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Government

Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops To Deceive Judges About Surveillance Tech 251

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-trust-us dept.
Advocatus Diaboli sends this excerpt from Wired: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails (PDF). At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect's location from a 'confidential source' rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.
The Internet

ICANN CEO Wants To Make Progress On Leaving US Control 73

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-you-love-us-anymore dept.
itwbennett writes: ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé hopes to make progress on preparations to take over running the world's central DNS servers from the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Agency when the organization meets in London next week. 'I think this is a meeting where the ICANN community has to deal with the fact, the good fact, that its relationship with the U.S. government, which characterized its birth, its existence and growth, has now run its course,' Chehadé said.
Bitcoin

US Marshals Accidentally Reveal Potential Bidders For Gov't-Seized Bitcoin 101

Posted by timothy from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.
jfruh (300774) writes "When the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road marketplace, they seized its assets, including roughly $18 million in bitcoin, and despite the government's ambivalence about the cryptocurrency, they plan to auction the bitcoin off to the highest bidder, as they do with most criminal assets. Ironically, considering many bitcoin users' intense desire for privacy, the U.S. Marshall service accidentally revealed the complete list of potential bidders by sending a message to everyone on the list and putting their addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field."
Crime

Chicago Adding Sensors For Public Monitoring 107

Posted by timothy from the keepin'-eye-on-yous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A research project dubbed the 'Array of Things' will add sensors for public monitoring throughout Chicago. The project is being started by a collaborative effort between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratories. The goal of the project is to build a permanent data collection infrastructure to monitor things that might help government officials, researchers and companies better understand the city environment. Sensors will examine various attributes such as air quality, wind, light, sound heat, precipitation, and of course cell phone data. Eventually the researchers would like to see the sensors exist as a public utility throughout the entire city to help public, private and academic partners learn about the city. Researchers say there is nothing to fear about privacy because the sensors will only count people by observing cellphone traffic. With such assurances from researchers working in a shining example of transparency and democratic freedom like Chicago, what could possible go wrong?"
Communications

How Secret Partners Expand NSA's Surveillance Dragnet 63

Posted by timothy from the if-they're-gonna-do-it-anyhow dept.
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as "third-party partners," are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables. The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners "provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment." This allows the agency to covertly tap into "congestion points around the world" where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
Communications

IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation 465

Posted by Soulskill from the conspiracy-theory-activate dept.
phrackthat writes with an update to Friday's news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS's apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. ... Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.
Data Storage

Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews 289

Posted by timothy from the genuine-panaphonics dept.
An anonymous reader writes Over the past few months, we've seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different, but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they've been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn't have purchased.
Crime

Man Behind Hacks of Bush Family and Other Celebs Indicted In the US 65

Posted by Soulskill from the bet-you-wish-you'd-stood-in-bed dept.
New submitter criticalmass24 writes: 42-year-old Marcel Lehel Lazar, better known as Guccifer, the hacker that gained unauthorized access to email and social network accounts of high-profile public figures, has been charged in the United States. According to the Department of Justice, "[F]rom December 2012 to January 2014, Lazar hacked into the e-mail and social media accounts of high-profile victims, including a family member of two former U.S. presidents, a former U.S. Cabinet member, a former member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a former presidential adviser. After gaining unauthorized access to their e-mail and social media accounts, Lazar publicly released his victims’ private e-mail correspondence, medical and financial information, and personal photographs. The indictment also alleges that in July and August 2013, Lazar impersonated a victim after compromising the victim’s account." The full indictment can be read online.
Earth

New Evidence For Oceans of Water Deep In the Earth 190

Posted by samzenpus from the there-is-water-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean dept.
techtech (2016646) writes Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form—the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle—the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir. This research was published in Science.
Android

New Permission System Could Make Android Much Less Secure 249

Posted by Soulskill from the this-app-is-requesting-permission-to-shock-you-with-a-tazer dept.
capedgirardeau writes: An update to the Google Play store now groups app permissions into collections of related permissions, making them much less fine grained and potentially misleading for users. For example, the SMS permissions group would allow an app access to both reading and sending SMS messages. The problem is that once an app has access to the group of permissions, it can make use of any of the allowed actions at any time without ever informing the user. As Google explains: "It's a good idea to review permissions groups before downloading an app. Once you've allowed an app to access a permissions group, the app may use any of the individual permissions that are part of that group. You won't need to manually approve individual permissions updates that belong to a permissions group you've already accepted."
Science

Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose 82

Posted by Soulskill from the wood-is-the-new-steel dept.
Zothecula writes "A team of researchers working at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology claim to have developed a way to make cellulose fibers stronger than steel on a strength-to-weight basis. In what is touted as a world first, the team from the institute's Wallenberg Wood Science Center claim that the new fiber could be used as a biodegradable replacement for many filament materials made today from imperishable substances such as fiberglass, plastic, and metal. And all this from a substance that requires only water, wood cellulose, and common table salt to create it. The full academic paper is available from Nature Communications."
Networking

Cisco Opposes Net Neutrality 337

Posted by Soulskill from the noted-and-filed dept.
angry tapir writes: All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite net neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems has said. Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations. "Different bits do matter differently. We need to ensure that we have a system that allows this to occur."

Comment Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon (Score 1) 132

by Wolfrider (#47208323) Attached to: Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released

--Sorry, I know Mint is one of the most popular distros and I'm a longtime user - but if you take a proper Debian base and modify it to the point where it can't be *upgraded* properly, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. I stopped using RPM-based distros exactly because of the upgrade headaches a long time ago.

--I went with Xubuntu this time around and haven't noticed the difference much - altho it appears to be much more stable than the last Mint(15/Olivia) I had on this laptop.

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