With Camera Sales Slowing, Canon Looks to Surveillance Sector for Growth
September 4th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Nosy governments and nervous homeowners, among other drivers of the surveillance society, may soon upstage amateur photographers as the focus for big camera makers such as Canon Inc who spot growing opportunities in the security market.
Canon, the industry leader, has been hit with a sudden downturn in shipments of its top-end digital cameras, an increasingly saturated market sensitive to the recent slowdown in emerging economies and with a receding pace of innovation.
Add to that a compact camera market that has been battered by smartphones with increasingly high-resolution cameras, and companies like Canon have been left scrambling for new markets.
“A major focus for the next phase is increasing our business-to-business (B2B) sales, and of course security cameras – which is a huge market – is part of that,” Canon President and CEO Fujio Mitarai said in an interview.
Readers Keep Cryptogon Going in September
September 3rd, 2013Thank you.
Pookie $75
CM €10
MW $25
Thanks also go out to the person who signed up for hosting with BlueHost. I received $90 as a result.
I’m happy to mention your domains when you sign up for hosting with BlueHost, but as people become more apprehensive about being associated with Cryptogon in any way, I don’t want to cause trouble for people who support me! If you sign up for hosting with BlueHost AND you want me to mention your domain, just let me know.
Snowden Reportedly Used High-Ranking Official’s Profiles to Troll NSA’s Intranet
September 3rd, 2013Something had to be very wrong on that network. Snowden must have pretty much had top level access to pull this off. Even so, it boggles the mind that something like disabling multi factor authentication didn’t generate some sort of notification at the next level up the pyramid.
I’ve been out of the sysadmin game since 2005, but does this make any sense to any of you who are currently involved with that stuff?
Via: Ars Technica:
The National Security Agency (NSA) is the font of information security wisdom for the US defense and intelligence communities. But apparently, the NSA’s own network security is so weak that a single administrator was able to hijack the credentials of a number of NSA employees with high-level security clearances and use them to download data from the agency’s internal networks. That administrator was Edward Snowden.
…
The systems accessed by Snowden limit access by user role, so he could not have used his own credentials on them without overriding access controls. Officials familiar with the case told NBC that Snowden had obtained the “profiles” of a number of NSA employees that have been identified through forensic examination of logs, finding periods when the employees were traveling but their accounts were still used to access the intranet. If Snowden used administrative privileges to reset their passwords, failed logins might have flagged a problem—but they might have simply been shrugged off as passwords forgotten over vacation.
In order to pull this off without raising alarms, Snowden would have needed access to the full credentials of the users whose identities he borrowed. He would have needed to somehow either gain access to the public key infrastructure (PKI) keys found in their user authentication or he would have needed to override multi-factor authentication to gain access to the systems. He also would have needed to avoid detection by audit logs in making those changes (or delete the record of changes after the fact). He managed to do all of these things, download the content, and get it past the NSA’s physical security.
Israel Confirms Missile Test in Mediterranean
September 3rd, 2013Interesting time and place for a “missile test.”
So, what was this, really?
Via: Al Jazeera:
Russia has announced that its missile early warning system detected the launch of two missiles from the central part of the Mediterranean Sea fired towards the sea’s eastern coastline, and later confirmed in an Israel statement by Reuters news agency.
Israel initially denied knowledge of the missile launch, but soon after said in a statement to Reuters that it had carried out one joint missile test with the US, of an “anchor” target missile used in anti-missile systems, the news agency reported on Tuesday.
Israel said it carried out a test of a missile, used as a target in a US-funded anti-missile system, in the Mediterranean at (9:15am) 06:15GMT, around the same time quoted by Russian state-run news agency, RIA.
An official from the Israeli Defence Ministry later confirmed that both Israel and the US carried a joint missile test in the Mediteranean today.
Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennen, reporting from Jerusalem, said that the confirmation by Israel was unusual.
“It’s is highly unusual that Israel should be involved in this joint exercise, as it could draw Israel into the conflict.”
Fukushima: Japanese Government to Build Ice Wall in Desperate Attempt to Contain Leaks of Contaminated Water
September 3rd, 2013For a moment, let’s just assume that this will work. I doubt that it will work, but let’s pretend that will.
What happens to all of the frozen slop when the grid goes down during the next disaster and the “ice wall” thaws out?
Have a nice day!
Via: AP:
The Japanese government announced Tuesday it is funding a costly, untested subterranean ice wall in a desperate step to stop leaks of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant after repeated failures by the plant’s operator.
Public funding is part of several measures the government adopted Tuesday. Most had already been announced but they are widely seen as a safety appeal before the International Olympic Committee votes on which city will host the 2020 Olympics. Tokyo is a front-runner.
“Instead of leaving this up to TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company], the government will step forward and take charge,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said after adopting the outline. “The world is watching if we can properly handle the contaminated water but also the entire decommissioning of the plant.”
The government plans to spend an estimated $470 million US through the end of 2014 on two projects — the ice wall and upgraded water treatment units that is supposed to remove all radioactive elements but tritium — according to energy agency official Tatsuya Shinkawa.
The government is not paying for urgently needed water tanks and other equipment that TEPCO is using to stop leaks.
The ice wall would freeze the ground to a depth of up to 30 metres through a system of thin pipes carrying a coolant as cold as minus -40 C. It would thus block contaminated water from escaping the facility’s immediate surroundings, as well as keep underground water from entering the reactor and turbine buildings, where most contaminated radioactive water has collected.
The project, which TEPCO and the government proposed in May, is set for completion by March 2015.
Related: Fukushima Radiation Levels 18 Times Higher than Previously Admitted
Microsoft to Acquire Nokia Handset Business
September 3rd, 2013I wonder how reckless Microsoft will get as the realization sinks in that Android and iOS are too far ahead to catch.
Via: BBC:
Microsoft has agreed a deal to buy Nokia’s mobile phone business for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn).
Nokia will also license its patents and mapping services to Microsoft. Nokia shares jumped 45% on news of the deal.
The purchase is set to be completed in early 2014, when about 32,000 Nokia employees will transfer to Microsoft.
While Nokia has struggled against competition from Samsung and Apple, Microsoft has been criticised for being slow into the mobile market.
Fukushima Radiation Levels 18 Times Higher than Previously Admitted
September 2nd, 2013This is definitely one for your Not The Onion file folder.
Via: BBC:
Radiation levels around Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.
Last week the plant’s operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground.
It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.
The plant was crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.
However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.
The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.
Britain: First Time a British Prime Minister Lost a Vote on War Since 1782
September 2nd, 2013Whoops.
Via: Reuters:
Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to join a potential military strike on Syria were thwarted on Thursday night when Britain’s parliament narrowly voted against a government motion to authorize such action in principle.
In a humiliating defeat for the British leader likely to damage Cameron’s hopes of being re-elected in 2015 and set back traditionally strong U.S.-UK relations, parliament defied Cameron by 285 to 272 votes.
Commentators said it was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782, when parliament effectively conceded American independence by voting against further fighting to crush the colony’s rebellion.
China Wants Operational Control Over Nuclear Power Plants It Finances in Britain
September 2nd, 2013Via: Power Engineering International:
China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) is looking for increased influence over EDF nuclear power facilities in the UK in return for investment in the sector.
The state-owned group is currently in negotiations with EDF over potential investment in the Hinkley Point project in England.
The FT reports that CGN wants greater operational control of any new plants it finances, potentially creating a national security headache for the British government.
Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA’s
September 2nd, 2013Via: New York Times:
For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.
The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.
Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.
