Barrett Brown: Charges Related to Publishing URL Dropped
March 5th, 2014Via: IT News:
United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown – including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum – in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet.
Windows XP Market Share Climbs Again as Customers Dig Their Heels In
March 5th, 2014Just about everyone I know with XP won’t budge, despite my warnings.
Maybe Microsoft has plans to try to convert millions of XP users over to Windows 8 with the rumored Windows 8.1 with Bing, which will supposedly be free.
Still, tens of millions of people will probably refuse to deal with the situation. I wouldn’t use Windows 8.x if someone paid me to use it. But I wouldn’t use XP on the Internet after that cut off date either. No way.
Via: Inquirer:
THE POPULAR Microsoft operating system that refuses to die, Windows XP, has seen a rise in popularity for the second month running.
Windows XP, which reaches end of life in a little more than four weeks, has continued its bizarre renaissance, according to this month’s Net Applications figures.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Facebook Drones to Battle Google Balloons in the War of Airborne Internet
March 5th, 2014Via: Wired:
The race for the airborne internet is on.
According to multiple reports, Facebook is in talks to buy a drone maker whose solar-powered aircraft could operate as high-altitude wireless hot spots, circling in the stratosphere for years without refueling. That may seem far-fetched, but it’s not entirely surprising in the context of today’s online rivalries. Witness Google, Facebook’s chief nemesis, which is already running its own high-speed internet service down here on the earth — the ever-expanding Google Fiber — not to mention the balloons it’s building to bring internet access to more remote locations from high in the sky.
Obama Is Complicit in Suppressing the Truth About Torture
March 5th, 2014Via: The Atlantic:
President Obama is complicit in suppressing the truth about CIA torture of prisoners. That’s clear from the fact that the Senate intelligence committee’s $40 million, 6,000-page torture report is still being suppressed 15 months after being adopted.
A Vast Hidden Surveillance Network Runs Across America, Powered by the Repo Industry
March 5th, 2014It’s not just law enforcement running those license plate scanners.
This is absolutely nuts.
Via: BetaBoston:
Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa’s repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa’s unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond the repossession business, transforming any industry that wants to check on the whereabouts of ordinary people.
An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.
These scans mean big money for Sousa — typically $200 to $400 every time the spotter finds a vehicle that’s stolen or in default — so he runs his spotter around the clock, typically adding 8,000 plate scans to the database in Texas each day.
“Honestly, we’ve found random apartment complexes and shopping plazas that are sweet spots” where the company can impound multiple vehicles, explains Sousa, the president of New England Associates Inc. in Bridgewater.
But the most significant impact of Sousa’s business is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to insurers are willing to pay for.
While public debate about the license reading technology has centered on how police should use it, business has eagerly adopted the $10,000 to $17,000 scanners with remarkably few limits.
At least 10 repossession companies in Massachusetts say they mount the scanners on spotter cars or tow trucks, and Digital Recognition Network of Fort Worth, Texas, claims to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles annually.
Food Packaging Chemicals May be Harmful to Human Health Over Long Term
March 5th, 2014Via: British Medical Journal Press Release:
The synthetic chemicals used in the packaging, storage, and processing of foodstuffs might be harmful to human health over the long term, warn environmental scientists in a commentary in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
This is because most of these substances are not inert and can leach into the foods we eat, they say.
Despite the fact that some of these chemicals are regulated, people who eat packaged or processed foods are likely to be chronically exposed to low levels of these substances throughout their lives, say the authors.
…
They point out that lifelong exposure to food contact materials or FCMs – substances used in packaging, storage, processing, or preparation equipment – “is a cause for concern for several reasons.”
These include the fact that known toxicants, such as formaldehyde, a cancer causing substance, are legally used in these materials. Formaldehyde is widely present, albeit at low levels, in plastic bottles used for fizzy drinks and melamine tableware.
Secondly, other chemicals known to disrupt hormone production also crop up in FCMs, including bisphenol A, tributyltin, triclosan, and phthalates.
“Whereas the science for some of these substances is being debated and policy makers struggle to satisfy the needs of stakeholders, consumers remain exposed to these chemicals daily, mostly unknowingly,” the authors point out.
And, thirdly, the total number of known chemical substances used intentionally in FCMs exceeds 4000.
Furthermore, potential cellular changes caused by FCMs, and in particular, those with the capacity to disrupt hormones, are not even being considered in routine toxicology analysis, which prompts the authors to suggest that this “casts serious doubts on the adequacy of chemical regulatory procedures.”
They admit that establishing potential cause and effect as a result of lifelong and largely invisible exposure to FCMs will be no easy task, largely because there are no unexposed populations to compare with, and there are likely to be wide differences in exposure levels among individuals and across certain population groups.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Singapore: Young CEO of Crypto Currency Exchange Found Dead
March 5th, 2014Via: Tech in Asia:
The startup community has lost one of its own. Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta, a Singapore-based virtual currency trading platform that also deals in bitcoin, has died last night, Tech in Asia has learned. She was 28 years old.
The circumstances surrounding the death is unclear. Sources have suggested that she committed suicide, although police investigations are still ongoing.
Research Credit: LoneWolf
Critical Crypto Bug Leaves Several Linux Distributions, Hundreds of Apps Open to Eavesdropping
March 4th, 2014
Via: Ars Technica:
Hundreds of open source packages, including the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Debian distributions of Linux, are susceptible to attacks that circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical vulnerability in a widely used cryptographic code library.
The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers.
The bug is the result of commands in a section of the GnuTLS code that verify the authenticity of TLS certificates, which are often known simply as X509 certificates. The coding error, which may have been present in the code since 2005, causes critical verification checks to be terminated, drawing ironic parallels to the extremely critical “goto fail” flaw that for months put users of Apple’s iOS and OS X operating systems at risk of surreptitious eavesdropping attacks. Apple developers have since patched the bug.
“It was discovered that GnuTLS did not correctly handle certain errors that could occur during the verification of an X.509 certificate, causing it to incorrectly report a successful verification,” an advisory issued by Red Hat warned. “An attacker could use this flaw to create a specially crafted certificate that could be accepted by GnuTLS as valid for a site chosen by the attacker.”
Barrett Brown Faces 100 Years in Prison for Posting Hyperlink to Site Containing Hacked Material in Chat Room
March 4th, 2014Update: Charges Related to Publishing URL Dropped
*phew*
Via: IT News:
United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown – including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum – in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet.
—
Via: Guardian:
Lawyers acting for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist facing more than 100 years in prison for having posted a hyperlink to hacked material, have called for his case to be dismissed on grounds that it violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and would chill the internet.
Brown, 32, is being held in Texas ahead of two scheduled trials on 28 April and 19 May. He is charged with a total of 17 counts in three separate indictments relating to his work uncovering online surveillance.
The main allegation against him – spanning 12 counts – is that he posted a hyperlink on an internet chat room to a website containing material hacked from the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc, (Stratfor). The hack included email addresses of 860,000 Stratfor subscribers as well as 60,000 credit card details.
In a legal memorandum lodged with a federal court in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday, Brown’s lawyers argued that the charges against him should be dropped ahead of trial because they were too vague and were in breach of his constitutional right to free speech. By hyperlinking to the hacked material, Brown did not “transfer” the stolen information as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page, but merely created a path to files that had already been published elsewhere that were in the public domain.
“Republishing a hyperlink does not itself move, convey, select, place or otherwise transfer, a file or document from one location to another… The government only alleges that Mr Brown ‘transferred’ a hyperlink containing directions to where the Stratfor file was already placed by another person when the Stratfor files were uploaded to public web servers,” the motion argues.
A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA
March 4th, 2014Via: New York Times:
In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.”
Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy.
The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life.
In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants.
This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University.
