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Comment Re:Hypocrisy (Score 5, Insightful) 327

Trump is blamed for people entering the Capitol illegally, though they did so 18 minutes before he even finished his speech. In addition, the initial perpetrators were a mile and a half from Trump, meaning it was unlikely they heard a word he said.

You don't actually believe that do you? Trump spent weeks spreading false information about the election, he spent weeks attacking the very process that elected him in the first place. No one in their right mind an make the statement that he had nothing to do with the actions that followed. He wanted it to happen. He was happy it happened. He's just upset now that it didn't go well.

Comment Stop being surprised.. (Score 1, Interesting) 91

by sqorbit (#60659258) Attached to: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Windows 7 and Windows 8
Microsoft is a for profit company that's end goal is to make money for shareholders. The need to move forward with products and stop supporting old products to keep their business moving and viable. I'm not saying you have to like it, but it's reality. We need to stop bitching at Microsoft for doing things that we 100% know they will do. It's not like they secretly take products off support.

Submission + - Five Eyes governments, India, and Japan make new call for encryption backdoors (zdnet.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Members of the intelligence-sharing allianceFive Eyes, along with government representatives for Japan and India, have published a statement over the weekend calling on tech companies to come up with a solution for law enforcement to access end-to-end encrypted communications. The statement is the alliance's latest effort to get tech companies to agree to encryption backdoors. The Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have made similar calls to tech giants in2018and2019, respectively. Just like before, government officials claim tech companies have put themselves in a corner by incorporating end-to-end encryption (E2EE) into their products.

If properly implemented, E2EE lets users have secure conversations — may them be chat, audio, or video — without sharing the encryption key with the tech companies. Representatives from the seven governments argue that the way E2EE encryption is currently supported on today's major tech platforms prohibits law enforcement from investigating crime rings, but also the tech platforms themselves from enforcing their own terms of service.

Submission + - Details and source of the NHS COVID-19 tracing app released

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The UK's National Health Service (NHS) has published the source code of its contact tracing app on Github (Android version). The app doesn't use the Google/Apple tracing API, instead relying on work-arounds to keep the Bluetooth active even when apps are running in the background. The iOS version in particular relies on other nearby devices, especially Android ones, to keep the NHS app "alive" by constantly sending wake-up messages.

Meanwhile Google has confirmed that contact tracing will be released via Google Play so everyone will get it fairly quickly. For Apple users it appears that an OS update will be required.

Submission + - U.S. lawmakers urge Trump to stop issuing new H-1B visas (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Citing unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, a group of U.S. Senate and House Republicans Thursday urged President Trump to "suspend" guest worker visa programs until the economy recovers or for at least one year — whichever comes first. "There is no reason why unemployed Americans and recent college graduates should have to compete in such a limited job market against an influx of additional H-1B workers, most of whom work in business, technology, or STEM fields," wrote Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, in their letter to Trump. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute analyzed prevailing wage levels that employers filed with the U.S. Department of Labor for last year. The report's broad finding, released this week, is similar to one made in 2011 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Nine years ago, the watchdog agency reported that more than 80% of H-1B jobs were certified at the lowest two wage levels — or below local U.S. median wages. The EPI study puts that number at 60% in 2019.

Submission + - Stephen Wolfram presents a new fundamental theory of physics (stephenwolfram.com)

Submitted by wattersa
wattersa writes: Mathematician/Physicist Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of the technical computation program Mathematica, has announced a discovery in the area of theoretical physics. His long-form blog post discusses the emergence of physical properties of our universe from what he describes as simple, universal, computable rules. He claims the emergent properties are consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics through a 448-page technical paper on the subject, which is posted on a completely new website that just went online.

Submission + - Silicon Valley Legends Jim Clark & Tom Jermoluk on Quest to Eliminate Passwo (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Internet icons Jim Clark and Tom Jermoluk (past founders of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and @Home Network) have launched a new company and created a phone-resident personal certificate-based authentication and authorization solution that eliminates all passwords. The technology used is not new, being based on X.509 certificates and SSL (invented by Netscape some 25 years ago and still the bedrock of secure internet communications). Their new firm, Beyond Identity, has raised $30 Million Series A funding and is first concentrating on the corporate market, but has plans to extend its offering to consumers in late 2020.

Submission + - How 'Oumuamua may have formed—no alien technology required (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When ‘Oumuamua swooped into our Solar System in 2017, the object stirred up excitement. The strange shape and trajectory of this first known visitor from interstellar space prompted even some serious scientists to suggest it might be an alien probe. But a new study arrives at a much more mundane explanation.

Submission + - MIT and Harvard Propose Anonymous Bluetooth COVID-19 Contact Tracing 3

Submitted by Shag
Shag writes: Cryptographer Ron Rivest and internet policy professor Daniel Weitzner (a founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology, who also worked with the EFF) have teamed up with Harvard Medical School and other institutions to create a "Private Automatic Contact Tracing" system using bluetooth chirps from mobile phones. It remains to be seen whether they can get the necessary OS-level permissions from Apple and Google to deploy it against COVID-19.

Submission + - COBOL Programmers Sought (cnn.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: State governors are calling for the help of the COBOL programmers with their aged databases. Jobless claims in many states are processed on computer systems using the programming language.

Submission + - Should Facebook, Google Be Liable For User Posts? (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post. “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans,” Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230’s broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form,” he said.

Section 230 says online companies such as Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information they provide. This largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. The increased size and power of online platforms has also left consumers with fewer options, and the lack of feasible alternatives is a relevant discussion, Barr said, adding that the Section 230 review came out of the Justice Department’s broader look at potential anticompetitive practices at tech companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Barr said the department would not advocate a position at the meeting. But he hinted at the idea of allowing the U.S. government to take action against recalcitrant platforms, saying it was “questionable” whether Section 230 should prevent the American government from suing platforms when it is “acting to protect American citizens.”

Submission + - US Natural Gas Plant and Pipelines Shut After Ransomware Attack (infosecurity-magazine.com)

Submitted by Garabito
Garabito writes: The Department of Homeland Security has revealed that an unnamed US natural gas compression facility was forced to shut down operations for two days after becoming infected with ransomware.

The plant was targeted with a phishing e-mail, that allowed the attacker to access its IT network and then pivot to its OT (control) network, where it compromised Windows PCs used as human machine interface (HMI), data historians and polling servers, which led the plant operator to shut it down along with other assets that depended on it, including pipelines.

According to the DHS CISA report, the victim failed to implement robust segmentation between the IT and OT networks, which allowed the adversary to traverse the IT-OT boundary and disable assets on both networks.

Comment House Keys (Bad Analogy) (Score 1) 234

I heard someone talking about this and their comment was "If my house is locked and the police have a warrant they can break in". This is such a horrible analogy. If I give you my house keys, I'm not giving you the keys to everyone else's house too. If there's a backdoor, it's for everyone's phone not one. If anyone is using this or any similar point in an argument for unlocking the phone, please stop. You are just doing damage to your own argument.

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