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Submission + - Container ship breaks in two, sinks

Submitted by Cliff Stoll
Cliff Stoll writes: Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half in high seas in the Indian Ocean. The aft section floated for a week, then sank on June 27th. The forward section was towed most of the way to port, but burned and sank on July 10th. This post-panamax ship was 316 meters long and only 5 years old. With a typical value of $40,000 per container, this amounts to a quarter billion dollar loss. The cause is unknown, but may be structural or perhaps due to overfilled containers that are declared as underweight. Of course, the software used to calculate ship stability relies upon these incorrect physical parameters.

Submission + - Facebook's New Search Engine – A Privacy Concern? (forward.ph)

Submitted by Lizel
Lizel writes: Facebook finally rolled out their Graph Search, a new search tool that allows users to quickly find information, photos, videos, and stories across the site. The results vary for each user just like the News Feed, as the algorithm is limited to what the user has shared. What other users / searchers see is determined by his privacy choices.

Graph Search might be a privacy issue, but for business owners, this is another tool that would help their organization grow through Social Media Optimization. However, since Graph Search was just recently released; there is no exact science about its proper optimization yet. What’s certain is that business owners should take advantage of whatever tool is available and what works for them. As a user, if you find the Graph Search as a privacy issue, then you’d better start tweaking your privacy settings.

Without a doubt, as Graph Search becomes more widely available, SEO companies and online marketers will surely find a way to gain visibility in the results page. What do you think? Is the Graph Search a promising optimization tool, or just another stalking machine in the making?

Read the full scoop at: http://www.forward.ph/blog/facebook-graph-search/

Submission + - Aussie Telco Telstra Storing Data For US Government (theage.com.au) 1

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Fairfax Media is reporting today that Australian telecommunications giant Telstra agreed more than a decade ago to store huge volumes of electronic communications it carried between Asia and America for potential surveillance by United States intelligence agencies.

Under the previously secret agreement, the telco was required to route all communications involving a US point of contact through a secure storage facility on US soil that was staffed exclusively by US citizens carrying a top-level security clearance.

The US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation also demanded that Telstra "provide technical or other assistance to facilitate ... electronic surveillance".

The revelations come as the British and US governments reel from the leaking of sensitive intelligence material that has detailed a vast electronic spying apparatus being used against foreign nationals and their own citizens.

Submission + - Is Postgres on par with Oracle? 1

Submitted by grahamsaa
grahamsaa writes: I work at medium sized company that offers a number of products that rely fairly heavily on backend databases, some of which are hundreds of gigabytes and deal with hundreds or thousands of queries per second. Currently, we're using a mix of Postgres, Oracle, and MySQL, though we're working hard to move everything to Postgres. The products that are still on MySQL and Oracle were acquisitions, so we didn't get to choose the RDBMS at the time these products were designed.

So far, we've been very happy with Postgres, but I know next to nothing about Oracle. It's expensive and has a long history of use in large enterprises, but I'm curious about what it offers that Postgres might not — I'm not saying this because I think that sticking with Oracle would be a good idea (because in our case, it probably isn't), but I'm curious as to how some companies justify the cost — especially considering that EnterpriseDB makes transitioning from Oracle to Postgres feasible (though not painless) in most cases. For those that use Oracle — is it worth the money? What's keeping you from switching?

Submission + - Obama Insider Threat Program gets blowback (mcclatchydc.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A little-noticed post-Manning Executive Order from 2011 establishes something called the "Insider Threat Program" which looks like something from the Cold War East German Stasi, complete with criminal penalties for not narcing on each other. Instant paranoia. Suddenly the purpose behind the whole improbable Snowden affair seems to become very clear. If you're a Fed, and one of the good guys, you might want to take that early retirement. You're needed elsewhere.

Submission + - Confessions Of A Cyber Warrior

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Roger Grimes interviews a longtime friend and cyber warrior under contract with the U.S. government, offering a fascinating glimpse of the front lines in the ever-escalating and completely clandestine cyber war. From the interview: 'They didn't seem to care that I had hacked our own government years ago or that I smoked pot. I wasn't sure I was going to take the job, but then they showed me the work environment and introduced me to a few future coworkers. I was impressed. ... We have tens of thousands of ready-to-use bugs in single applications, single operating systems. ... It's all zero-days. Literally, if you can name the software or the controller, we have ways to exploit it. There is no software that isn't easily crackable. In the last few years, every publicly known and patched bug makes almost no impact on us. They aren't scratching the surface.'

Submission + - Stanford Files Weev Amicus with Mozilla, Security and Privacy Experts 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Auernheimer ("weev") was convicted of a federal felony for something many of us do routinely: changing a user-agent and crawling a public website. His case is now on appeal in the Third Circuit. The Stanford Center for Internet and Society has filed an amicus brief, clarifying the technical issues and arguing that the conviction poses a grave risk to research. Signatories include the Mozilla Foundation and a litany of security and privacy luminaries.

Submission + - US, UK watchdogs file legal moves to curb government surveillance (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) of the United States of America has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court, asking the Supremes to vacate what it alleges is "an unlawful order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that enables the collection of all domestic phone record by the NSA."

EPIC explains that it finds itself forced to petition the Supreme Court directly because it has no other recourse:

Normally, when a court issues an unlawful order, the adversely affected parties can intervene or appeal to a higher court. However, the FISC and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review only have jurisdiction to hear petitions by the Government or recipient of the FISC Order. Neither party to the order represents EPIC's interests. As EPIC is not a recipient of the order, it cannot challenge it in the FISC. Other federal and state trial and appellate courts have no jurisdiction over the FISC, and therefore cannot grant relief.

The EPIC petition requests the Supreme Court to halt the disclosure of details of Americans' telephone usage, alleging that the FISC did not have legal authority to compel Verizon to hand that metadata to the NSA

According to EPIC, the FISC order exceeded the autnority granted to is under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which states that such orders require "reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation."

Submission + - Snowden Video Part 2 (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 'In the second part of an exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden contemplates the reaction from the US government to his revelations of top-secret documents regarding its spying operations on domestic and foreign internet traffic, email and phone use.' Theguardian

Submission + - Average cost per 'official' wiretap in the United States: $50,452 (sovereignman.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Last week, in a very, very quiet release, the US Federal Court system published its annual Wiretap report to Congress.

This is something that is required by law; the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) must annually report the number of federal and state applications for court orders to “intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications.”

Note – this report only covers wiretapping orders by US courts; it does not include anything related to the NSA’s electronic surveillance, FBI ‘administrative subpoenas’ to Google / Facebook, the US Postal Service snooping people’s physical mail, or any of this top secret FISA nonsense.

In other words, these numbers add yet another dimension to how vast the US spy state has become.

The report gives a lot of eye-popping details about these official, court-ordered wiretaps, including:
  • Riverside County, California is the most spied-on county in the United States
  • Followed by Clark County, Nevada
  • 3,395 wiretaps were ordered, averaging 29.03 days each
  • The average cost of a wiretap order last year was $50,452
  • The highest cost was $872,841 for a Federal wiretap in the Eastern district of Washington
  • 87.39% of these wiretap orders were connected to drug-related charges
  • Only 18.19% of these wiretaps actually led to a conviction

Submission + - Sent to jail because of a software bug.

Submitted by toshikodo
toshikodo writes: The BBC is reporting a claim that some sub-postoffice workers in the UK have been sent to jail because of a bug in the accounting software that they use. Post Office admits Horizon computer defect. I've worked on safety critical system in the past, and I am well aware of the potential for software to ruin lives (thankfully AFAIK nobody has been harmed by my software), but how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?

Submission + - NYT Looks at FISA: Everybody is a potential "Target" (nytimes.com)

Submitted by some old guy
some old guy writes: This NYT analysis looks into the recent attention given to the FISA court, particularly at its broad interpretations of Congress' intent and what constitutes "foreign intelligence". Particularly disturbing is how only the government is allowed to present it's side of the story in filings. We're all being subjected to a court where we have no standing to defend or assert our side of any case.

Submission + - Inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation (tuxradar.com)

Submitted by qwerdf
qwerdf writes: Airstrip One wasn’t built in a day, nor will a total police state suddenly appear overnight. But times are changing, the threats to our freedom are coming from every direction, and fighting this battle demands a great deal of persistence and determination. One group firmly on our side is the EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s goal is “defending your rights in the digital world”, and its activities span the full gamut of freedom fighting: providing help with court cases; issuing white papers that explain current threats; running campaigns to spread awareness of various issues; and developing technologies that make our online activities safer from prying eyes. It’s a non-profit, donation-supported organisation based in San Francisco with an impressive staff roster (see www.eff.org/about/staff), including attorneys, analysts and activists – and generally with a strong pro-free software and pro-GNU/Linux culture.

Read on to find out how the EFF came together, what it has done so far, and how it’s preparing for upcoming battles.

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