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Comment Re:That's a great plan... (Score 1) 197

by cyrano.mac (#46329375) Attached to: US Carriers Said To Have Rejected Kill Switch Technology Last Year
Yeah, but what's real funny is that every GSM phone already has a kill switch. The use has been abandoned years ago, after a Danish wholesales cie sold a couple of thousand phones to an operator in Spain. One of those got stolen. The operator activated the kill switch, rendering the phone useless. Only to find out ALL the phones stopped working. The cie in Danmark had cloned the same IMEI number to every phone...

Submission + - Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.

Defenders of the program have argued that Congress acquiesced to that secret interpretation of the law by twice extending its expiration without changes. But the report rejects that idea as “both unsupported by legal precedent and unacceptable as a matter of democratic accountability.”

The report also scrutinizes in detail a handful of investigations in which the program was used, finding “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

Submission + - Blackhole Exploit Author Arrested In Russia (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Reports that the author of the Blackhole exploit kit has been arrested in Russia have been confirmed. The creator, called Paunch,has been nabbed, according to Troels Oerting, head of the European Cybercrime Centre. Blackhole was being updated daily until four days ago, which is more evidence of the arrest — although security researchers warn there are still functioning versions out there.

Submission + - Why is there a lack of NSA-free advertisements from major Linux distributions?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NSA/GCHQ disaster seems to be a really great opportunity for Linux distributions to advertise their spyware-free operating system and their intentional willingness to not cooperate with spying programs. Yet, while this pitch would be such a goldmine of excellent and almost free advertisement destined to go viral automagically, especially when all the big operating-system corporations have been found in a warm bed with the spooks, we do not see any such public announcements from Red Hat/Fedora, Canonical/Ubuntu or the likes. There is also no sign of dead man's switches appearing, which is the least one could do to avoid suspicion. Should we take these facts as signs of incompetence in benefiting from the NSA fallout or is it a sign that Linux, or its distributions, are not so innocent after all?

Submission + - China warns US as superpower expresses concern for $1.3 trillion loan (tucknews.com)

Submitted by Tuck News
Tuck News writes: China, the USA's biggest foreign creditor is warning Congress it must resolve the political impasse over the debt ceiling without further delay. China's Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America's deadlocked politicians on Monday that "the clock is ticking" and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October, a date that is rapidly approaching.

Submission + - Bradley Manning spoke in court, like a man crushed by the state (muktworld.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Bradley Manning has spoken today in the court before his defense closed. He did not speak like a hero who wanted to expose the wrong doings. He did not speak like a hero who was willing to pay a heavy price for justice, ethics, morality and humanity.

Manning spoke like a man whose spirit was crushed by the state after years and years of solitary confinement which many would say was nothing short of torture.

Submission + - Vastly improved Raspberry Pi performance with Wayland

Submitted by nekohayo
nekohayo writes: While Wayland/Weston 1.1 brought support to the Raspberry Pi merely a month ago, work has recently been done to bring true hardware-accelerated compositing capabilities to the RPi's graphics stack using Weston. The Raspberry Pi foundation has made an announcement about the work that has been done with Collabora to make this happen. X.org/Wayland developer Daniel Stone has written a blog post about this, including a video demonstrating the improved reactivity and performance. Developer Pekka Paalanen also provided additional technical details about the implementation.

Comment Re:stingray phone tracking device (Score 4, Informative) 146

There are no limits to what a DIY-er kan buy in China. And with SDR (software defined radio) and open source GSM software, it takes relatively little effort to build one yourself. There's even a small GSM router (20-30 euros on evilbay) that's very popular for that sort of projects. It holds the GSM modem and Wifi, so you can easily control it from a laptop.

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