The One About a Russian Satellite “Raising Alarm” with U.S.
August 16th, 2018Just a few stories for context about this Russian satellite situation:
Mystery Russian Satellite’s Behaviour Raises Alarm in U.S.:
A mysterious Russian satellite displaying “very abnormal behaviour” has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official.
“We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” said assistant secretary Yleem Poblete at a conference in Switzerland on 14 August.
She voiced fears that it was impossible to say if the object may be a weapon.
Russia has dismissed the comments as “unfounded, slanderous accusations based on suspicions”.
The satellite in question was launched in October last year.
“[The satellite’s] behaviour on-orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection satellite activities,” Ms Poblete told the conference on disarmament in Switzerland.
“Russian intentions with respect to this satellite are unclear and are obviously a very troubling development,” she added, citing recent comments made by the commander of Russia’s Space Forces, who said adopting “new prototypes of weapons” was a key objective for the force.
Ms Poblete said that the US had “serious concerns” that Russia was developing anti-satellite weapons.
* roll eyes *
The Russians. Space Force. The Russians. Space Force.
In other news, I’m sure this thing is just up to spreading rainbows and unicorns in the heavens: Mysterious X-37B Military Space Plane Nears 1 Year in Orbit:
The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B miniature space plane has winged past 340 days in orbit performing secretive duties during the program’s fifth flight.
The robotic craft’s latest mission, known as Orbital Test Vehicle-5 (OTV-5), kicked off on Sept. 7, 2017, with a launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
As usual, Air Force officials have revealed few details about OTV-5. But we do know that one payload flying aboard the X-37B this time around is the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader, or ASETS-11. Developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, this cargo is testing experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipes for long durations in the space environment.
Finally, ‘Very Abnormal’ Russian Satellite Doesn’t Seem So Threatening, Experts Say:
Perhaps the Russians “are checking out the [spacecraft] bus and its capability to deliver multiple subsatellites to different orbits — something like that,” McDowell said. “From the information that’s available in the public domain, that would be an entirely plausible interpretation.”
These three satellites’ activities may be related to the military and may have something to do with spacecraft inspection, he added. But McDowell doesn’t regard their behavior as “very abnormal,” and there’s no indication that they’ve done anything illegal or threatening. So, he’s not sure what prompted the concerns expressed by Poblete.
“What are they complaining about?” McDowell said, referring to American officials.
Weeden voiced similar sentiments. Cosmos 2523’s “deployment was unusual, but hard to see at this point why the US is making it a big deal,” he said via Twitter today.
“There are a lot of facts and not a lot of pattern,” McDowell said. “So, partly I take the U.S. statement as saying, ‘Russia, how dare you do something confusing?'”
Inflation: Venezuela Will Cut Five Zeros from Currency
August 16th, 2018Ah yes, ye ole Zimbucks solution:
Three Eggs Priced in Zimbabwean Dollars
Toilet Paper Only; No Zim Dollars
Via: WRAL:
Faced with nearly incomprehensible inflation — 32,714 percent as of Wednesday — Venezuelan officials thought they had a solution: They changed the color of the bank notes and increased their denomination. Then they said they would lop off three zeros. And when that didn’t seem enough, they announced they would cut off two more.
The tactics have left Venezuelans like Yosmar Nowak, the owner of a coffee shop in Caracas, convinced that there is no solution in sight and that the government cannot even bring down the price of a cup of coffee, an eye-watering 2 million bolivars.
“I imagine if we keep like this we’re going to have to do the same thing in December,” said Nowak, who has been forced to raise prices in her cafe at least 40 times this year.
Pennsylvania Report Details Decades of Sexual Abuse by Priests
August 14th, 2018Via: Reuters:
Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused thousands of children over a 70-year period and silenced victims through “the weaponization of faith” and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops, the state attorney general said on Tuesday.
An 884-page report made public by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro after a two-year investigation contained graphic examples of children being groomed and sexually abused by clergymen. It was largely based on documents from secret archives kept by the dioceses, including handwritten confessions by priests, he said.
“It was child sexual abuse, including rape, committed by grown men – priests – against children,” Shapiro told a press conference.
An 11-Year-Old Changed Election Results On a Replica Florida State Website in Under 10 Minutes
August 14th, 2018Via: PBS:
An 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world’s largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26, organizers of the event said.
Thousands of adult hackers attend the convention annually, while this year a group of children attempted to hack 13 imitation websites linked to voting in presidential battleground states.
The boy, who was identified by DEFCON officials as Emmett Brewer, accessed a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website. He was one of about 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 who were taking part in the so-called “DEFCON Voting Machine Hacking Village,” a portion of which allowed kids the chance to manipulate party names, candidate names and vote count totals.
Nico Sell, the co-founder of the the non-profit r00tz Asylum, which teaches children how to become hackers and helped organize the event, said an 11-year-old girl also managed to make changes to the same Florida replica website in about 15 minutes, tripling the number of votes found there.
Sell said more than 30 children hacked a variety of other similar state replica websites in under a half hour.
“These are very accurate replicas of all of the sites,” Sell told the PBS NewsHour on Sunday. “These things should not be easy enough for an 8-year-old kid to hack within 30 minutes, it’s negligent for us as a society.”
Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It or Not
August 13th, 2018Mmm hmm.
Via: AP:
Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.
An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used privacy settings that say they will prevent it from doing so.
Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.
British UFO Researcher, Who Died After Vomiting Black Liquid, Had His Laptop Wiped by Authorities
August 13th, 2018“Natural causes.”
Via: Daily Mail:
A conspiracy theorist’s laptop and mobile will be analysed at an inquest into his death after the UFO expert vomited two litres of black fluid and died aged 39.
Max Spiers’s laptop was wiped when authorities returned it after his death more than two years ago during a trip to Poland to attend a conference.
Today a pre-inquest review at Guildhall in Sandwich, Kent, heard how the contents of his SIM card were also of particular interest.
Before he died Mr Spiers messaged his mother, Vanessa Bates, saying: ‘You’re boy’s in trouble, if anything happens to me, investigate.’
An initial inquest opened in December 2016 when the court heard he vomited two litres of black blood, but the inquest was adjourned last year.
The father of two allegedly made many ‘enemies’ in his investigations. His inquest will now be held over four days from January 7, 2019.
Authorities in Poland, where Mr Spiers was attending a conference, initially concluded the sudden death was due to natural causes.
Inside Google’s Effort to Develop a Censored Search Engine in China
August 12th, 2018Via: The Intercept:
Google analyzed search terms entered into a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for a censored search engine it has been planning to launch in China, according to confidential documents seen by The Intercept.
Engineers working on the censorship sampled search queries from 265.com, a Chinese-language web directory service owned by Google.
…
It appears that Google has used 265.com as a de facto honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu. Google’s use of 265.com offers an insight into the mechanics behind its planned Chinese censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly, which the company has been preparing since spring 2017.
After gathering sample queries from 265.com, Google engineers used them to review lists of websites that people would see in response to their searches. The Dragonfly developers used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether the websites were blocked by the Great Firewall. They compiled a list of thousands of websites that were banned, and then integrated this information into a censored version of Google’s search engine so that it would automatically manipulate Google results, purging links to websites prohibited in China from the first page shown to users.
Airbus’ Solar-Powered Zephyr Smashes Flight Duration Record on Maiden Outing
August 12th, 2018Via: New Atlas:
Airbus’ Zephyr program has claimed another record, with a production model unmanned solar-powered aircraft touching down after more than 25 days in the air. That voyage is the longest unmanned flight ever made, and was achieved on this particular vehicle’s maiden voyage, no less.
Originally built by British defence company Qinetiq and now owned by Airbus, the Zephyr aircraft is designed to soar through the stratosphere for months at a time by drawing on the power of the sun. It is similar to Facebook’s now defunct Aquila aircraft in this sense, and is hoped to one day provide satellite-like services with the flexibility of an unmanned drone.
Hacker Finds Hidden ‘God Mode’ on Old x86 CPUs; ‘These Backdoors Probably Exist Elsewhere’
August 12th, 2018One more for your herniating Compromised Down to the Silicon file folder.
Via: Tom’s Hardware:
Some x86 CPUs have hidden backdoors that let you seize root by sending a command to an undocumented RISC core that manages the main CPU, security researcher Christopher Domas told the Black Hat conference here Thursday (Aug. 9).
The command — “.byte 0x0f, 0x3f” in Linux — “isn’t supposed to exist, doesn’t have a name, and gives you root right away,” Domas said, adding that he calls it “God Mode.”
The backdoor completely breaks the protection-ring model of operating-system security, in which the OS kernel runs in ring 0, device drivers run in rings 1 and 2, and user applications and interfaces (“userland”) run in ring 3, furthest from the kernel and with the least privileges. To put it simply, Domas’ God Mode takes you from the outermost to the innermost ring in four bytes.
“We have direct ring 3 to ring 0 hardware privilege escalation,” Domas said. “This has never been done.”
That’s because of the hidden RISC chip, which lives so far down on the bare metal that Domas half-joked that it ought to be thought of as a new, deeper ring of privilege, following the theory that hypervisors and chip-management systems can be considered ring -1 or ring -2.
“This is really ring -4,” he said. “It’s a secret, co-located core buried alongside the x86 chip. It has unrestricted access to the x86.”
The good news is that, as far as Domas knows, this backdoor exists only on VIA C3 Nehemiah chips made in 2003 and used in embedded systems and thin clients. The bad news is that it’s entirely possible that such hidden backdoors exist on many other chipsets.
“These black boxes that we’re trusting are things that we have no way to look into,” he said. “These backdoors probably exist elsewhere.”
Cost to Dismantle First Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carrier: “Up to $1.5 Billion”
August 12th, 2018
Via: Popular Mechanics:
Six years after decommissioning USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy is still figuring out how to safely dismantle the ship. The General Accounting Office estimates the cost of taking apart the vessel and sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility at up to $1.5 billion, or about one-eighth the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier.
