Microsoft Adding Windows 10 Style Spyware to Windows 7 and Windows 8
August 31st, 2015Update: Several Windows 10 Privacy Tools
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How many hosts is Microsoft phoning everything home to? Is it feasible to just block them all with an external firewall so a Windows box simply can’t reach Microsoft?
The article below says that Windows 10 is ignoring the hosts file and phoning home anyway, so it seems like an external firewall would be the way to go.
Of course, as soon as you get your Microsoft blacklist established, if you’re still pulling OS updates, Microsoft could just change the hosts that the telemetry apps are using, and you’re back to square one. You would have to use a packet sniffer, firewall log, etc and make a new catalog of hosts that Microsoft is using.
*pfft* It’s a shit sandwich, no doubt about it.
As bad as this situation is, my guess is that it’s overly optimistic to assume that 1% of Windows users even care. Of that 1%, maybe 1% of those users are able to run any sort of technical countermeasures. I hope this disaster doesn’t embolden Apple to screw its OSX users over in a similar manner.
Via: ghacks:
Windows 7 and 8 users have been plagued by “upgrade preparation” updates but left alone otherwise up until recently when it comes to this new level of data collecting.
This changed recently with the release of several updates for both operating systems that step up the game.
KB3068708 Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry – This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights. (Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1)
KB3022345 (replaced by KB3068708) Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry – This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to in-market devices. By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet been upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights. (Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1)
KB3075249 Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 – This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels. (Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1)
KB3080149 Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry – This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. This service provides benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights. (Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1)
If these updates are installed on the system, data is sent to Microsoft regularly about various activities on it.
Microsoft lists two host names in KB3068708 that data is received from and sent to:
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
settings-win.data.microsoft.com
These, and maybe others, appear to be hardcoded which means that the Hosts file is bypassed automatically.
Maryland Man Fined $50 for Picking Berries in Park
August 30th, 2015Via: Reason:
To me, nothing screams summer like picking and eating fresh berries. I know I’m not alone. Greg Visscher, head of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Young Republicans Club, has been picking berries with his family for years.
So it was with some degree of surprise that Visscher found himself confronted last month by a trio of county park police officers and handed a $50 ticket for “destroying/interfering with plants to wit: berries. Without a permit on park property.”
British Tabloids: Spy Found Dead in a Bag Hacked Into Secret U.S. Data on Bill Clinton
August 30th, 2015Via: Daily Mail:
The British spy whose body was found padlocked inside a bag in his flat had illegally hacked into secret data on former U.S. president Bill Clinton, it has been revealed.
Gareth Williams, 31, was discovered in a holdall in the bath at his London home five years ago this month, but the mystery surrounding his death has never been solved.
Today, it has been revealed the spy had dug out a guest list for an event Clinton was due to attend as a favour for a friend.
The hack breached Mr Williams’ security clearance and this sparked anger among MI6 bosses as tensions rose with U.S. security services over the spy’s transatlantic work, The Sun on Sunday has reported.
A source said: ‘The Clinton diary hack came at a time when Williams’ work with America was of the most sensitive nature.
‘It was a diplomatic nightmare for Sir John Sawers, the new director of MI6 at the time.’
The paper has also reported that voicemail messages Mr Williams, a maths genius and expert cryptographer, left for family and friends were deleted shortly after his death.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that detectives who investigated the mysterious death believe he was murdered and that his killers then broke back in through a skylight to cover their tracks.
The claim centres on the revelation that part of the forensic equipment placed in the flat after the body was found was moved – despite the fact the building was under armed police guard.
The theory supports his family’s suspicions he was murdered by ‘agents specialising in the dark arts of the secret services’.
Main Source: The Sun: Clinton Secrets Hacked by Spy in Bag
Frederick Forsyth Reveals MI6 Spying Past
August 30th, 2015Via: BBC:
The Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth has revealed he was working for MI6 for more than 20 years.
The disclosure comes with the publication of the author’s autobiography The Outsider: My Life.
Fans have long suspected that Forsyth, 77, acclaimed for his highly realistic spy novels, may have been involved with British Intelligence.
He told the BBC it started when he was asked to send information from the Biafran War in Nigeria.
Boeing: Portable Drone-Killing Laser
August 29th, 2015Via: The Verge:
Boeing has been researching ways to disable drones with lasers for a while now, and this week, the defense contractor released new footage (below) of its Compact Laser Weapons System: a portable, tripod-mounted device that can burn a hole in a UAV or a quadcopter in seconds. The system is essentially a less-powerful version of Boeing’s High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), a truck-mounted laser that can destroy mortars in mid-flight. Although HEL MD might one day be deployed on the battlefield, its compact cousin is intended to keep drones away from sensitive areas, according to a report from Wired.
Pentagon Teams Up with Apple, Boeing to Develop Wearable Tech
August 28th, 2015Via: Reuters:
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter awarded $75 million on Friday to help a consortium of high-tech firms and researchers develop electronic systems packed with sensors flexible enough to be worn by soldiers or molded onto the skin of a plane.
Carter said funding for the Obama administration’s newest manufacturing institute would go to the FlexTech Alliance, a consortium of 162 companies, universities and other groups, from Boeing , Apple and Harvard, to Advantest Akron Polymer Systems and Kalamazoo Valley Community College.
The group will work to advance the development and manufacture of so-called flexible hybrid electronics, which can be embedded with sensors and stretched, twisted and bent to fit aircraft or other platform where they will be used.
“This is an emerging technology that takes advanced flexible materials for circuits, communications, sensors and power and combines them with thinned silicon chips to ultimately produce the next generation of electronic products,” Carter said.
He was speaking at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley.
San Francisco as Open Sewer
August 28th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times:
City officials say corrosion from urine — human and canine — contributed to the collapse of a light pole that fell on a car at Taylor and Pine streets in San Francisco.
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In the Tenderloin, at Eddy and Jones streets, I watched a group of small schoolchildren ushered across the street like ducklings by their teachers, who steered them around an unconscious man on the sidewalk and warned them to avoid stepping in two separate piles of excrement that I assumed were canine in origin.
The Zapruder Film Mystery
August 28th, 2015Via: E2 Films:
The Zapruder Film Mystery from E2 Films on Vimeo.
We Are the Government: Tactics for Taking Down the Police State
August 27th, 2015They don’t like jury nullification.
Using your First Amendment right to free speech in front of a court house could result in indictments.
Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment
Denver DA Charges Man with Jury Tampering for Handing Out Jury Nullification Flyers
Via: Rutherford Institute:
Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror.
As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive.”
According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.”
Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just.
In a world of “rampant overcriminalization,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.”
Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises:
If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes.
Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America.
Unfortunately, for thousands of Americans who are serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes as a result of harsh mandatory sentencing laws passed by “tough on crime” politicians, the punishment rarely fits the crime.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every ill inflicted upon us by the American police state, from overcriminalization and surveillance to militarized police and private prisons, it’s money that drives the police state. And there is a lot of money to be made from criminalizing nonviolent activities and jailing Americans for nonviolent offenses.
This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime.
Research Credit: pookie
13,000 Fall Into Homelessness Every Month in L.A. County
August 27th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times:
About 13,000 people on public assistance tumble into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County, according to a new study that experts say provides the clearest picture yet of extreme poverty in the region.
Although many quickly find work or rely on family to get off the streets, the number experiencing “continuous, unremitting, chronic homelessness” continues to grow, even after 10,000 people were housed over the last three years, according to the report being released Tuesday by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles.
The report recommended that the welfare system intervene to help children and young adults who become homeless before their condition becomes chronic.
