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Submission + - Supreme Court Hacker Approaching Sentencing (abovethelaw.com)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: > Remember when the Supreme Court was absolutely consumed with figuring out who leaked the Dobbs draft opinion? They assigned the Marshal to investigate, brought in outside help, and made scores of employees sign affidavits. The response was immediate, muscular, and deeply unserious. The investigation did basically everything except interview the justices, because why interview anyone with both opportunity AND motive? Say, a justice credibly accused of leaking the results of other decisions who might have feared that colleagues would water down the maximalist draft before the case came down? No need to check in on anyone like that!

However, access was widely available from "the front door" so to speak, and the accused Nicholas Moore, is set to plead guilty to accessing these files receiving sentencing soon after.

Submission + - ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree (eff.org)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE's budget would be the envy of many national militaries around the world. Indeed, this budget would put ICE as the 14th most well-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel.

Submission + - Inside ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods (404media.co)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.

Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.

Do you know anything else about this tool? Do you work for ICE, CBP, or another agency? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.

Submission + - We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds. (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: This video discusses the concerning vulnerabilities, questionable efficacy, and public pushback against Flock Safety cameras and similar ALPR (Automatic License Plate Reader) services.

It's long, but really interesting from a security perspective.

Submission + - Stefan Fatsis on the words that defined 2025 From rage bait to slop (reuters.com)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: In an era of search engines and algorithm-inspired slang, dictionaries can seem like analog relics.

But for writer Stefan Fatsis — who spent time working for America’s oldest dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, while researching his new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” — they remain vital catalogs of language and, by extension, who we are as people.

Speaking from his home in Washington, D.C., Fatsis reflects on the thousands of words that were added to the lexicon in 2025, what they reveal about the year just passed, and the forces shaping language to come.

This conversation, conducted in December, has been edited for length and clarity.

Submission + - FCC approves 7,500 additional Starlink Gen2 satellites (reuters.com)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) — The Federal Communications Commission said on Friday it has approved SpaceX's request to deploy another 7,500 second-generation Starlink satellites as it works to boost internet service worldwide.

The FCC said Elon Musk's SpaceX can now operate an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites, bringing the total to 15,000 satellites worldwide. The FCC is also allowing SpaceX to upgrade the satellites and operate across five frequencies and is waiving prior requirements that prevented overlapping coverage and enhanced capacity.

Submission + - Statement from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell on Grand Jury subpeonas (federalreserve.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned in part a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings.

Submission + - World's most powerful flying wind turbine launched in western China (scmp.com)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: Gigantic gliding ‘power bank’ could help communities cut off from the grid during blackouts and cement China’s leading role in green energy

China has successfully flown the world’s largest and most powerful airborne wind turbine, a milestone that could bring cheaper, more reliable green energy and strengthen the country’s leading role in the global clean energy transition.

Between September 19 and 21 2025, the airship-like S1500 – about the size of a basketball court and as tall as a 13-story building – became the first turbine of its kind to generate one megawatt of power during a test flight at a desert site in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Submission + - New Sni5Gect Attack Crashes Phones + Downgrades 5G to 4G w/o rogue base station (thehackernews.com)

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: A team of academics has devised a novel attack that can be used to downgrade a 5G connection to a lower generation without relying on a rogue base station (gNB).

The attack, per the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), relies on a new open-source software toolkit named Sni5Gect (short for "Sniffing 5G Inject") that's designed to sniff unencrypted messages sent between the base station and the user equipment (UE, i.e., a phone) and inject messages to the target UE over-the-air.

The framework can be used to carry out attacks such as crashing the UE modem, downgrading to earlier generations of networks, fingerprinting, or authentication bypass, according to Shijie Luo, Matheus Garbelini, Sudipta Chattopadhyay, and Jianying Zhou.

Submission + - SPAM: The proposal for randomness as a service : drand

Submitted by beadon
beadon writes: Billions of devices around the world use random numbers to keep computers secure and keep the internet open. High-grade random number generators need to be unpredictable, publicly verifiable, bias-resistant, decentralized, and always available. The alternate is that each organization/person manage and maintain their own random number generators which are likely not truly random.

[spam URL stripped]

What are your thoughts on decentralized randomness as a service? What problems does this solve for cryptography? Should this be a service, like NTP is, that we all rely on in the future somehow ?
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