Archive for March, 2016
DOJ Recovers Data from San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone (Possibly with Help of Israeli Company)
March 28th, 2016Possible explanation of how they did it: NAND “Mirroring” Concept Demonstration tl;dr There are clever tricks to allow unrestricted brute forcing of the password, no crack or cryptographic signatures necessary. Israel’s Cellebrite Linked to FBI’s iPhone Hack Attempt: An Israeli cybersecurity firm is under pressure to reveal its involvement in efforts to extract data from […]
Some Japanese Elderly Attempting to Get Into Prison for, “Free Food, Accommodation and Healthcare”
March 28th, 2016Via: Financial Times: Japan’s prison system is being driven to budgetary crisis by demographics, a welfare shortfall and a new, pernicious breed of villain: the recidivist retiree. And the silver-haired crooks, say academics, are desperate to be behind bars. Crime figures show that about 35 per cent of shoplifting offences are committed by people over […]
Why Are Educators Learning How to Interrogate Their Students?
March 26th, 2016Via: The New Yorker: About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an […]
PSYOP: Public Perception of Autonomous Machines
March 26th, 2016The vast majority of robotics research is funded by the military industrial complex. There is a lot of dancing around that fact, but the reality is that it’s governments’ desire for more, cheaper and deadlier killing machines that’s at the root of this. Sure, the corporate drive to shrink payrolls is a large factor, but […]
LAPD’s Air-Support Division
March 26th, 2016Via: New York Times: The air-support division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city’s downtown, near the Los Angeles River. A looming mass of utilitarian architecture tucked beside the 101 Freeway, the complex appears to have no real public face; here the view from […]
Water Treatment Plant Hacked, Chemical Mix Changed for Tap Supplies
March 25th, 2016Wow! They don’t say where this supposedly happened. Via: Register: Hackers infiltrated a water utility’s control system and changed the levels of chemicals being used to treat tap water, we’re told. The cyber-attack is documented in this month’s IT security breach report (available here, registration required) from Verizon Security Solutions. The utility in question is […]
Britain: Dyson Developing an Electric Car with Partial Government Funding
March 25th, 2016Via: Guardian: Dyson is developing an electric car at its headquarters in Wiltshire with help from public money, according to government documents. The company, which makes a range of products that utilise the sort of highly efficient motors needed for an electric car such as vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and bladeless fans, last year refused […]
Hedge Funds Pumped Up Silicon Valley. Now They’re Pulling Out.
March 24th, 2016Just in time for… Via: Bloomberg: In recent months, venture capital firms and mutual funds have become choosier about which technology startups they’re prepared to back. Now hedge funds, after helping push valuations to dot-com-era heights, are getting more picky, too. Last month, hedge funds participated in the fewest number of venture capital rounds in […]
Binney: NSA Is So Overwhelmed with Data, It’s No Longer Effective
March 23rd, 2016On the contrary, I think it’s remarkably effective, as long as effective means being able to use retroactive surveillance and parallel construction to secretly build criminal cases against anyone the state wants to disappear into its private/for-profit gulags. Furthermore, most “terrorist” attacks are very obviously false flag operations. So tune away on the Magic 8 […]
The Long-Awaited Promise of a Programmable Quantum Computer
March 23rd, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review: The quest to build a powerful quantum computer is one of the great challenges of 21st century physics. And although the hurdles are significant, physicists are chasing them down, one by one. They’ve gradually learned how to control quantum particles with the precision necessary to run quantum algorithms on a small […]
