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.
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."
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.
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.
60870845
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A year after leaked files exposed the National Security Agency's efforts to spy on citizens and companies in Brazil, previously unpublished chat logs obtained by Motherboard reveal that while under the FBI's supervision, Hector Xavier Monsegur, widely known by his online persona, "Sabu," facilitated attacks that affected Brazilian websites.
The operation raises questions about how the FBI uses global Internet vulnerabilities during cybercrime investigations, how it works with informants, and how it shares information with other police and intelligence agencies.
After his arrest in mid-2011, Monsegur continued to organize cyber attacks while working for the FBI. According to documents and interviews, Monsegur passed targets and exploits to hackers to disrupt government and corporate servers in Brazil and several other countries.
Details about his work as a federal informant have been kept mostly secret, aired only in closed-door hearings and in redacted documents that include chat logs between Monsegur and other hackers. The chat logs remain under seal due to a protective order upheld in court, but in April, they and other court documents were obtained by journalists at Motherboard and the Daily Dot.
60812785
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
CIUDAD JUAREZ — The man cuts a striking profile. He’s been dead for two years—a nameless hit-and-run victim, I’m told, left to bleed out on the side of some dusty road in this Mexico-US border town of 1.5 million people. The accident punched a hole in his forehead. From where I’m standing, hunched over an autopsy stretcher on which his body is strewn akimbo, I can see through to his pickled brain. If I didn’t know any better, there's still life in this man. It’s been 120 hours since Dr. Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas got to work. That’s when Hernández Cárdenas, an unassuming local dentist who splits his time practicing, teaching graduate forensic odontology courses at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and identifying the unidentified at the Juarez Forensic Science Lab, submerged this man’s gnarled, sun-scorched body into what Hernández Cárdenas affectionately calls the “Jacuzzi.”
60759199
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A hacker group from the Middle East known as Molerats attacked a wide range of major public sector organisations over April and May, including the BBC and a smattering of European governments, researchers revealed today. The latest attacks, which sought to establish espionage operations on targets’ digital infrastructure, took place between 29 April and 27 May, according to security technology vendor FireEye. The Molerats’ actions have added weight to concerns around growing cyber capability stemming from the Middle East. Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators, whose targets included both Israel and Palestine, as well as Turkey, Slovenia, Macedonia, New Zealand and Latvia. The hackers also went after government bodies in the US and the UK.
60626667
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If you still buy DVDs, you're killing the environment. Maybe that's a little extreme, but the environmental benefits of streaming a movie (or downloading it) rather than purchasing a DVD are staggering, according to a new US government study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households. It would have cut roughly 2 billion kilograms of carbon emissions. According to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters , even when you take into account cloud storage, data servers, the streaming device, streaming uses much less energy than purchasing a DVD.
If, like me, you're thinking, "who buys DVDs anymore, anyways," the answer is "a lot of people."
60588547
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The Edward Snowden saga is coming to a close. As a final act, Glenn Greenwald, who's been working closely with the whistleblower to publish leaked information about the National Security Agency, has said he will reveal a list of Americans that have been targeted by the NSA. And tonight, Snowden will be giving his first American television interview to NBC. It’s been a dizzying year of revelations about US government spying. Programs like PRISM—the ones capable of mass surveillance—have received the most media attention, and in some cases even become household names. But there are other things exposed in the string of leaks that have received relatively little media attention, despite presenting serious threats to privacy, freedom of speech, and the way we use the web. Here's a look back at some of those forgotten discoveries.
60544285
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
This morning, at the US district court of New York's Southern District, Judge Loretta Preska handed down a sentence to Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka "Sabu"—time served followed by one year supervised release. Monsegur's lenient sentencing took place in the same ceremonial courtroom where outlaw-hacktivist Jeremy Hammond—who committed cybercrimes unwittingly with the aid of Monsegur, an Anonymous hacker turned FBI informant—received his 10-year prison sentence last November. Monsegur entered the room to find a sparse crowd of journalists, three members of his family, and a couple dozen others awaiting the hearing, and 40 minutes later walked free. Citing a sentencing submission filed by the government on Friday afternoon, Monsegur's attorneys agreed with the motion to side-step his recommended sentencing of 259 to 317 months of jail time due to the ex-LulzSec leader's "extraordinary" help to the feds. Since his arrest in 2011, the former hacker he helped the FBI bust some 300 potential cyberattacks.
