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Submission + - Trump's Executive Order Eliminates Privacy Act Protections for Foreigners

Submitted by Kernel Kurtz
Kernel Kurtz writes: January 28 is supposed to be Data Privacy Day, so it seems fitting in an alternative sort of way that US President Trump just signed an executive order that eliminates Privacy Act protections for foreigners. As a non-American, I find it curious that the person who says he wants to bring jobs to America is simply confirming the post-Snowden belief that America is not a safe place to do business. Does anyone else see a conflict here?

Submission + - Twitter Releases National Security Letters (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, Twitter joined the ranks of Yahoo, Cloudflare and Google by announcing it had received two national security letters, one in 2015 and one in 2016. The NSLs came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government’s demands. The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time. In the newly-published NSLs, the FBI asked Twitter to turn over “the name, address, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records” of two users. Twitter associate general counsel Elizabeth Banker said that the company provided a “very limited set of data” in response to the requests, but did not make clear exactly what kind of data Twitter provided. “Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive,” Banker wrote in a blog post. “We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when ‘classification’ prevents speech on issues of public importance.”

Submission + - US Intelligence Seeks a Universal Translator For Text Search In Any Language (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the U.S. Intelligence Community’s own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA’s Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. The specific goal, according to IARPA’s announcement, is an “‘English-in, English-out’ information retrieval system that, given a domain-sensitive English query, will retrieve relevant data from a large multilingual repository and display the retrieved information in English as query-biased summaries.” Users would be able to search vast numbers of documents with a two-part query: the first giving the “domain” of the search in terms of what sort of information they are seeking (for example, “Government,” “Science,” or “Health”) and the second an English word or phrase describing the information sought (the examples given in the announcement were “zika virus” and “Asperger's syndrome”). The system would be used in situations like natural disasters or military interventions in remote locations where the military has little or no local language expertise. Those taking on the MATERIAL program will be given access to a limited set of machine translation and automatic speech recognition training data from multiple languages ”to enable performers to learn how to quickly adapt their methods to a wide variety of materials in various genres and domains,” the announcement explained. “As the program progresses, performers will apply and adapt these methods in increasingly shortened time frames to new languages... Since language-independent approaches with quick ramp up time are sought, foreign language expertise in the languages of the program is not expected.” The good news for the broader linguistics and technology world is that IARPA expects the teams competing on MATERIAL to publicly publish their research. If successful, this moonshot for translation could radically change how accessible materials in many languages are to the rest of the world.
 

Submission + - Why Have Hackers Failed on Trump's Tax Returns? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Given the size of Donald Trunp's holdings, the documentation of his financial holdings must be enormous. His tax returns are undoubtedly worked on by large staffs in multiple companies. How is it possible that no hacker has found them yet? Wikileaks recently stated they will publish the returns, and still...nothing. Is it really imaginable that not a single hacker has managed to find any part of these widely-distributed documents?

Submission + - Trump Wasn't Wrong To Secure @POTUS with a Gmail Account (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: The world is having a collective freak out about the serial (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/donald-trump-phone-social-media-security.html?_r=0) security lapses (https://www.rt.com/usa/375109-trump-administration-private-server-rnc/) of the newly enshrined Trump administration. That includes the revelation, this week, that the Leader of the Free World is using a lowly Google Gmail account to secure @POTUS, the official Twitter account of the U.S.’s Chief Executive. (https://theintercept.com/2017/01/26/donald-trump-is-using-a-private-gmail-account-to-secure-the-most-powerful-twitter-account-in-the-world/)

For a President and Administration as unconventional as Mr. Trump, the news about how The Most Powerful Twitter Account in the World was being secured was just another data point in a raucous and singularly unprofessional first week in office – the online equivalent of trash talking the United States’ second largest trading partner. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/politics/mexico-wall-tax-trump.html)

But is having the Chief Executive’s Twitter account secured by a Google Gmail account really a security lapse? Not necessarily, according to security experts. In fact, Gmail may offer superior security to government-run platforms, The Security Ledger argues. (https://securityledger.com/2017/01/trump-securing-potus-with-gmail-is-reasonable-heres-why/)

“Companies like Google and Microsoft have invested billions of dollars in securing their infrastructure,” said John Ackerly, the CEO at the firm Virtru, a secure email provider. “If want your data to be secure, it’s tough to beat Google, Microsoft or Amazon’s cloud,” he said.

Indeed, Gmail offers a wide range back-end and front end security features that make it among the most difficult platforms to compromise – providing users take advantage of those features. Among them: detection of nation-state attacks, protection against account takeovers, strong encryption for all Gmail data both at rest and in transit, and the availability of strong second-factor authentication options such token based authentication and soft second factors like SMS codes and Google Authenticator.

In contrast, the U.S. government has struggled to secure its own IT assets. In fact, a report by GAO in 2015 listed “personal identity verification” (http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/670936.pdf) as a top cyber security challenge for government agencies. By GAO’s accounting, only 41 percent of user accounts at 23 civilian agencies had required these credentials for accessing agency systems.

Submission + - Tesla CEO Elon Musk Joins President Trump's New Manufacturing Council (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla CEO Elon Musk was already on President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, but the White House announced today that he will also be joining the administration’s new manufacturing council, a private sector group that advises the U.S. secretary of commerce. He headed a meeting on Monday at the White House. Musk was present along with several other industry leaders who are now also formally joining the manufacturing council. CNBC reports: "The group of business leaders includes Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and chief executives of large American companies like Ford, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Richard Trumka, president of the labor federation AFL-CIO, will also give advice." As we recently reported, while Musk’s mission to accelerate the advent of renewable energy might seem at odd with Trump’s plan to unlock fossil fuel reserve, but Musk is betting that job creation is more important to the new President than simply satisfying the oil industry. If Trump wants to be the champion of job creation and Tesla shows that renewables create a lot of jobs, then their interests are aligned. Tesla currently employs over 30,000 people, more than 25,000 of which are in the U.S. The company wants to add over 3,000 manufacturing jobs at its factory in Fremont, California, 1,000 at its solar panel factory in Buffalo, New York, and over to 6,500 at the Gigafactory in Nevada.

Submission + - Toshiba will spin off a portion of its memory business to WD (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Toshiba, which invented NAND flash, plans to sell off an as of yet undisclosed portion of its memory business, including its solid-state drive unit, to Western Digital. Toshiba is spinning the business off to WD, a business ally, because it hopes in the long run the Toshiba-WD alliance will enable an expansion in NAND flash production capacity and increased efficiency in storage product development. Toshiba's solvency and fundraising ability are also in trouble because of a $1.9 billion accounting scandal and a multi-billion dollar loss related to a nuclear plant purchase. Last week, Toshiba announced its share price had tumbled 13% after reports that its nuclear power business had lost $4.4 billion. Currently, Toshiba and WD together represent 35% of global NAND flash production; Samsung leads that market with 36% of production. "Toshiba wants to put its memory business in a more stable financial position," said Sean Yang, research director of DRAMeXchange. "Facing mounting operational and competitive pressure, the spun-off entity will be more effective in raising cash to stay afloat or expand."

Submission + - Intelligence agency opens $325k automated fingerprint gathering competition (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The idea behind the competition, called the “Nail to Nail (N2N) Fingerprint Challenge” – which offers $325,000 worth of prizes – is to develop a system that allows for more distinguishing data to be collected from fingerprint biometrics but also eliminates the time and cost associated with using human operators, IARPA said. N2N fingerprints capture the entire fingerprint from the edge of one finger nail bed to the other.

Submission + - 85% of the world's governments are corrupt (newatlas.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: According to one think tank that studies corruption in government, 85% of the world lives under governments that are essentially corrupt.

“Corruption” is defined by Transparency International (TI) as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” Each year since 1995, TI has published a Corruption Perceptions Index that scores the world’s nations out of 100 for their public sector honesty and the just-released 2016 report paints the same bleak picture we’ve been seeing now for two decades except it’s getting worse.

According to the data, despite the illusion of elected government in half the world’s countries, democracy is losing. Only two countries scored 90 out of 100 this year, and just 54 of the 176 countries (30%) assessed in the report scored better than 50. Fifty percent might have constituted a pass in a High School arithmetic test, but for an elected government to be so inept at carrying out the will of the electorate, it is a clear betrayal of the people. The average country score this year is a paltry 43, indicating endemic corruption in a country’s public sector is the norm.

Even more damning is that more countries declined than improved in this year’s results.

Not surprisingly, the countries at the bottom of the list are almost all Middle Eastern nations, all of whom are the source of most of the world’s terrorism and Islamic madness. The few others are those trying to become communist paradises, Venezuela and North Korea.

Submission + - Fifty years ago today: the Apollo 1 launchpad fire (nasaspaceflight.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Fifty years ago Friday, the first – but sadly not the last – fatal spaceflight accident struck NASA when a fire claimed the lives of Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White during a training exercise at Launch Complex 34. The accident, a major setback for the struggling Apollo program, ushered in the first understanding of the “bad day” effects of schedule pressure for spaceflight and brought with it words and reminders that still echo today.

The article provides a very detailed and accurate look at the history and causes of the accident, as well as its consequences, which even today influence American space engineering.

Submission + - Police and FAA Are Making It Impossible To Use Drones To Document Protests (vocativ.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Last November, an aerial drone flown by a member of the resistance camp opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline captured dramatic footage of riot police blasting crowds with water cannons as temperatures dipped below freezing, sending 17 of the camp’s occupants to the hospital with injuries and hypothermia.

The video quickly spread on social media, spurring global news coverage of the fight against the oil pipeline, which saw activists clash with police and security forces in tense standoffs last year. A few weeks later, the Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of the pipeline, which had encroached on Native American sacred lands and threatened water supplies near North Dakota’s Standing Rock reservation.

It was another example of how drones have become a crucial technology, allowing activists and journalists to document protests and hold police accountable for abuses. But as a new era of civil resistance dawns under the Trump administration, at the Standing Rock site and in anti-Trump demonstrations across the country, drone experts say police and government have made it unnecessarily difficult — sometimes impossible — for civilians to deploy drones at large protests.

Just a few days after the video from Standing Rock went viral, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave permission to local authorities to effectively ban all civilian drone flights in 4 mile radius above the Oceti Sakowin resistance camp and drill site. The same thing happened two years earlier, during the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri: Police were granted what is called a Temporary Flight Restriction, or TFR, which legally restricts airspace above a designated area to law enforcement and emergency aircraft. In Ferguson, the explicit goal was to stop news helicopters and drones from observing the Black Lives Matter protests, where cops were firing tear gas and menacing protesters with military vehicles and weapons.

Submission + - At-home brain-zapping treatment for depression may soon be mainstream (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: This isn't old-school brain zapping: It's not electroshock therapy, in which doctors flood a depressed patient's brain with some 900 milliamps of current to cause a seizure and something like a mood reset. This is tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation), which would let psychiatrists send their depressed patients home with a brain-zapping headband that sends perhaps 2 milliamps of current through specific portions of their brains. A doctor's prescription might call for the patient to do a 20-minute stimulation session daily for a few weeks, then less frequent maintenance sessions.

While tDCS is being investigated as a treatment for all sorts of neuropsychiatric disorders, many researchers and doctors think depression may be the killer app. A South Korean company called Ybrain thinks its consumer-friendly headband for depression will be the product that makes this treatment mainstream — first in Korea, then in Europe, then in the United States and around the world.

Comment Can authentication be distributed? (Score 1) 45

by Toe, The (#52577495) Attached to: Researchers Discover 110 Snooping Tor Nodes

I always assumed relays of any kind are untrustworthy. Even if there is a group of admins regulating them, that's still prone to social engineering.

Might it be possible to have relays cross-check each other? Way over my head technically: I can't imagine if it's possible to run checks that would prove validity. But it seems like the only possible solution: distribute the authority instead of trying to centralize it.

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