, naturally, was captured on tape, which was originally posted by the pilot, Austin Haughwout, but has since been taken down by YouTube. Part of the video has made its way over to LiveLeak, which you can watch here. As you'll see, the woman, who is identified in arrest reports as Andrea Mears, is shown calling the police—she says that Haughwout is "taking pictures of people on the beach" with a "helicopter plane." Mears then attacks Haughwout, rips his shirt, and appears to get him in a leg lock. She puts her fingers in his mouth, and they exchange some words.
