Keystone Oil Pipeline Leaks in South Dakota
November 16th, 2017Via: Reuters:
TransCanada Corp (TRP.TO) shut part of its Keystone oil pipeline system after a 5,000-barrel leak in South Dakota, the company said on Thursday, four days before neighboring Nebraska was set to decide on the company’s long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline.
Opponents of TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline seized on the spill, saying it highlighted the risks posed by the XL project – which has become a symbol for environmentalists of fossil-fuel pollution and global warming.
TransCanada said in a statement it discovered the leak in the town of Amherst at 6 a.m. on Thursday after systems detected a drop in pressure, and that it was working with authorities as it investigates the cause.
South Dakota Department of Environmental and Natural Resources spokesman Brian Walsh said the leak came from an underground pipeline and that it had been contained at the site.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made Keystone XL a key plank in his energy policy and handed TransCanada a federal permit in March, reversing former President Barack Obama’s decision to reject the line on environmental grounds after years of study.
Trump has argued that the 830,000-barrel pipeline, which would serve as an extension of the existing Keystone system linking Alberta oil to U.S. refineries, will lower fuel prices, shore up national security and bring jobs.
Military Coup in Zimbabwe
November 15th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Zimbabwe was on a knife’s edge on Thursday after the military seized power in what it dubbed a targeted operation against “criminals” in the entourage of President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the southern African nation for almost four decades.
It was not clear whether the apparent military coup would bring a formal end to the 93-year-old Mugabe’s rule. The main goal of the generals appeared to be preventing Mugabe’s wife Grace, 41 years his junior, from succeeding him.
Local media reported South Africa’s defense and state security ministers, dispatched by President Jacob Zuma as regional envoys, arrived in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, on Wednesday night and were expected to meet both Mugabe and the military. Their ultimate goal was not clear.
Brokerage Chief: Bitcoin Futures Must Be Quarantined
November 15th, 2017Via: CoinDesk:
A well-known electronic brokerage firm is issuing dire warnings against the CME Group’s plan to launch a bitcoin futures contract next month.
But Interactive Brokers, in a comment letter dated Nov. 14, suggested a way to mitigate the risk it sees from such activity: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), under the auspices of J. Christopher Giancarlo, should sequester systems that handle cryptocurrency derivatives.
“This letter is to request that the Commission require that any clearing organization that wishes to clear any cryptocurrency or derivative of a cryptocurrency do so in a separate clearing system isolated from other products,” wrote Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers.
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“If the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or any other clearing organization clears a cryptocurrency together with other products, then a large cryptocurrency price move that destabilizes members that clear cryptocurrencies will destabilize the clearing organization itself and its ability to satisfy its fundamental obligation to pay the winners and collect from the losers on the other products in the same clearing pool.”
Venezuela Defaults on Foreign Debt Repayments
November 15th, 2017Via: Radio New Zealand:
The ratings agency said the South American nation had failed to make $200m in repayments on its foreign debt.
Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA has also been declared in default by rating agencies Fitch and Moody’s.
The news came just hours after the government met investors in Caracas to try to renegotiate its debt.
Standard & Poor (S&P)’s declares a “selective default” when a country has failed to pay one or more of its financial obligations when it came due.
In the case of Venezuela, the government of President Nicolás Maduro failed to make $200m in payments on two global bond issues by 12 November, when a 30-day grace period expired.
S&P said Venezuela is also overdue on four other bond payments worth a total of $420m but that the grace period has not yet expired on those payments.
Venezuela’s total external debt, which also includes loans from countries like Russia and China, is thought to be as much as $140bn.
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S.
November 13th, 2017Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Memphis police use the surveillance cameras to scan the streets for crime. The U.S. Army uses them to monitor a base in Missouri. Consumer models hang in homes and businesses across the country. At one point, the cameras kept watch on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
All the devices were manufactured by a single company, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology . It is 42%-owned by the Chinese government.
Hikvision (pronounced “hike-vision”) was nurtured by Beijing to help keep watch on its 1.4 billion citizens, part of a vast expansion of its domestic-surveillance apparatus. In the process, the little-known company has become the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It has sold equipment used to track French airports, an Irish port and sites in Brazil and Iran.
A Top Secret Desert Assembly Plant Starts Ramping Up to Build Northrop’s B-21 Bomber
November 13th, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times:
A once-empty parking lot at Northrop Grumman Corp.’s top secret aircraft plant in Palmdale is now jammed with cars that pour in during the predawn hours.
More than a thousand new employees are working for the time being in rows of temporary trailers, a dozen tan-colored tents and a vast assembly hangar at the desert site near the edge of urban Los Angeles County.
It is here that Northrop is building the Air Force’s new B-21 bomber, a stealthy bat-winged jet that is being designed to slip behind any adversary’s air defense system and deliver devastating airstrikes for decades to come. The Pentagon is aiming to buy 100 of the bombers by the mid-2030s for at least $80 billion, though the exact amount is classified.
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The bomber — dubbed the “Raider” — is expected to become Northrop’s largest cash cow, which could run for two decades if it does not encounter technical or political setbacks.
TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports
November 13th, 2017Via: EFF:
The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face images and iris scans on a nationwide scale. DHS’s programs will become a massive violation of privacy that could serve as a gateway to the collection of biometric data to identify and track every traveler at every airport and border crossing in the country.
Currently TSA collects fingerprints as part of its application process for people who want to apply for PreCheck. So far, TSA hasn’t used those prints for anything besides the mandatory background check that’s part of the process. But this summer, TSA ran a pilot program at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and at Denver International Airport that used those prints and a contactless fingerprint reader to verify the identity of PreCheck-approved travelers at security checkpoints at both airports. Now TSA wants to roll out this program to airports across the country and expand it to encompass face recognition, iris scans, and other biometrics as well.
Quantum Computers a Threat to Bitcoin Security
November 12th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review:
A crucial feature of Bitcoin is its security. Bitcoins have two important security features that prevent them from being stolen or copied. Both are based on cryptographic protocols that are hard to crack. In other words, they exploit mathematical functions, like factorization, that are easy in one direction but hard in the other—at least for an ordinary classical computer.
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So Aggarwal and co specifically examine the likelihood of a quantum computer becoming that powerful on the network. They look at the projected clock speeds of quantum computers in the next 10 years and compare that to the likely power of conventional hardware.
Their conclusion will be a relief to Bitcoin miners the world over. Aggarwal and co say that most mining is done by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) made by companies such as Nvidia. This hardware is likely to maintain a speed advantage over quantum computers over the next 10 years or so.
“We find that the proof-of-work used by Bitcoin is relatively resistant to substantial speedup by quantum computers in the next 10 years, mainly because specialized ASIC miners are extremely fast compared to the estimated clock speed of near-term quantum computers,” they say.
But there is a different threat that is much more worrying. Bitcoin has another cryptographic security feature to ensure that only the owner of a Bitcoin can spend it. This is based on the same mathematics used for public-key encryption schemes.
The idea is that the owner generates two numbers—a private key that is secret and a public key that is published. The public key can be easily generated from the private key, but not vice versa. A signature can be used to verify that the owner holds the private key, without revealing the private key, using a technique known as an elliptic curve signature scheme.
In this way, the receiver can verify that the owner possesses the private key and therefore has the right to spend the Bitcoin.
The only way to cheat this system is to calculate the private key using the public key, which is extremely hard with conventional computers. But with a quantum computer, it is easy.
And that’s how quantum computers pose a significant risk to Bitcoin. “The elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027,” say Aggarwal and co.
Indeed, quantum computers pose a similar risk to all encryption schemes that use a similar technology, which includes many common forms of encryption.
There are public-key schemes that are resistant to attack by quantum computers. So it is conceivable that the Bitcoin protocols could be revised to make the system safer. But there are no plans to do that now.
Recovery: Many Older Americans Are Living a Desperate, Nomadic Life
November 11th, 2017Via: MarketWatch:
In her powerful new book, “Nomadland,” award-winning journalist Jessica Bruder reveals the dark, depressing and sometimes physically painful life of a tribe of men and women in their 50s and 60s who are — as the subtitle says — “surviving America in the twenty-first century.” Not quite homeless, they are “houseless,” living in secondhand RVs, trailers and vans and driving from one location to another to pick up seasonal low-wage jobs, if they can get them, with little or no benefits.
The “workamper” jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, “felt they’d spent too long losing a rigged game.” Some were laid off from high-paying professional jobs. Few have chosen this life. Few think they can find a way out of it. They’re downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.
Hive: CIA Infrastructure to Control Its Malware
November 9th, 2017Via: Wikileaks:
Today, 9 November 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the source code and development logs to Hive, a major component of the CIA infrastructure to control its malware.
Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet. Hive provides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA.
Hive can serve multiple operations using multiple implants on target computers. Each operation anonymously registers at least one cover domain (e.g. “perfectly-boring-looking-domain.com”) for its own use. The server running the domain website is rented from commercial hosting providers as a VPS (virtual private server) and its software is customized according to CIA specifications. These servers are the public-facing side of the CIA back-end infrastructure and act as a relay for HTTP(S) traffic over a VPN connection to a “hidden” CIA server called ‘Blot’.
