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Security

Submission + - Hackers Raid Mass Killer's Email Accounts for Info (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: After the recent hacking of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik Behring's Twitter account, it seems that the same group of hackers has also decided to compromise two of his email accounts. They sent the information they found within the accounts to Norwegian freelance investigative reporter Kjetil Stormark and asked him to deliver it to the police. A wise decision, especially for a group of hackers allegedly led by a 17-year-old, since Norway's strong source protection law should protect their identities from being exposed.

Submission + - Court Says Sending Too Many Emails Is Hacking (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An appeals court has ruled that having people send a company a lot of emails (in this case, a union protesting a company's business practices) qualifies as hacking under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act. We're not even talking about a true DDoS action here, but just a bunch of protest emails. Part of the problem is that the company apparently set up their email to only hold a small number of emails in their inbox, and the court seems to think the union should take the blame for stuffing those inboxes.
Facebook

Submission + - Germany: Facebook's Facial Recognition is illegal (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by
fysdt
fysdt writes: "Although we think it's generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook's auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That's right—Facebook in its current state is now illegal. Deep Scheiße, Zuckerberg.

The German government—which possesses perhaps the world's most adamant privacy laws as a result of postwar abuse—considers The Book's facial recognition a violation of "the right to anonymity," The Atlantic reports."
Government

Submission + - NSA Hiring At Black Hat (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "It may seem strange that the US government would be recruiting tech talent at Black Hat, a security conference whose participants have a notorious ambivalence about keeping within the letter of the law. But the NSA — a shadowy organization with its own reputation for dodgy behavior — is there recruiting, and pitching itself as a haven for geeks."

Submission + - Senators Want Secret Warrantless Wiretap Renewal (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of Senators are meeting in secret today, while most people are focused on the "debt ceiling" issue, in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which expressly allowed warrantless wiretapping in the US. The law isn't set to expire until next year, but some feel that the debt ceiling crisis is a good distraction to pass the extension without having to debate the issue in public. The meeting is being held in secret, but it's not classified, so people can demand to know how their Senator voted.
Music

Submission + - Spotify Sued For Patent Infringement (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Celebrated online music player Spotify just entered the US market a few weeks ago, and already it's being sued for patent infringement. Welcome to America! The patent in question is a very very broad patent on distribution of music in a digital form, which basically describes how anyone would ever distribute digital music. The company suing, PacketVideo, has no competing product. It just wants money from the company that actually innovated.
Privacy

Submission + - Flying Drone Can Sniff WiFi & Snoop on Cell Ph (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: "At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD cameras, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset, a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.

“This is like Black Hat’s greatest hits,” Tassey says. “And it flies.”

On top of cracking wifi networks, this year WASP also performs a new trick: impersonating the GSM cell phone towers used by AT&T and T-Mobile to trick phones into connecting to the plane rather than their carrier, allowing the drone to record conversations and text messages on a 32 gigs of storage. A 4G T-mobile card routes the connection through voice-over-Internet or traditional voice connections to avoid dropping the call. "
Science

Submission + - New NASA Data Blows Gaping Hole in Global Warming (forbes.com)

Submitted by d3ac0n
d3ac0n writes: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. (PDF Warning)The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Submission + - New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming (yahoo.com) 2

Submitted by DaSpudMan
DaSpudMan writes: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.
Microsoft

Submission + - PCMag's first interview with Bill Gates in 1981 (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hot the heels of MS-DOS's 30th birthday (yesterday), PCMag has re-published its interview with Bill Gates from 1981 which comes from the very first print edition of PC Magazine. The interview mainly discusses the genesis of the IBM PC, but it also has a section on Bill's predictions for the next five years.

Submission + - Girls Go Geek Again! (fogcreek.com) 1

Submitted by
nessus42
nessus42 writes: ""Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.... And then the women left. In droves. ...it looks like women are now returning to computer science.""
Security

Submission + - War texting lets hackers unlock car doors via SMS (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Software that lets drivers unlock car doors and even start their vehicles using a mobile phone could let car thieves do the very same things, according to computer security researchers at iSec Partners. Don Bailey and fellow iSec researcher Mathew Solnik say they've figured out the protocols that some of these software makers use to remote control the cars, and they've produced a video showing how they can unlock a car and turn the engine on via a laptop. According to Bailey, it took them about two hours to figure out how to intercept wireless messages between the car and the network and then recreate them from his laptop. Bailey will discuss the research at next week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, but he isn't going to name the products they've hacked — they've looked at two so far — or provide full technical details of their work until the software makers can patch them.
Security

Submission + - Aaron Barr Bows Out of DEFCON After Legal Threat (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr says he will withdraw from a planned appearance at the DEFCON conference in the face of threatened legal action over his plans to take part in a panel discussion there.

Barr notified DEFCON organizers on Wednesday that he was withdrawing from the Aug. 6 panel discussion after attorneys representing HBGary Federal threatened to file an injunction against him if he did not withdraw from the panel immediately. The incident is just the latest in a series of conflicts between Barr and HBGary Federal following attacks by the anarchic hacking group Anonymous on February 5.
Government

Submission + - Can the NSA Track Your Phone's Location? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Responding to questions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday, Matthew Olsen, the NSA's general counsel, said that the NSA 'may', under 'certain circumstances' have the authority to track U.S. citizens by intercepting location data from cell phones, but it's 'very complicated.' 'There's no need to panic, or start shopping for aluminum-foil headwear,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty, but clearly the NSA has been thinking about it enough 'that the agency's chief lawyer was able to speak intelligently about it off the cuff while interviewing for a different job.'"

Submission + - Physicist Claims Fukushima Disaster Health Risk Gr (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by baosol
baosol writes: Physicist Curt Busby contends that the ICRP, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, grossly underestimates the health risk of the Fukushima disaster, which could lead to over 200,000 more cases of cancer in the next 50 years than officially predicted in Japan – and even more worldwide.
Dr. Busby’s analysis is based on his theory that low dose ionizing radiation causes more cellular damage than the official standards set by the ICRP’s model, which was developed after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His work is on how these low doses of radiation are much more potent when they break down or are excited by Gamma radiation than generally believed, and that the risk of them damaging cells and DNA is therefore underestimated. Given the close proximity of the disaster to Tokyo and the generally high population density of the island nation, the cancer risk would be higher than that of the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown which occurred in a region with a relatively low population.

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