Russian Forces in Ukraine
March 24th, 2014Via: Globe and Mail:
The NATO alliance’s top commander in Europe pushed already sky-high tensions in Europe even higher on Sunday when he told a conference in Brussels that Russia had massed a large and battle-ready military force along its border with Ukraine.
“The force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizable and very, very ready,” U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove said, speaking at an event organized by the German Marshall Fund, a think tank. He suggested Russia now had enough troops at the ready to push through eastern and southern Ukraine, thereby connecting mainland Russia with the newly annexed Crimean Peninsula, as well as the breakaway pro-Russian region of Trans-Dniester, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.
Apple and Google’s Wage-Fixing Cartel Involved Dozens More Companies, Over One Million Employees
March 23rd, 2014Via: Pando Daily:
Back in January, I wrote about “The Techtopus” — an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. The agreement prompted a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in a settlement in which the companies agreed to curb their restricting hiring deals. The same companies were then hit with a civil suit by employees affected by the agreements.
This week, as the final summary judgement for the resulting class action suit looms, and several of the companies mentioned (Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm) scramble to settle out of court, Pando has obtained court documents (embedded below) which show shocking evidence of a much larger conspiracy, reaching far beyond Silicon Valley.
Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.
Turkey Tries to Block Twitter
March 22nd, 2014Tor Use in Turkey
Via: BBC:
Some users trying to open the twitter.com website are apparently being redirected to a statement by Turkey’s telecommunications regulator.
It cites a court order to apply “protection measures” on the website.
This comes after PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “wipe out Twitter” following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle.
The BBC’s James Reynolds in Istanbul reports that he is unable to access Twitter.
“I don’t care what the international community says at all. Everyone will see the power of the Turkish Republic,” Mr Erdogan said earlier on Thursday.
Police and Stingray
March 22nd, 2014Via: AP:
Police across the country might be intercepting phone calls or text messages to find suspects using a technology tool known as Stingray. But they’re refusing to turn over details about its use or heavily censoring files when they do.
Police say Stingray, a suitcase-size device that pretends it’s a cell tower, is useful for catching criminals, but that’s about all they’ll say.
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A Stingray device tricks all cellphones in an area into electronically identifying themselves and transmitting data to police rather than the nearest phone company’s tower. Because documents about Stingrays are regularly censored, it’s not immediately clear what information the devices could capture, such as the contents of phone conversations and text messages, what they routinely do capture based on how they’re configured or how often they might be used.
In one of the rare court cases involving the device, the FBI acknowledged in 2011 that so-called cell site simulator technology affects innocent users in the area where it’s operated, not just a suspect police are seeking.
Drone Advertises Fake WiFi Access Points, Steals Information
March 20th, 2014This type of exploit has been around forever. Now it’s just taking to the sky on a remote controlled toy.
Via: CNN:
The next threat to your privacy could be hovering over head while you walk down the street.
Hackers have developed a drone that can steal the contents of your smartphone — from your location data to your Amazon password — and they’ve been testing it out in the skies of London. The research will be presented next week at the Black Hat Asia cybersecurity conference in Singapore.
The technology equipped on the drone, known as Snoopy, looks for mobile devices with Wi-Fi settings turned on.
Snoopy takes advantage of a feature built into all smartphones and tablets: When mobile devices try to connect to the Internet, they look for networks they’ve accessed in the past.
“Their phone will very noisily be shouting out the name of every network its ever connected to,” Sensepost security researcher Glenn Wilkinson said. “They’ll be shouting out, ‘Starbucks, are you there?…McDonald’s Free Wi-Fi, are you there?”
That’s when Snoopy can swoop into action (and be its most devious, even more than the cartoon dog): the drone can send back a signal pretending to be networks you’ve connected to in the past. Devices two feet apart could both make connections with the quadcopter, each thinking it is a different, trusted Wi-Fi network. When the phones connect to the drone, Snoopy will intercept everything they send and receive.
“Your phone connects to me and then I can see all of your traffic,” Wilkinson said.
Los Angeles Cops Argue That All Cars Are Under Investigation
March 20th, 2014Via: EFF:
Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.
The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that “All [license plate] data is investigatory.” The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter.
This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.
ALPR systems operate in just this way.
Related: A Vast Hidden Surveillance Network Runs Across America, Powered by the Repo Industry
When the Rivers Run Black
March 20th, 2014Via: Medium:
The most toxic byproduct of coal-fired power isn’t carbon dioxide. It’s the residue that’s left over. When coal is burned in a plant, just like in a home, it produces two kinds of ash: fly ash, which rises, and bottom ash, which sinks to the floor of the furnace. Together, they comprise coal ash. In a power plant, all that ash has to be put somewhere.
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According to the American Coal Ash Association, the nation churns out nearly 65 million tons of coal ash annually. However, despite the fact that it is replete with toxins, coal ash is essentially unregulated by the federal government, with oversight meant to happen at state level. Yet most states handle the material with less precaution than your standard household garbage.
The “best” use for coal ash, say scientists, is to recycle it and use it in cement, which means the contaminants get locked in and cannot leach out. But there are a range of other recycling methods, including using it in asphalt and wallboard, spreading it as a soil amendment, or using it as a substitute for salt on icy roads. One particularly novel method of disposal is dumping it into abandoned mines. Most coal ash, though, is simply carted off to landfills or placed in retaining ponds like the one at Kingston. Many of the ponds, including Kingston’s failed one, are not just built to contain the coal ash, but actually use it as a construction material in their dams and dikes.
How Virtual Gaming Worlds Are Revealing the Nature of Human Hierarchies
March 20th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
The way players form into groups in online games reveals that hierarchies are an inevitable product of the human condition, say complexity scientists.
U.S. Tech Giants Knew of NSA Data Collection, Agency’s Top Lawyer Insists
March 19th, 2014
Via: Guardian:
The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.
Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.
Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”
Facebook’s New ‘DeepFace’ Program Is Just As Creepy As It Sounds
March 19th, 2014Via: Huffington Post:
Facebook owns the world’s largest photo library, and it now has the technology to match almost all the faces within it. Yes, even the ones you don’t tag.
Facebook announced last week that it has developed a program called “DeepFace,” which researchers say can determine whether two photographed faces are of the same person with 97.25 percent accuracy.
According to Facebook, humans put to the same test answer correctly 97.53 percent of the time — only a quarter of a percent better than Facebook’s software.
The takeaway: Facebook has essentially caught up to humans when it comes to remembering a face. The program was developed by three in-house Facebook researchers and a professor at Tel Aviv University.
Research Credit: T
