Britain: Libraries Lose a Quarter of Staff as Hundreds Close
March 29th, 2016Via: BBC:
Almost 8,000 jobs in UK libraries have disappeared in six years, about a quarter of the overall total, an investigation by the BBC has revealed.
Over the same period, some 15,500 volunteers have been recruited and 343 libraries have closed, leading to fears over the future of the profession.
Children’s author Alan Gibbons said the public library service faced the “greatest crisis in its history”.
DOJ Recovers Data from San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone (Possibly with Help of Israeli Company)
March 28th, 2016Possible explanation of how they did it: NAND “Mirroring” Concept Demonstration tl;dr There are clever tricks to allow unrestricted brute forcing of the password, no crack or cryptographic signatures necessary.
Israel’s Cellebrite Linked to FBI’s iPhone Hack Attempt:
An Israeli cybersecurity firm is under pressure to reveal its involvement in efforts to extract data from an iPhone.
The FBI said on Monday that it might have found a way to deal with the password lock set by killer Syed Rizwan Farook, who was behind an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December.
An Israeli newspaper has since reported that data forensics experts at Cellebrite are involved in the case.
Cellebrite told the BBC that it works with the FBI but would not say more.
Its website, however, states that one of its tools can extract and decode data from the iPhone 5C – the model in question – among other locked handsets. Apple has refused to help the FBI do this.
“File system extractions, decoding and analysis can be performed on locked iOS devices with a simple or complex passcode,” Cellebrite’s site states.
“Simple passcodes will be recovered during the physical extraction process and enable access to emails and keychain passwords.
“If a complex password is set on the device, physical extraction can be performed without access to emails and keychain.”
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Via: CNBC:
The Justice Department said Monday it has accessed data on the iPhone used by a shooter in last year’s San Bernardino, California, attacks and no longer needs Apple (AAPL)’s help in cracking it.
The DOJ asked a California judge to drop an order requiring the tech giant to help the FBI unlock the phone. The government sought data as part of the investigation into the attack, which left 14 people dead.
“Our decision to conclude the litigation was based solely on the fact that, with the recent assistance of a third party, we are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” said U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker in a statement.
The DOJ’s action comes after weeks of wrangling with Apple that ignited fierce rhetoric about the limits of privacy and data security. Apple and others in the tech community said they feared the order would set a dangerous precedent, while officials previously noted they wanted help to unlock only the phone in question.
Some Japanese Elderly Attempting to Get Into Prison for, “Free Food, Accommodation and Healthcare”
March 28th, 2016Via: Financial Times:
Japan’s prison system is being driven to budgetary crisis by demographics, a welfare shortfall and a new, pernicious breed of villain: the recidivist retiree. And the silver-haired crooks, say academics, are desperate to be behind bars.
Crime figures show that about 35 per cent of shoplifting offences are committed by people over 60. Within that age bracket, 40 per cent of repeat offenders have committed the same crime more than six times.
There is good reason, concludes a report, to suspect that the shoplifting crime wave in particular represents an attempt by those convicted to end up in prison — an institution that offers free food, accommodation and healthcare.
Related: 13.5 Percent of the Japan’s Housing Stock Vacant or Abandoned
Why Are Educators Learning How to Interrogate Their Students?
March 26th, 2016Via: The New Yorker:
About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an abbreviated version of the Reid Technique, which is used across the country by police officers, private-security personnel, insurance-fraud investigators, and other people for whom getting at the truth is part of the job. Schneider, who is a staff attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was alarmed. She knew that some psychologists and jurists have characterized the technique as coercive and liable to produce false confessions—especially when used with juveniles, who are highly suggestible.
PSYOP: Public Perception of Autonomous Machines
March 26th, 2016The vast majority of robotics research is funded by the military industrial complex.
There is a lot of dancing around that fact, but the reality is that it’s governments’ desire for more, cheaper and deadlier killing machines that’s at the root of this.
Sure, the corporate drive to shrink payrolls is a large factor, but I see that as a by-product of the military work.
I found this piece interesting because it touches upon the efforts with perception management around autonomous systems; the sugar that helps the Rise of the Machines medicine go down.
With regard to the “soft fascism” described here, don’t miss the recent post on The New Mind Control, which describes an emerging, “unseen dictatorship.”
Via: The Atlantic:
The year is 2016. Robots have infiltrated the human world. We built them, one by one, and now they are all around us. Soon there will be many more of them, working alone and in swarms. One is no larger than a single grain of rice, while another is larger than a prairie barn. These machines can be angular, flat, tubby, spindly, bulbous, and gangly. Not all of them have faces. Not all of them have bodies.
And yet they can do things once thought impossible for machine. They vacuum carpets, zip up winter coats, paint cars, organize warehouses, mix drinks, play beer pong, waltz across a school gymnasium, limp like wounded animals, write and publish stories, replicate abstract expressionist art, clean up nuclear waste, even dream.
Except, wait. Are these all really robots? What is a robot, anyway?
This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer. Yet it’s a crucial one. Ubiquitous computing and automation are occurring in tandem. Self-operating machines are permeating every dimension of society, so that humans find themselves interacting more frequently with robots than ever before—often without even realizing it. The human-machine relationship is rapidly evolving as a result. Humanity, and what it means to be a human, will be defined in part by the machines people design.
“We design these machines, and we have the ability to design them as our masters, or our partners, or our slaves,” said John Markoff, the author of Machines of Loving Grace, and a long-time technology reporter for The New York Times. “As we design these machines, what does it do to the human if we have a class of slaves which are not human but that we treat as human? We’re creating this world in which most of our interactions are with anthropomorphized proxies.”
In the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a passage known as the master-slave dialectic. In it, Hegel argues, among other things, that holding a slave ultimately dehumanizes the master. And though he could not have known it at the time, Hegel was describing our world, too, and aspects of the human relationship with robots.
But what kind of world is that? And as robots grow in numbers and sophistication, what is this world becoming?
…
There are all kinds of reasons why engineers might want to make a robot appealing this way. For one thing, people are less likely to fear a robot that’s adorable. The people who make autonomous machines, for example, have a vested interest in manipulating public perception of them. If a Google self-driving car is cute, perhaps it will be perceived as more trustworthy. Google’s reported attempts to shed Boston Dynamics, the robotics company it bought in 2013, appears tied to this phenomenon: Bloomberg reported last week that a director of communications instructed colleagues to distance the company’s self-driving car project from Boston Dynamic’s recent foray into humanoid robotics.
It’s clear why Google might not want its adorable autonomous cars associated with powerful human-shaped robots. The infantilization of technology is a way of reinforcing social hierarchy: Humankind is clearly in charge, with sweet-looking technologies obviously beneath them.
When the U.S. military promotes video compilations of robots failing—buckling at the knees, bumping into walls, and tumbling over—at DARPA competitions, it is, several roboticists told me, clearly an attempt to make those robots likeable. (It’s also funny, and therefore disarming, like this absurd voiceover someone added to footage of a robot performing a series of tasks.) The same strategy was used in early publicity campaigns for the first computers. “People who had economic interest in computers had economic interest in making them appear as dumb as possible,” said Atkeson, from Carnegie Mellon. “That became the propaganda—that computers are stupid, that they only do what you tell them.”
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What matters, in other words, is who is in control—and how well humans understand that autonomy occurs along a gradient. Increasingly, people are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. “People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date,” Markoff told me. “That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace. Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.”
“A society-wide discussion about autonomy is essential,” he added.
LAPD’s Air-Support Division
March 26th, 2016Via: New York Times:
The air-support division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city’s downtown, near the Los Angeles River. A looming mass of utilitarian architecture tucked beside the 101 Freeway, the complex appears to have no real public face; here the view from the street matters little. Instead, like much of the city around it, the air-support division makes more sense when seen from above.
On the first of several flights I would take with the division over the course of the last three years, our helicopter lifted off into the haze of a July afternoon. The true bulk of the structure below us finally revealed itself. The building’s landing deck alone seemed nearly the size of an aircraft carrier’s, and from this new, elevated perspective, the headquarters indeed resembled a landlocked warship in the heart of the city; a half-dozen other helicopters were waiting there on the tarmac. The division began with a single helicopter in 1956, and it now has 19 in all, augmented by a King Air fixed-wing plane. The aircrews operate in a state of constant readiness, with at least two helicopters in flight at any given time for 21 hours of every day. A ground crew is suited up and on call for the remaining three, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. On weekends, considered peak hours, the number of airborne helicopters goes up to three, although in a crisis the division might send as many as four or five “ships” up at once.
Water Treatment Plant Hacked, Chemical Mix Changed for Tap Supplies
March 25th, 2016Wow! They don’t say where this supposedly happened.
Via: Register:
Hackers infiltrated a water utility’s control system and changed the levels of chemicals being used to treat tap water, we’re told.
The cyber-attack is documented in this month’s IT security breach report (available here, registration required) from Verizon Security Solutions. The utility in question is referred to using a pseudonym, Kemuri Water Company, and its location is not revealed.
A “hacktivist” group with ties to Syria compromised Kemuri Water Company’s computers after exploiting unpatched web vulnerabilities in its internet-facing customer payment portal, it is reported.
The hack – which involved SQL injection and phishing – exposed KWC’s ageing AS/400-based operational control system because login credentials for the AS/400 were stored on the front-end web server. This system, which was connected to the internet, managed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that regulated valves and ducts that controlled the flow of water and chemicals used to treat it through the system. Many critical IT and operational technology functions ran on a single AS400 system, a team of computer forensic experts from Verizon subsequently concluded.
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The same hack also resulted in the exposure of personal information of the utility’s 2.5 million customers. There’s no evidence that this has been monetised or used to commit fraud.
Nonetheless, the whole incident highlights the weaknesses in securing critical infrastructure systems, which often rely on ageing or hopelessly insecure setups.
Britain: Dyson Developing an Electric Car with Partial Government Funding
March 25th, 2016Via: Guardian:
Dyson is developing an electric car at its headquarters in Wiltshire with help from public money, according to government documents.
The company, which makes a range of products that utilise the sort of highly efficient motors needed for an electric car such as vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and bladeless fans, last year refused to rule out rumours it was building one.
But on Wednesday, the government appeared to have accidentally disclosed Dyson is working on one, along with other big companies outside of the automotive industry, such as Apple.
“The government is funding Dyson to develop a new battery electric vehicle at their headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. This will secure £174m of investment in the area, creating over 500 jobs, mostly in engineering,” said the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan, published on Wednesday.
Hedge Funds Pumped Up Silicon Valley. Now They’re Pulling Out.
March 24th, 2016Just in time for…
Via: Bloomberg:
In recent months, venture capital firms and mutual funds have become choosier about which technology startups they’re prepared to back. Now hedge funds, after helping push valuations to dot-com-era heights, are getting more picky, too.
Last month, hedge funds participated in the fewest number of venture capital rounds in U.S. tech companies since 2013, inking just two deals, according to research firm PitchBook Data Inc. Even Tiger Global Management LLC, an early backer of Facebook and LinkedIn with $20 billion under management, has pulled back. Smaller firms are getting out altogether.
Like VCs, hedge funds are more circumspect because some startups have failed to live up to their billing. Plus, in the wake of several disappointing tech IPOs, many of the most promising firms are choosing to stay private longer, meaning it takes longer to cash out. Investors’ stinginess is forcing startups to cut costs, fire workers and accept more stringent terms when raising money.
Related: Less Than 1% of Users Keeping Entire Mobile Game Industry Afloat
Binney: NSA Is So Overwhelmed with Data, It’s No Longer Effective
March 23rd, 2016On the contrary, I think it’s remarkably effective, as long as effective means being able to use retroactive surveillance and parallel construction to secretly build criminal cases against anyone the state wants to disappear into its private/for-profit gulags.
Furthermore, most “terrorist” attacks are very obviously false flag operations. So tune away on the Magic 8 Ball surveillance systems all you like.
*boom*
Via: ZDnet:
A former National Security Agency official turned whistleblower has spent almost a decade and a half in civilian life. And he says he’s still “pissed” by what he’s seen leak in the past two years.
In a lunch meeting hosted by Contrast Security founder Jeff Williams on Wednesday, William Binney, a former NSA official who spent more than three decades at the agency, said the US government’s mass surveillance programs have become so engorged with data that they are no longer effective, losing vital intelligence in the fray.
Binney said that an analyst today can run one simple query across the NSA’s various databases, only to become immediately overloaded with information. With about four billion people — around two-thirds of the world’s population — under the NSA and partner agencies’ watchful eyes, according to his estimates, there is too much data being collected.
“That’s why they couldn’t stop the Boston bombing, or the Paris shootings, because the data was all there,” said Binney. Because the agency isn’t carefully and methodically setting its tools up for smart data collection, that leaves analysts to search for a needle in a haystack.
“The data was all there… the NSA is great at going back over it forensically for years to see what they were doing before that,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop it.”
