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Submission + - Report Claims CIA Controlled Second Swiss Encryption Firm (courthousenews.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide.

“How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?” co-head of Switzerland’s Socialist Party, Cedric Wermuth, asked in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster SRF late Thursday.

He called for a parliamentary inquiry after an SRF investigation broadcast on Wednesday found that a second Swiss encryption firm had been part of a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by U.S. and German intelligence services.

A first investigation had revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which the CIA and its German counterpart creamed off the top-secret communications of governments through their hidden control of a Swiss encryption company called Crypto.

SRF’s report this week found that a second but smaller Swiss encryption firm, Omnisec, had been used in the same way.

That company, which was split off from Swiss cryptographic equipment maker Gretag in 1987, sold voice, fax and data encryption equipment to governments around the world until it halted operations two years ago.

SRF’s investigative program Rundschau concluded that, like Crypto, Omnisec had sold manipulated equipment to foreign governments and armies.

Omnisec meanwhile also sold its faulty OC-500 series devices to several federal agencies in Switzerland, including its own intelligence agencies, as well as to Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, and other private companies in the country, the SRF investigation showed.

Comment Lockdowns (Score 2) 131

by gauntlet420 (#60756720) Attached to: Hundreds More Movie Theatres Close As Attendance Plummets
In Ontario, cinemas which were permitted to re-open were initially limited to a maximum of 50 people per facility, in line with restrictions at casinos and other entertainment venues. Some areas did loosen up to allow up to 50 per auditorium, assuming the auditorium had sufficient seating to allow social distancing between patrons but now that we're in a second wave, tighter restrictions are returning to the most populous areas. Quebec and BC have similar restrictions - the prairie provinces slightly less restricted (but also much lower population density). The Maritime provinces have walled themselves off from the rest of the world (Atlantic Bubble) and things are much closer to normal out East as a result. Regardless, you ain't gonna make much box office with such a light headcount even if people did want to go to a movie, and those areas limited to 50 per facility aren't going to have many megaplexes open.

Comment Re:Invasive species (Score 1) 166

by gauntlet420 (#60495494) Attached to: Hundreds of Americans Planted 'Chinese Mystery Seeds'
+1 on resilience. There's a patch of this stuff across the street from my parents' home surrounding the town's electrical substation, and numerous patches all over the community. I have no idea where it originated from, but it's "always been there" according to my folks. As a child we used to play in those patches all the time - knocking down the shoots, building thatched forts and flimsy swords. They would try and burn the substation patch every year - it came back every single time. The patches are still there and I'm in my mid-40s now.

Comment Re:Try not crippling the camera if rooted (Score 1) 88

by gauntlet420 (#57050498) Attached to: Sony's Mobile Business Is Shrinking Out of Existence
Further to this, they also refuse to unlock the bootloader if the phone was originally carrier-locked, even if the phone is out of warranty. My Xperia Z2 is now a boat-anchor because of (1) a badly bloated stock O/S and (2) locked bootloader which cannot be unlocked other than by paying an exorbitant fee to the original carrier, with whom I don't even do business. I would have gladly kept using the phone were I able to run custom firmware on it. The camera was really good, as was the microphone - I could record clips at live shows and concerts and get *really* decent audio from this phone. My current G5 makes recordings which sound like messed-up McDonalds' drive-through-speakers.

Comment IANAL, but IAC (Score 2) 62

by gauntlet420 (#48523817) Attached to: Negative Online Reviews Are Not Defamation (At Least In Canada)

The title is a bit misleading - it *should* read "(At Least In Québec)".

This case was a civil matter heard in the Québec Superior Court, and some of the statues cited were from the Québec Code of Civil Procedure. The legislative framework of Québec is derived from French civil law, whereas the English-speaking provinces derive from English common law. A Québec precedent on a civil matter won't have weight in other provinces, so extrapolating a Québec decision to the whole of Canada isn't correct. A similar decision would need to be reacehd in, say, the Ontario or B.C. superior court, as there's much more commonality between the common-law derived jurisdictions (no pun intended).

Comment Pedantic rant (Score 1, Flamebait) 133

by gauntlet420 (#46899143) Attached to: Star Cluster Ejected From Galaxy At 2,000,000 MPH

a globular cluster of several thousand stars (compressed into a space just a few dozen light-years apart) is being thrown out of galaxy M87.

I always have issues with astronomical articles that say something *is* happening, especially when the observation is of a structure 53.4 million light years away. *Was* happening, sure. *Is* happening? Don't think so...

Submission + - Spark Advances From Apache Incubator To Top-Level Project

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: The Apache Software Foundation announced the open-source cluster-computing framework for Big Data analysis has graduated http://sdt.bz/68845 from the Apache Incubator to a top-level project. A project management committee will guide the projects day-to-day operations, and Databricks cofounder and VP of Apache Spark Matei Zaharia will be appointed VP of Apache Spark.Spark runs programs 100x faster than Apache Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and it provides APIs that enable developers to rapidly develop applications in Java, Python or Scala, according to the ASF http://spark.apache.org/.

Comment Grain of salt (Score 5, Informative) 74

by gauntlet420 (#44445459) Attached to: FreeBSD, Ubuntu Offer Same NVIDIA OpenGL Support As Windows
This article seems to be talking about newer hardware and the NVIDIA binary blob driver. If you're stuck with Nouveau and an older NVIDIA card, your performance is going to be much worse than Windoze. I recently de-Windozed a P4 box running a GeForce440MX. Perfectly acceptable performance under XP became molasses-slow under Xubuntu 13 - we're talking seconds per screen refresh, and lots of visual artifacting. Newer distys and the legacy binary blob drivers that support GeForce 4 don't play nice with each other either. I ended up yanking the card and putting in a Radeon 9800SE (with 1/4 the video RAM) and even with the open-source radeon driver, performance was astronomically better - the machine was actually *useable*.

Comment Super Mario Galaxy (Score 5, Insightful) 477

by gauntlet420 (#21769114) Attached to: What Is Your Game of the Year?

This game has brought back everything that I used to enjoy about video games back in the 90's console era (NES/Genesis/SNES/TG16) - joy, frustration, a sense of wonder, and an as-of-yet unresolved addiction. (10 more stars to go!) The control scheme took all of 30 seconds to master. The graphics, while not super-detailed, are incredibly smooth (with the exception of some underwater bits). The score is spectacular - haunting, epic, whimsical, and nostalgic as the need arises.

I bought the game on release day (while on vacation), somewhat on a whim - thinking "It can't live up to the hype", "Hopefully it will have good trade value" and "At least it will give me something to do after I finish Guitar Hero III". So far, I've probably put 60 hours into SMG, and perhaps six hours into GH3.

Having played all of the other Mario games to some degree (I never owned an SNES, but played a fair bit of SMW) only SM64 has been as much of an addiction as SMG. (My virtual console copy of SM64 hasn't been played in almost a month.)

I also recently got a used copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids. It has been an enjoyable game thus far, although the control is sometimes lacking (the 'slam the outhouse door' minigame is very inconsistent).
Movies

MPAA Committed To Fair Use and DRM 212

Posted by kdawson from the crack-in-the-wall dept.
Doctor Jay writes "At a LexisNexis Conference on DRM this week, MPAA's Dan Glickman announced that the MPAA was fine with consumers ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers. 'In his speech to industry insiders at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel, Glickman repeatedly stressed that DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers. The goal, he said, was "to make things simpler for the consumer," and he added that the movie studios were open to "a technology summit" featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved.'"

Feed China sets out to curb kids' online gaming (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming

It looks like China's not content to simply wait for over-eager gamers to find their way to a halfway house, with the government now taking some steps to curb the amount of online gaming kids partake in. It's not imposing a strict limit, however, instead forcing game makers to install so-called "anti-addiction software" in their games, which would ramp up in-game penalties if gamers play more than the government deems to be healthy. Apparently, gamers will only get half the normal amount points if they play more than three hours, with no points awarded at all after the five hour mark. At that point, they'll be presented with the ominous message: "You have entered unhealthy game time, please go offline immediately to rest." Exactly how that system will be applied to various games isn't clear, although it seems that any games that don't comply by July 16th will be shut down. What's more, in order to verify their age, all gamers will also be required to register for games using their real name and identity card number, which at least one analyst speculates could "scare away" adults and young users alike.

[Via Slashdot]

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Security

WoW Players Targeted By Windows Flaw Exploit 130

Posted by Zonk from the keep-your-cursors-peeled dept.
grimwell writes "The BBC is carrying the story that the ANI flaw is being used to target World of Warcraft players, as hackers search for account details. 'Analysis of that malicious software showed that it lay dormant on a victims machine until they ran World of Warcraft (WoW) at which point it captured login data and sent it to the hacking group ... Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.'" Doubtless, any compromised accounts would quickly see their equipment sold, and the resulting gold transferred to another account. This gold would then be sold for US currency to Real Money Traders like the company IGE.

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