NSA Uses Google Cookies to Pinpoint Targets for Hacking
December 11th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using “cookies” and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.
FreeBSD Developers: Don’t Trust Intel/Via Random Number Generators
December 10th, 2013Via: Ars Technica:
Developers of the FreeBSD operating system will no longer allow users to trust processors manufactured by Intel and Via Technologies as the sole source of random numbers needed to generate cryptographic keys that can’t easily be cracked by government spies and other adversaries.
The change, which will be effective in the upcoming FreeBSD version 10.0, comes three months after secret documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor Edward Snowden said the US spy agency was able to decode vast swaths of the Internet’s encrypted traffic. Among other ways, The New York Times, Pro Publica, and The Guardian reported in September, the NSA and its British counterpart defeat encryption technologies by working with chipmakers to insert backdoors, or cryptographic weaknesses, in their products.
The revelations are having a direct effect on the way FreeBSD will use hardware-based random number generators to seed the data used to ensure cryptographic systems can’t be easily broken by adversaries. Specifically, “RDRAND” and “Padlock”—RNGs provided by Intel and Via respectively—will no longer be the sources FreeBSD uses to directly feed random numbers into the /dev/random engine used to generate random data in Unix-based operating systems. Instead, it will be possible to use the pseudo random output of RDRAND and Padlock to seed /dev/random only after it has passed through a separate RNG algorithm known as “Yarrow.” Yarrow, in turn, will add further entropy to the data to ensure intentional backdoors, or unpatched weaknesses, in the hardware generators can’t be used by adversaries to predict their output.
What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
December 10th, 2013Via: ACLU:
We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered…
JPMorgan Patents Bitcoin-Like Payment System
December 10th, 2013Bitcoin is not anonymous on it’s own. Never was. Never will be.
And if this JPMorgan thing is anonymous, my name is Santa Claus.
Via: CNN:
JPMorgan Chase has patented a digital payment system that could rival Bitcoin.
The system includes digital wallets, the ability to transfer money to anyone and anonymity too, according to a patent application filed to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office on Aug. 5. The Financial Times first reported the story.
JPMorgan has also patented payment software that would latch onto your Internet browser and allow you to shop without pausing to fill out forms with personal financial information. And with what the bank calls its Internet Pay Anyone Account, moving funds would be anonymous and as easy as sending an email.
Related: What is Bitcoin?
“The credit pushes can be made completely anonymously, with the recipient of the credit having no way to determine from where the credit originated,” the bank says in the application.”
Another aspect of the digital payment system is a virtual private lockbox. Think of it as a bank account that can only accept funds. That way, users can receive funds from anyone by publishing its digital address publicly without fear that someone can pull money out of it.
The impetus for the project is likely Bitcoin, the independent electronic currency created in 2009 that has gained lots of recent attention. But the patent application shows no mention of Bitcoin.
Homeland Secure: TSA Agent Confiscates Sock Monkey’s Pistol
December 10th, 2013Via: KING5:
“Rooster Monkburn” the cowboy sock monkey is without his pistol, thanks to a diligent TSA agent in St. Louis.
…
May and her husband were going through the screening process when she noticed that one of her bags was missing.
“And the (TSA agent) held it up and said ‘whose is this?’” she said. “I realized oh, my God this is my bag.”
May said the TSA agent went through the bag, through the sewing supplies and found the two-inch long pistol.
“She said ‘this is a gun,’” said May. “I said no, it’s not a gun it’s a prop for my monkey.”
“She said ‘If I held it up to your neck, you wouldn’t know if it was real or not,’ and I said ‘really?’” said May.
The TSA agent told May she would have to confiscate the tiny gun and was supposed to call the police.
“I said well go ahead,” said May. “And I said really? You’re kidding me right, and she said no it looks like a gun.”
“She took my monkey’s gun,” said May, who has retained her sense of humor.
“Rooster Monkburn has been disarmed so I’m sure everyone on the plane was safe,” she said. “I understand she was doing her job but at some point doesn’t common sense prevail?”
This Week in Acidic Radioactive Slurry
December 10th, 2013Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
The chemical spill at Ranger Uranium Mine last weekend was the second such incident in a week for the mine’s parent company, Rio Tinto, placing further scrutiny on the company’s uranium mining operations.
Processing at the Ranger site, in Kakadu National Park, was suspended by the federal government on Tuesday. Environment Minister Greg Hunt ordered ”an immediate investigation” into the incident in which a leach tank burst, spilling about 1 million litres of highly acidic uranium slurry.
It has since emerged that a virtually identical incident occurred just days before, at Rossing, Rio Tinto’s other uranium mine, in Namibia. On December 3, one of the 12 leach tanks at Rossing had a ”catastrophic structural failure”, spilling a large quantity of radioactive slurry.
”This is obviously a very serious incident, which is currently under investigation,” the mine’s general manager of operations, Ben De Vries, was quoted as saying.
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”It’s the same company, same mineral, same piece of infrastructure,” said Dave Sweeney, of the Australian Conservation Foundation. ”This copycat incident shows there is a serious structural issue here and that the halt on processing at Ranger should not be lifted.”
Mr Sweeney believes that plans for an underground expansion of the Ranger mine, known as the 3 Deeps project, should be shelved.
”The mine is at full design life stretch: the pipes, pumps and tanks are over 30 years old,” he said. ”If the 3 Deeps project is processed through the same infrastructure, as ERA proposes, we will see an increasing likelihood of uncontrolled and unpredicted equipment failures.”
Ranger’s operating company, Energy Resources of Australia, maintains that water testing at the site shows no environmental damage has been caused to the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, which surrounds the mine.
The Criminalization of Everyday Life
December 10th, 2013Via: Tom Dispatch:
If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.
By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where “the War on Crime” and “the War on Drugs” are no longer metaphors but bland understatements. There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
Nobel Winner Declares Boycott of Top Science Journals
December 10th, 2013Via: Guardian:
Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a “tyranny” that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.
Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.
Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.
The prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000 (£18,000). Some researchers made half of their income through such “bribes”, Schekman said in an interview.
Writing in the Guardian, Schekman raises serious concerns over the journals’ practices and calls on others in the scientific community to take action.
“I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel prize. But no longer,” he writes. “Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals.”
Schekman is the editor of eLife, an online journal set up by the Wellcome Trust. Articles submitted to the journal – a competitor to Nature, Cell and Science – are discussed by reviewers who are working scientists and accepted if all agree. The papers are free for anyone to read.
Schekman criticises Nature, Cell and Science for artificially restricting the number of papers they accept, a policy he says stokes demand “like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags.” He also attacks a widespread metric called an “impact factor”, used by many top-tier journals in their marketing.
Bloomberg Wants Mandatory Flu Vaccinations for New York City Schoolchildren
December 10th, 2013Via: Politicker:
On Wednesday, with just three weeks to go until he leaves office, Mr. Bloomberg’s controversial Board of Health is set to vote on new rules that would force children as young as six months old to be immunized each year before December 31 if they attend licensed day care or pre-school programs.
Darpa’s Giant Folding Spy Satellite Will Dwarf All Other Space Telescopes
December 10th, 2013Via: Wired:
Spying could become much easier if a new lightweight, folding satellite concept gets off the ground.
Darpa, the military’s futuristic research agency, says it has plans to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes by shooting a new design into orbit that’s made of plastic and unfolds into a mammoth satellite that would dwarf the world’s most famous telescopes.
Darpa’s Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) program redesigns the traditional glass telescope into an orbital telescope that’s bigger and lighter than previous imaging satellites, making it easier to spy on larger areas and for longer periods of time.
Launched as a tightly packed cluster of petals 20 feet in diameter, MOIRE stretches to 68 feet across once it reaches 22,000 miles above the earth. From orbit, MOIRE could view approximately 40 percent of the earth’s surface at once while recording high resolution images and video, making it the ultimate spying satellite (Darpa notes that it could also be beneficial in weather forecasting and disaster response).
