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Submission + - The CIA is Investing in Firms that Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos (theintercept.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Yet among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant. Those four firms, which provide unique tools to mine data from platforms such as Twitter, presented at a February “CEO Summit” in San Jose sponsored by the fund, along with other In-Q-Tel portfolio companies. The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media. Last September, David Cohen, the CIA’s second-highest ranking official, spoke at length at Cornell University about a litany of challenges stemming from the new media landscape. The Islamic State’s “sophisticated use of Twitter and other social media platforms is a perfect example of the malign use of these technologies,” he said.

Submission + - TorrentFreak has posted its annual VPN review - which are actually trustworthy? (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by frrrp
frrrp writes: TorrentFreak has done its annual VPN review for 2016. With my limited knowledge, I look at them as being as close as you can get to offering the public a fair and unbiased opinion. Of course, I may be wrong — but there is so much gibberish and shill-craft in this area, it is impossible for a mug like me to know what to trust. What opinions do the BigBrains here have of the listed VPN providers?

Submission + - Miami Cop Doxes Innocent Woman, Anonymous Doxes Cop Back (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After a woman saw a cop speeding down the freeway without a siren, she pulled him over and told him to stop going so fast. The cop's police union chief decided to take the woman's private details and put them on his Facebook account, asking friends to "call her." Of course, harassment ensued. Now, Anonymous hackers have doxed the police union chief back as payback. For once, these hacktivists did something useful.

Submission + - Full List of TV Shows and Movies on US Netflix

Submitted by SlappingOysters
SlappingOysters writes: On the request of some Slashdot members in the comments of yesterday's content reveal for each country in Netflix's global roll out, Finder.com has assembled the full list of 1157 TV Shows and the full list of 4593 movies available in the USA. The list is searchable, and can be filtered by genre. The Netflix Rating for each is also shown.

Submission + - New HTTPS Bicycle Attack Reveals Details About Passwords From Encrypted Traffic (softpedia.com)

Submitted by campuscodi
campuscodi writes: Dutch security researcher Guido Vranken has published a paper [PDF] in which he details a new attack on TLS/SSL-encrypted traffic, one that can potentially allow attackers to extract some information from HTTPS data streams. Attackers could extract the length of a password from TLS packets, and then use this information to simplify brute-force attacks. The new HTTPS Bicycle Attack can also be used retroactively on HTTPS traffic logged several years ago. Hello NSA!

Submission + - Need a Security Monitoring Company That Accepts VPN'ed Video Feeds 2

Submitted by mache
mache writes: My cousin is finishing up a major remodel of his home in Houston and has installed video cameras for added security. At my suggestion, he wired up all the cameras to be on a separate VLAN that only uses wired Ethernet and has no WiFi access. Since the Houston police will only respond to security alarms if the monitoring company is viewing the crime in progress, he must arrange for the video feed to available to a security monitoring company.

I told him that the feed should use VPN or some other encrypted tunneling technique as it travels the Internet to the monitoring company and we proceeded to try and find a company that supported those protocols. No one I have talked to understands the importance of securing a video feed and everyone so far blithely suggests that we just open a port on his home router. Its frustrating to see such willful ignorance about Internet security.

Does anyone know of a security monitoring company that we can work with that has a clue?

Submission + - EFF asks appeals court to "shut down the Eastern District of Texas" (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have asked a federal appeals court to make big changes to the rules governing venue in patent cases. The two public interest groups are seeking to file an amicus brief (PDF) which attacks the Eastern District of Texas as being one of the "most notorious situations of forum shopping in recent history."

Submission + - SPAM: Glyphosate found in Cotton gauzes, swabs, pads and tampons

Submitted by jcfandino
jcfandino writes: Researchers from La Plata University in Argentina detected the presence of Glyphosate (a potentially carcinogenic herbicide according to the World Health Organization) or AMPA (a derivative) in all tested cotton and sterile gauze. Substances were also found, though to a lesser percentage- in swabs, wipes and pads, according to a study.
"In terms of concentrations, we saw that in raw cotton AMPA dominates (39 mg / kg and 13 mg / kg of glyphosate), while in gauze is absent, but glyphosate was present in concentrations of 17 mg / kg.", Dr. Marino said.
The researcher reported that "we sought literature and found no national or international publication that speaks of glyphosate residues and its metabolite in this type of product."
"We want the results we have obtained during last week to alert all to systematize research and in this what we are on now, working with other disciplines, because our obligation is to ensure the health of the population" he concluded.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Scientists Invent a New Steel as Strong as Titanium (popularmechanics.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: South Korean researchers have solved a longstanding problem that stopped them from creating ultra-strong, lightweight aluminum-steel alloys.

Today a team of material scientists at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea announced what they're calling one of the biggest steel breakthroughs of the last few decades: an altogether new type of flexible, ultra-strong, lightweight steel. This new metal has a strength-to-weight ratio that matches even our best titanium alloys, but at one tenth the cost, and can be created on a small scale with machinery already used to make automotive-grade steel. The study appears in Nature.

Submission + - Was Carly a failure at HP? 7

Submitted by MouseTheLuckyDog
MouseTheLuckyDog writes: With Carly Fiorina, now running for President, her tenure at HP is once again under a microscope. A recent article claims that her stay wasn't as bad as it seemed. The main argument is a graph of HP, IBM,, Dell and Sun's stock performance.

My own take is the graph is "cooked". Sun, for the most part, never generic desktops or laptops. Furthermore Sun mostly depended on Sparc chips which were on their last legs at the time. The end result is that the graph looks like one you would expect of three French vintners and one California vintner. Sun's 200% peak ( due to java ) makes variations in the other 3 companies performances look small.

Furthermore, Apple is glaringly missing. If Apple were included, the graph would be a flatline clearly showing the graph was cooked. With Apple in, they would have to cut the graph off at 2007 showing a more realistic view of Carly's performance.

So what do you think. Was the article correct? What do you think of Fiorina's job at HP? ( From what I remember "worst CEO ever" about sums it up. ) Links from that period of time would be appreciated, since I think it is going to be a long election season and the issue will not go away anytime soon.

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