Britain: Lawrence Family Hacks The Matrix
July 24th, 2013Via: Daily Mail:
A family sold their four-bedroom house for life on a narrowboat – because they could no longer afford the cost of living.
Now, the Lawrences make savings of £8,000 per year on household bills.
After their property went under the hammer for £249,000, they moved on to the 65ft boat, worth £80,000, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.
Debra, mother to Jake, seven, and Phoebe, 12, who attend local schools, said: ‘It was a big jump, but we were trapped and bored in our life.
‘I didn’t want the mortgage – it was a huge weight on our shoulders. The boat was our ticket to freedom.’
Mrs Lawrence has even been stripped of her title as housewife and husband Duncan, 41, who was a lorry driver, has taken over the duties while she goes to work in a cafe.
She said: ‘In the past, I was always left at home while Duncan went off to work. Now he gets to spend more time with the kids.’
Extremely Compartmentalized Information?
July 24th, 2013Update: 12 October 2014: “Exceptionally Compartmented Information,” or ECI
Via: The Intercept:
The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
The documents, leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also indicate that the agency has used “under cover” operatives to gain access to sensitive data and systems in the global communications industry, and that these secret agents may have even dealt with American firms. The documents describe a range of clandestine field activities that are among the agency’s “core secrets” when it comes to computer network attacks, details of which are apparently shared with only a small number of officials outside the NSA.
“It’s something that many people have been wondering about for a long time,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, after reviewing the documents. “I’ve had conversations with executives at tech companies about this precise thing. How do you know the NSA is not sending people into your data centers?”
Previous disclosures about the NSA’s corporate partnerships have focused largely on U.S. companies providing the agency with vast amounts of customer data, including phone records and email traffic. But documents published today by The Intercept suggest that even as the agency uses secret operatives to penetrate them, companies have also cooperated more broadly to undermine the physical infrastructure of the internet than has been previously confirmed.
In addition to so-called “close access” operations, the NSA’s “core secrets” include the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to weaken their encryption systems; the fact that the NSA spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on technology to defeat commercial encryption; and the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to penetrate computer networks, possibly without the knowledge of the host countries. Many of the NSA’s core secrets concern its relationships to domestic and foreign corporations.
Some of the documents in this article appear in a new documentary, CITIZENFOUR, which tells the story of the Snowden disclosures and is directed by Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras. The documents describe a panoply of programs classified with the rare designation of “Exceptionally Compartmented Information,” or ECI, which are only disclosed to a “very select” number of government officials.
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Update: Extremely Compartmented Information?
I’ve received emails from three people who claimed to have had TS/SCI backgrounds who all explained this situation the same way. I won’t post their emails, but it was all right out of the Wikipedia pages for Classified information in the United States, Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Programs. Feel free to go through all of that if you want, but the point is: This is all well known information.
None of these people had ever heard of Extremely Compartmentalized Information. One of these people suggested that Extremely Compartmentalized Information might refer to some variety of Special Access Program.
Now, IB came across a reference to extremely compartmented information on this page from Sans Institute:
Of course, the ability to collect from more and more log sources, does come at a cost; the Snare infrastructure needs to be robust enough to deal with the rapid increase in log volume, and we also need to continually come up with effective ways to present the information to people who have to manage the security of the source data. As Snare finds it’s way into systems that protect extremely compartmented information, our customers have also asked us for a few extra features in our agent and server infrastructure, such as strong encryption, and verifiable delivery.
Close, but no cigar. Extremely compartmented information isn’t extremely compartmentalized information, which is what we’re after.
I found “extremely compartmented” in the right context used in the Nomination of Robert M. Gates: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session, on Nomination of Robert M. Gates, to be Director of Central Intelligence, Volume 2, page 24.
Again, close, but both of these examples could just be describing special access stuff that only a handful of people have been read into.
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Update: Not Sensitive Compartmented Information
You guys are funny. Good try, though. The earliest reference I could find to SCI on Cryptogon is from 2003. There might be earlier ones.
You’ll have to go back to the drawing board to get my 10 bucks. 😉
The term we’re after here, again, is ECI, “Extremely Compartmentalized Information,” not SCI, “Sensitive Compartmented Information.”
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In more than two decades of following information related to U.S. intelligence agencies, covert operations, etc. I have definitely never seen any reference to, “Extremely Compartmentalized Information.”
Bounty: I will pay US$10 to anyone who can provide me with any reference to the term, “Extremely Compartmentalized Information,” used within the context of the United States government information classification system, but not referencing Snowden. Let’s say that it has to be something printed before 2013.
Returning to the CNN piece, read on and you’ll see that the bogeymen are changing their behavior to make NSA’s job harder *wink*:
U.S. officials have said that terror groups are aware of the Snowden leaks and are responding internally, like adjusting communications and security.
Let me get this straight: Because of Snowden, and not Klein-Binney-Tice-etc., “The Terrorists” are no longer using the likes of Yahoo Instant Messenger to plan their strikes against The Great Satan?
You would have to be an imbecile with amnesia to believe this.
Anyway, 10 bucks for that pre-2013, non-Snowden-related reference to “Extremely Compartmentalized Information.” Make me pay.
Via: CNN:
U.S. intelligence now believes Edward Snowden did not gain access to the “crown jewels” of National Security Agency programs that secretly intercept and monitor conversations around the world, CNN has learned.
The Obama administration is reviewing what the admitted leaker of classified information actually got his hands on and what damage he may have caused.
The ongoing damage assessment indicates he did not gain access to what is called ECI or “extremely compartmentalized information,” according to a U.S. official familiar with the review.
…
U.S. officials have said that terror groups are aware of the Snowden leaks and are responding internally, like adjusting communications and security.
NSA Director Keith Alexander said last week the United States has concrete proof terrorists are making changes and taking actions that are going to “make our job harder.”
Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites
July 24th, 2013Via: Travis Goodspeed’s Blog:
In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking moving targets and looking for downlink channels.
Spain Taps Social Security Reserve Fund to Pay Pensions
July 23rd, 2013Via: Reuters:
Spain tapped its social security reserve fund for the second time in a month on Monday, the Labour Ministry said, to help with extra summer pension payments as unemployment and retirement costs deplete government funds.
The government turned to the fund for 3.5 billion euros ($4.6 billion) on July 1 then for a further 1 billion euros on Monday. Spanish pensioners receive two cheques in summer and two over the Christmas holidays.
Spain was forced to tap the reserve for the first time last year to help pay pension costs, using some 7 billion euros.
Record high unemployment, which hit over 27 percent in the first quarter, and a growing number of retirees on a state pensions have put an unprecedented strain on Spanish social security funds.
The Bell Labs of Quantum Computing
July 23rd, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Raymond Laflamme can’t yet sell you a quantum computer. But he’ll sell you a $13,000 logic board for measuring entangled photons.
It’s a start.
Laflamme is head of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, a research center that’s part of a quixotic, grandiose effort by Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of the smartphone maker BlackBerry, to invent a quantum computer and turn this city 70 miles from Toronto into a “Quantum Valley.”
Since 1999, Lazaridis has put $270 million behind his vision, paying to recruit some of the world’s best theoretical physicists. While he thinks a true quantum computer is still 10 years away, he believes initial discoveries can be commercialized now, turning Waterloo into a thriving industrial cluster built around quantum information science.
Google Responsible for More Internet Traffic Than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram Combined
July 23rd, 2013Via: Wired:
Everyone knows Google is big. But the truth is that it’s huge. On an average day, Google accounts for about 25 percent of all consumer internet traffic running through North American ISPs.
That’s a far larger slice of than previously thought, and it means that with so many consumer devices connecting to Google each day, it’s bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined. It also explains why Google is building data centers as fast as it possibly can. Three years ago, the company’s services accounted for about 6 percent of the internet’s traffic.
“What’s really interesting is, over just the past year, how pervasive Google has become, not just in Google data centers, but throughout the North American internet,” says Craig Labovitz, founder of Deepfield, the internet monitoring company that crunched the data. His probes show that more than 62 percent of the smartphones, laptops, video streamers, and other devices that tap into the internet from throughout North America connect to Google at least once a day.
Labovitz calls Google’s traffic “astounding.” The lion’s share of it comes from YouTube. But Google traffic involving search, analytics, web apps, and advertising is far from insignificant.
Take these numbers with a grain of salt, though. It’s impossible to get a total picture of the internet, so Deepfield’s numbers are a best guess based on the traffic flowing through its internet service provider partners. Still, there’s no question that Google is big and getting massive.
Madness: The Raisin Administrative Committee
July 23rd, 2013Via: Reason:
“They want us to pay for our own raisins that we grew,” says Raisin Valley Farms owner Marvin Horne. “We have to buy them back!”
Marvin and Laura Horne, fined for the federal crime of selling their own raisins.
This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Every year, the Hornes plant seeds, tie vines, harvest fruit, and place grapes in paper trays to create sun-dried raisins. And every year, the federal government prevents them from bringing their full harvest to market.
It’s called an agriculture marketing order. Depression-era regulations meant to stabilize crop prices endanger the livelihoods of small farmers across the country, but the raisin marketing order is particularly egregious. An elected board of bureaucrats known as the Raisin Administrative Committee decides what the proper yield should be in any given year in order to meet a previously decided-upon price. Once they can estimate the size of the year’s harvest, they force every farmer to surrender a percentage of their crop to raisin packers. The packers then place the raisins in a “reserve pool,” a special holding vat for raisins that cannot be sold in the U.S. Eventually, the packers can sell the reserve pool raisins overseas at highly discounted prices set by the government or funnel them into school lunch programs for next to nothing.
The government allows them to sell one out of every two raisins.The farmers were always supposed to get a percentage of the money raised from the reserve pool raisins, but as profit margins dwindled over the years, so did the return to farmers. The tipping point came in 2003, when farmers received zero dollars in return for the 47 percent of the crop they had surrendered.
“You can’t work for a whole year and then give 47 percent of what you made away and still keep that business afloat,” says Laura Horne.
Illegal raisins, with chile-lime flavoring.Frustrated and desperate, the Hornes started packing and selling their own raisins, which they believed would allow them to circumvent the marketing order. In doing so, they inadvertantly sparked a small revolution, as other independent raisin farmers saw their initial success and began to pack and sell, too. The government wasn’t happy (neither was Sun-Maid).
The USDA saddled the Hornes with massive fines in addition to demanding payment for the raisins they had failed to surrender. Marvin Horne estimates his outstanding balance at close to a million dollars, a virtually insurmountable figure for a small, family-owned farm. The Hornes decided to fight back.
Microsoft Drove the Bus Off the Cliff, Now it Tries to Speed Up
July 23rd, 2013Via: SemiAccurate:
Microsoft has driven off the cliff into the death spiral and rather than change direction they are trying to speed up their ‘momentum’. Endless reorgs, paid analyst reports, and flat-out lying to anyone who will listen won’t help, they can not succeed from their current position.
Last fall SemiAccurate was one of the few voices criticizing Windows 8, WART, and Surface. The mainstream press seemed too welded to the MS advertising revenue stream to dare even hint that the emperor has no clothes, but anyone even looking at the facts had to admit the trio was doomed. In light of the utter meltdown of Surface that the company announced yesterday, let’s do a little recap before we point out why this $900 million loss is a minor bump in their death spiral.
The Eye of Sauron Is the Modern Surveillance State
July 23rd, 2013Via: Slate:
What can literary fiction teach us about recent revelations that the National Security Agency has aggressively been gathering massive amounts of data on American citizens? The novel one usually turns to, of course, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its terrifying vision of the Thought Police. Even President Obama, in response to questions about the NSA, has been forced to deny that the government has engaged in “Big Brother” tactics. Orwell’s book, however, isn’t the most compelling or accurate literary prediction of modern surveillance. That award goes to a less obvious title: J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s most potent and intimidating image of centralized surveillance, the Eye of Sauron atop a tower, taking in the whole world, has resonated with those who are paranoid about government monitoring. But it’s Sauron’s vulnerability that has the most relevance for America today. Consider the basic premise of Tolkien’s trilogy: a small group of dedicated subversives willing to sacrifice their lives slips in under the surveillance system of a great power, blends in with an alien population, and delivers a devastating blow to the heart of its empire, leaving its security forces in disarray and its populace terrified. Even a tower or two crumbles to dust. Far from being covert, much of this operation is conducted in plain sight, with the great power aware of its enemies’ existence, if not their intent. Given its prescience about modern-day terrorism, Tolkien’s vision offers at least three lessons for present-day America…
Research Credit: DF
A Tour Inside CloudFlare’s Latest Generation Servers
July 23rd, 2013This is off topic, but possibly interesting for anyone who wants to see what balls-to-the-wall looks like in the realm of custom server hardware.
In short, huge RAM cache and SSDs—lots of SSDs.
Via: CloudFlare:
CloudFlare operates at a significant scale, handling more than a trillion requests through our network every month. To ensure this is as efficient as possible, we own and operate all the equipment in our 23 locations around the world in order to process the volume of traffic that flows through our network. We spend a significant amount of time specing and, in some cases, designing the hardware that makes up our network. At the edge of CloudFlare’s network we run three main components: routers, switches, and servers. On regular intervals, we will take everything we’ve learned about a last generation of hardware and refresh each component with a next generation.
