53747553
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Thor, He-Man) reports that US Customs now requires a Video Declaration Form be completed for any imported DVDs. The form requires that you "declare the the films/videos contain no obscene or immoral matter, nor any matter advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the United States, nor any threat to take the life of or inflict bodily harm upon any person in the United States."
53609957
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The latest from the front lines in the War on Dignity:
In 2012, Canadian Ellen Richardson was hospitalized for clinical depression. This past Monday she tried to board a plane to New York for a $6,000 Caribbean cruise. DHS denied her entry, citing supposedly private medical records listing her hospitalization.
53475917
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document.
This plan is remarkably similar to the way the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, aka "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation," with an audiotape they got by bugging his bedroom.
53379127
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Newegg, an online retailer that has made a name for itself fighting the non-practicing patent holders sometimes called "patent trolls," sits on the losing end of a lawsuit tonight. An eight-person jury came back shortly after 7:00pm and found that the company infringed all four asserted claims of a patent owned by TQP Development
53189209
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
In the wake of the trial of Jeremy Hammond, an Anonymous activist who received a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to hacking the company, WikiLeaks released its final batch of Stratfor files—and it’s potentially scandalous.
According to leaked files, Walmart tasked Stratfor with investigating the alleged extramarital affairs of a CEO who worked for one of the corporation’s global competitors. It’s presented in the context of job recruitment, but, given the competitive nature of the businesses involved, the effort could be construed as an attempt at corporate espionage.
53029325
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Yes, there’s yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will effect the kinds of services you’re offered.
Based out of L.A.’s “Silicon Beach,” Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar “verify that you received this code” texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.
53004087
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
In early-2013, independent security researcher, Evan “treefort” Booth, began working to answer one simple question: Can common items sold in airports after the security screening be used to build lethal weapons? As it turns out, even a marginally “MacGyver-esque” attacker can breeze through terminal gift shops, restaurants, magazine stands and duty-free shops to find everything needed to wage war on an airplane.
52898433
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you're connected to. What could possibly go wrong?
52862825
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Turns out the new kinect on the xbox one is so accurate that it can see your junk through your jeans.
52737753
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The New York Times' editorial board has made a disappointing endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even as the actual text of the agreement remains secret. That raises two distressing possibilities: either in an act of extraordinary subservience, the Times has endorsed an agreement that neither the public nor its editors have the ability to read. Or, in an act of extraordinary cowardice, it has obtained a copy of the secret text and hasn't yet fulfilled its duty to the public interest to publish it.
52221483
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Not one single person detained by the TSA has ever been convicted on terrorism charges. So, in what appears to be a twisted attempt to stay relevant, they are getting into the debt collection business. According to this article at the NY Times, if you are even "accused of violating security regulations" they will hand over your personal information to debt collection agencies.
51977737
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?
The answer is simple but subtle: There are good reasons to protect against insider attacks, and a court order is an insider attack.
51760591
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Florida's hanging chads ain't going nothing on Azerbaijan. Fully a day before the polls were to open, election results were accidentally released via an official smartphone app, confirming what everybody already knew — the election was rigged from the beginning. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008.
50150527
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Forget the NSA — the DEA has been working hand-in-hand with AT&T on the Hemisphere database of records of every call that passes through AT&T's phone switches going back as far as 1987. The government pays AT&T for contractors who site side-by-side with DEA agents and do phone records searches for them.
49863069
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The latest twist in the NSA coverage sounds like something out of a dime-store romance novel — NSA agents eavesdropping on their current and former girlfriends. Official categories of spying have included SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) and now the NSA has added a new category to the lexicon LOVEINT which is surely destined to be a popular hashtag now.
