Google Wallet Stores Some Payment Card Data In Plain Text
December 17th, 2011Via: Dark Reading:
Google’s much-anticipated mobile payment application locally stores some sensitive user information unencrypted, such as a cardholder’s name, transaction dates, email address, and account balance, new research released today reveals.
Researchers from viaForensics tested the security of Google Wallet — which lets consumers transact credit-card charges, redeem gift cards, and use loyalty membership cards in stores from their phones — on rooted Android smartphones and found that the app leaves sensitive data in the clear. While Google Wallet hides the full credit-card account number, the last four digits reside in plain text in the app’s local SQLite database.
The good news is that viaForensics confirmed that the app does repel man-in-the-middle attacks, and is protected by a PIN to conduct transactions with the cards.
But the apps’ SQLite databases resident on the Android phones included credit-card balance, limit, expiration date, cardholder name, and transaction locations and dates — information that viaForensics says could be used, for example, as a way to social-engineer the actual credit-card account from the cardholder.
UMG Claims “Right to Block or Remove” YouTube Videos it Doesn’t Own
December 17th, 2011Via: Ars Technica:
Universal Music Group has responded to Megaupload’s request for a temporary restraining order barring the music giant from further interference with the distribution of its “Mega Song.” UMG insists that it had a right to take down the video—not under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as Megaupload had assumed, but under a private contractual arrangement between UMG and YouTube.
UMG’s filing raises more questions than it answers. Most obviously, the firm has not explained why it took down the video in the first place. But the filing also raises deeper questions about UMG’s effort to essentially opt out of the DMCA takedown rules. UMG seems to believe it can take down videos even if it doesn’t hold the copyright to them, and that when UMG takes a video down from YouTube, the owner of that video can’t avail herself of even the weak protections against takedown abuse provided by the DMCA.
Coming Soon: Retroactive Surveillance on Anyone
December 17th, 2011Via: Network World:
As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report.
These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to “Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government,” written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA.
That will enable shadowing people’s movements and communications that took place before the individuals became suspects, he says.
“For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator previously unknown to security services is arrested, it will be possible to go back in time to scrutinize the demonstrator’s phone conversations, automobile travels, and the people he or she met in the months and even years leading up to the arrest,” the report says.
“These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine. … This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution,” the report says.
Villaseno draws on knowledge gained from recent overthrows of such authoritarian regimes to support his argument that such a scenario is not just possible but likely. He notes that when the government of Libya fell, insurgents found equipment that had captured 30 million to 40 million minutes of phone conversations per month and enabled the government to read activist emails. There have been reports that the government of Syria wants to build communications intercepts as well, he says.
Related: NSA Building 1.5 Million Square Foot Data Center
Sprint Orders All OEMs to Strip Carrier IQ from Their Hardware
December 17th, 2011Via: geek.com:
In an attempt to distance themselves from the increasingly volatile Carrier IQ situation, we’ve been told that Sprint has ordered that all of their hardware partners remove the Carrier IQ software from Sprint devices as soon as possible.
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Sources at HTC have told us that, as a result of the lawsuits targeting Carrier IQ, Sprint, and other CIQ-using OEMs, Sprint has asked all of their partners to get rid of Carrier IQ. Starting with the high-volume and high-profile devices on the network, each of the OEM’s has been asked to quickly release binaries that do not contain Carrier IQ so that over-the-air updates can be pushed to those devices as quickly as possible. The eventual plan is to remove Carrier IQ from all of the devices on Sprint’s network.
SEC Charges Ex-Fannie, Freddie CEOs with Fraud
December 17th, 2011Ya think?
Via: AP:
Two former CEOs at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Friday became the highest-profile individuals to be charged in connection with the 2008 financial crisis.
In a lawsuit filed in New York, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil fraud charges against six former executives at the two firms, including former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron.
The executives were accused of understating the level of high-risk subprime mortgages that Fannie and Freddie held just before the housing bubble burst.
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was,” said Robert Khuzami, SEC’s enforcement director.
Khuzami noted that huge losses on their subprime loans eventually pushed the two companies to the brink of failure and forced the government to take them over.
Russia: Founder of Newspaper That Investigated Government Corruption Shot Dead
December 16th, 2011Via: Guardian:
The founder of a newspaper that investigated government corruption has been shot dead outside the newspaper’s office in Russia’s North Caucasus region, police say.
A gunman shot Gadzhimurat Kamalov as he was leaving the offices of the newspaper Chernovik in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan province, shortly before midnight on Thursday, the regional interior ministry said.
Police said Kamalov was shot eight times and pronounced dead on the way to hospital.
The New-York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said journalists at Chernovik, known for reporting on corruption in the provincial administration, had been “routinely persecuted for their work”.
Six Waltons Have More Wealth Than the Bottom 30% of Americans
December 15th, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
The brand-new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small northwest Arkansas city of Bentonville is the creation of Alice Walton, the daughter of the late Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest retailer in the world.
Alice Walton, who is worth about $21 billion, has achieved her dream of building a top-tier museum that unabashedly celebrates American art in the American heartland. Crystal Bridges, in many ways, is an aesthetic success.
It’s also a moral tragedy, very much like the corporation that provided Walton with the money to build a billion-dollar art museum during a terrifying recession. The museum is a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else. In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion, according to Forbes.
The museum, which opened last month, sits in a wooded ravine a few miles from Wal-Mart headquarters. Two main buildings, referred to locally as the armadillos, for their rounded and ribbed roofs, are linked to a series of galleries that ring what will eventually be a spring-fed pond. Crystal Bridges was designed by Moshe Safdie, who is a fine architect, and his museum in some ways resembles a handsome Scandinavian airline terminal. It is certainly the handsomest building ever built with Wal-Mart money. I suspect it is also the only building associated with Wal-Mart that is devoted solely to American-made goods.
Half of Americans Poor or Near Poor
December 15th, 2011Via: CBS:
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too `rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
“The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” he said. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.”
Related: American Citizens Can Be Arrested As Terrorists On Home Soil And Held Indefinitely Without Trial
American Citizens Can Be Arrested As Terrorists On Home Soil And Held Indefinitely Without Trial
December 15th, 2011Now with even more Hope and Change.
Via: Guardian:
Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.
Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.
The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.
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The legislation’s supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law’s critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.
“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”
9/11: A Conspiracy Theory
December 15th, 2011Via: The Corbett Report:
