Submission + - XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects 'Nearly Everything A User Does On The Internet' (theguardian.com)

Submitted by dryriver on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:58AM

dryriver writes: A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats, social media activities and the internet browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet. The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight. The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10. "I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email". US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

Comment Pfft. That's too much! (Score 3, Interesting) 195

by degradas on Sunday July 22, 2012 @02:52PM (#40731021) Attached to: If You Lived In Riga, You Wouldn't Bother To Cut the Cord

I live in Vilnius, Lithuania (neighboring Latvia, for those who can't be bothered to look at the map) and pay 22 USD/month for 100 Mbps FTTH, no download caps. For additional 15 USD or so I can get cable TV with HD channels from the same provider.

But who the hell needs cable when torrents download at 70 Mbps or so? :)

Comment Re:Other strategies... (Score 1) 801

by degradas on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @03:44PM (#31675996) Attached to: How To Build Roads To Control How Fast You Drive

Possibilities for a DDOS attack on the roads are simply amazing :)

Comment Re:Worried about the results of your actions? (Score 1) 730

by degradas on Friday August 14, 2009 @11:42AM (#29066479) Attached to: Why Should I Trust My Network Administrator?

Outsourcing to IBM has lead to a 30 to 60 day lead time.

I work for a major global outsourcing company (90K+ employees) and I sometimes wonder how do our clients put up with this. For example, a simple project (replacing one Wintel FTP server with another) is now taking more than 6 months to execute, and we are buying a complete server where a VMWare instance would be more than sufficient - load on that server is negligible. Entire project is costing maybe 30K $ just in time booked to the client - and that is something I could do in two days - but everybody takes it as "business as usual", including the client.

Makes me wanna go and start my own company, providing better quality services for 1/10th of a price. But then again, I wouldn't be able to claim that I've been in a market for 50 years and will not go bankrupt next year, crisis or no crisis.

Lawyer Jailed For Contempt Is Freed After 14 Years 408

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @10:56AM from the all-we-need-is-a-little-patience dept.

H. Beatty Chadwick has been in a staring match with the judicial system for the past 14 years, and the system just blinked. Chadwick was ordered to pay his ex-wife $2.5 million after their divorce. He refused to pay saying that he couldn't because he lost the money in a series of "bad investments." The judge in the case didn't believe him and sent him to jail for contempt. That was 14 years ago. Last week another judge let Chadwick go saying that "continued imprisonment would be legal only if there was some likelihood that ultimately he would comply with the order; otherwise, the confinement would be merely punitive instead of coercive." Chadwick, now 73, is believed to have served the longest contempt sentence in US history.

Sarah Connor Chronicles — Why It Died 834

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 21, 2009 @08:44AM from the because-it-was-boring dept.

brumgrunt writes "Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Terminator name proved more hindrance than aid."

Comment Re:I was scanned in LAX (Score 1) 620

by degradas on Thursday May 21, 2009 @07:37AM (#28037655) Attached to: Freshman Representative Opposes "TSA Porn"

Not that it's possible, but I find myself wondering how an airline that advertised itself has having zero security checks would do.

I, for one, would be willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay double the amount of normal ticket to flight with _zero_ security checks.

Comment Re:Other bases? (Score 1) 509

by degradas on Monday May 11, 2009 @12:42PM (#27908801) Attached to: New Pattern Found In Prime Numbers

IAAM.

Wow, first use of "I am a moron" I've seen in the field!

Hmm, or it is Mormon?

What's the difference?

Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8 332

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:56PM from the seekret-leaks-from-nowhere-in-particular dept.

CWmike writes "A post-beta version of Windows 7, Build 7022, leaked to Internet file-sharing sites also includes an updated version of IE8, according to searches at several BitTorrent trackers. With Microsoft halting new Windows 7 beta downloads on Tuesday, and blocking all downloads as of noon (EST) today, users are again turning to illegal sources to get the new operating system."

Submission + - Researchers decode Missile System protocol (tippingpoint.com)

Submitted by nitro on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:41PM

nitro writes: A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer any proprietary network protocol. Their proof of concept is a USB missile launching toy system in which they develop an iPhone application. Check out the video for the final results and a laugh.

Microsoft Slaps $250K Bounty On Conficker Worm 258

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:02PM from the sic-the-french-air-force-on-'em dept.

alphadogg writes "The spreading Conficker/Downadup worm is now viewed as such a significant threat that it's inspired the formation of a posse to stop it, with Microsoft leading the charge by offering a $250,000 reward to bring the Conficker malware bad guys to justice. The money will be paid for 'information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for illegally launching the Conficker malicious code on the Internet,' Microsoft said today in a statement, adding it is fostering a partnership with Internet registries and DNA providers such as ICANN, ORG, and NeuStar as well as security vendors Symantec and Arbor Networks, among others, to stop the Conficker worm once and for all. Conficker, also called Downadup, is estimated to have infected at least 10 million PCs. It has been slowly but surely spreading since November. Its main trick is to disable anti-malware protection and block access to anti-malware vendors' Web sites."

Comment Re:How deep? (Score 1) 725

by degradas on Thursday December 18, 2008 @05:44PM (#26165795) Attached to: British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows

...in the universally recognised mpg.

If by universally you mean United States, then yes, mpg is universally recognized. Pretty much the rest of the world measures their cars performance in liters/100 km.

SoHo NAS With Good Network Throughput? 517

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @06:55PM from the small-office-home-office dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I work at a small business where we need to move around large datasets regularly (move onto test machine, test, move onto NAS for storage, move back to test machine, lather-rinse-repeat). The network is mostly OS X and Linux with one Windows machine (for compatibility testing). The size of our datasets is typically in the multiple GB, so network speed is as important as storage size. I'm looking for a preferably off-the shelf solution that can handle a significant portion of a GigE; maxing out at 6MB is useless. I've been looking at SoHo NAS's that support RAID such as Drobo, NetGear (formerly Infrant), and BuffaloTech (who unfortunately doesn't even list whether they support OS X). They all claim they come with a GigE interface, but what sort of network throughput can they really sustain? Most of the numbers I can find on the websites only talk about drive throughput, not network, so I'm hoping some of you with real-world experience can shed some light here."

Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision 128

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @04:28PM from the speak-we-will dept.

2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."

Remote Code Execution Hole Found In Snort 95

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @11:00PM from the upgrade-right-now dept.

Palljon1123 writes "A stack-based buffer overflow in the Snort intrusion detection system could leave government and enterprise installations vulnerable to remote unauthenticated code execution attacks. The flaw, found by researchers at IBM's ISS X-Force, affects the Snort DCE/RPC preprocessor and could be used to execute code with the same privileges (usually root or SYSTEM) as the Snort binary. No user action is required." Sourcefire has an update to fix the vulnerability in versions 2.6.1, 2.6.1.1, and 2.6.1.2; Heise Security spells out the workaround for the 2.7.0 beta version.