Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked
February 4th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
German academics said they had cracked two encryption systems used to protect satellite phone signals and that anyone with cheap computer equipment and radio could eavesdrop on calls over an entire continent. Hundreds of thousands of satellite phone users are thought to be affected.
“We were able to completely reverse engineer the encryption algorithms employed,” said Benedikt Driessen and Ralf Hund of Ruhr University Bochum as they announced their report, “Don’t Trust Satellite Phones”.
The encryption algorithms are known as GMR-1 and GMR-2, and are standards used across satellite phone operators, including Thuraya, a leading providers. Their technology is widely used in the Middle East and Africa, including in some military applications.
Mr Driessen told The Telegraph that the equipment and software needed to intercept and decrypt satellite phone calls from hundreds of thousands of users would cost as little as $2,000. His demonstration system takes up to half an hour to decipher a call, but a more powerful computer would allow eavesdropping in real time, he said.
Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low
February 4th, 2012Via: ZeroHedge:
A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.
Who Killed Lard?
February 4th, 2012Via: NPR:
At the Lard Exoneration Dinner, Bubby’s owner Ron Silver says its time to bring it back. Lard is showing up at high end restaurants, drizzled on potatoes and layered onto coal-fired pizzas. Silver says it’s intimidating after 100 years of bad press to put the word back on the menu, but he’s embracing it.
“I’m proud of it. I’m waving my lard flag,” he says.
Just try the pie crusts, he says. Then decide.
North Korea Might Have Experimented with a Fusion Boost to Its Fission Weapons
February 4th, 2012Via: Nature:
North Korea may have conducted two covert nuclear weapons tests in 2010, according to a fresh analysis of radioisotope data.
The claim has drawn scepticism from some nuclear-weapons experts. But if confirmed, the analysis would double the number of tests the country is known to have conducted and suggest that North Korea is trying to develop powerful warheads for its fledgling nuclear arsenal.
It might also explain a bizarre statement issued by North Korea’s state news agency in May 2010, which said that the country had achieved nuclear fusion. The news was largely ridiculed in the South Korean and Western media — but it was not so quickly dismissed by the small circle of experts who devote their careers to identifying covert nuclear tests. South Korean scientists had detected a whiff of radioactive xenon at around that time, hinting at nuclear activity in its northern neighbour, which had already tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.
Filling America’s Private Prisons
February 4th, 2012Via: Guardian:
In the past few decades, changes in sentencing laws and get-tough-on-crime policies have led to an explosion in America’s prison population. Funding this incarceration binge has been an enormous drain on taxpayer dollars, with some states now spending more to lock up their citizens than to provide their children with education. It’s difficult to spin anything positive out of that scenario, but as it turns out, even this blackest of clouds has a silver lining – silver as in dollars, that is, for the private prison industry.
How America Made Its Children Crazy
February 4th, 2012“It’s not some sci-fi dystopic concern that’s always 20 years out. They’re gunning for your children’s minds with this right now.”
—Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
Via: Asia Times:
Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.
The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.
It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn’t worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ”The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data, ”Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ”And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”’
Related:
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education
Are Teenagers More Doomed Than Usual?
Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Research Credit: jb
Syria: Hundreds Dead After Government Unleashes Artillery Barrage on Homs
February 4th, 2012Via: Guardian:
More than 200 people were reported to have been killed yesterday in the Syrian city of Homs as security forces continued their efforts to take back opposition-held areas on the eve of a vote by the UN security council on a much-disputed resolution on the country.
Hundreds more were killed in shelling of the city, according to the the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which cited witnesses.
Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the campaign group, said that women and children were among 217 people killed, many of them in the Khalidya district of the city.
“Syrian forces are shelling the district with mortars from several locations, some buildings are on fire. There are also buildings which got destroyed,” Abdulrahman told Reuters.
Riots Outside Cairo Interior Ministry
February 4th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Rock-throwing protesters fought riot police through clouds of teargas to within metres of Egypt’s Interior Ministry on a second day of clashes triggered by the deaths of 74 people in the country’s worst soccer disaster.
A demonstrator and an army officer were reported dead in Cairo and in the city of Suez two people were killed as police used live rounds to hold back crowds trying to break into a police station and fought in front of the state security headquarters, witnesses and the ambulance authority said.
Most of those killed in the Port Said football stadium on Wednesday night were crushed in a stampede and the government declared three days of mourning, but protesters hold the military-led authorities responsible.
It was country’s deadliest incident since an uprising ousted Hosni Mubarak almost a year ago and it gave fresh impetus to regular street protests against Egypt’s ruling generals.
“We will stay until we get our rights. Did you see what happened in Port Said?” said 22-year-old Abu Hanafy, who arrived from work on Thursday evening and decided to join the protest.
The ministry in Cairo, an object of hatred for football fans who say lax policing was to blame for the stadium disaster, has been hemmed in by the street battles since Thursday.
Thousands were still battling riot police there and more protesters were expected to gather in the centre of the capital for a “Friday of Anger” declared by 28 youth activist groups and political parties.
Feds Steal Children from Illegal Aliens
February 3rd, 2012Via: ABC News:
The scars of childbirth were still healing on Amelia Reyes Jimenez’s stomach in 2008 when police came to her Phoenix apartment and took her three-month-old daughter from her arms.
Three and a half years later, Reyes Jimenez and her four children have become statistics in the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration. Each year thousands of children of undocumented immigrants, like Amelia’s kids, wind up in foster care when their parents are arrested for immigration violations. Some are even adopted by U.S. citizens while their parents are held in federal detention centers or deported back to their native countries.
Reyes Jimenez’s son and three daughters are now living in foster care in Phoenix, and are awaiting possible adoption. Reyes Jimenez is back in Mexico, her parental rights terminated by an Arizona judge, and she cries when she remembers the raid that began it all.
“My daughters were calling, ‘Mommy, my Mommy,'” said Reyes Jimenez. “I felt destroyed. I felt like I would never see my girls, even worse [the baby] was so small. I had just bought her cradle and her stroller.”
A new study by the human rights group Applied Research Center estimates that as of summer 2011 there were at least 5,100 children of detained immigrants in foster care in 22 states.
Use Encryption Software on a Computer in a Cafe? Pay in Cash? You Might Be a Terrorist
February 3rd, 2012Via: Public Intelligence:
A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity. The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media. In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.
Research Credit: Damian
