Top Email Terms Used by Corporate Fraudsters Published by FBI
January 8th, 2013Via: ComputerWorld:
The top fraud words and phrases in email conversations:
Cover up
Write off
Illegal
Failed investment
Nobody will find out
Grey area
They owe it to me
Do not volunteer information
Not ethical
Off the books
Putin Preps Russian Navy for Biggest Exercise Since the Soviet Union
January 8th, 2013Via: Wired:
The Russian navy is about to stage its largest war exercise in a long time — possibly the largest since before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It’s a chance for President Vladimir Putin to show off his military might, of course. But the exercise may also be a subtle warning to the United States: Stay clear of waters that traditionally lie in Russia’s sphere of influence.
The Russian defense ministry says its the “first time in decades” it’s launched naval exercises on this scale. The drills involve warships from all of Russia’s fleets: “the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific,” noted a statement from the ministry. The exercise will be reportedly held in late January, and involve amphibious landings in the Caucasus and naval exercises in the Mediterranean.
Tide Detergent Now Used as Ghetto Currency
January 8th, 2013Via: New York Magazine:
It turned out the detergent wasn’t being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: “Liquid gold.” The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.
One Hundred Billion Planets Just in Our Galaxy
January 8th, 2013Via: Slate:
For example, you can use some statistics to extrapolate how many planets there must be in our galaxy. A new study has done just that, and the number they get is stunning: they calculate there may be a hundred billion planets in the Milky Way, with 17 billion of them the size of Earth!
First, let me point out that previous studies have gotten roughly the same numbers (for example, recently my pal John Johnson of Caltech was part of an announcement that the number of planets in the Milky Way was around a hundred billion, using one star and its system of five planets as a basis; it’s solid work). This new study is important because it uses more data and analyzes it more robustly than most previous work.
Ten Banks Agree to Pay $8.5 Billion for Foreclosure Abuse
January 7th, 2013Via: AP:
Ten major banks and mortgage companies agreed Monday to pay $8.5 billion to settle federal complaints that they wrongfully foreclosed on homeowners who should have been allowed to stay in their homes.
The banks, which include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, will pay billions to homeowners to end a review process of foreclosure files that was required under a 2011 enforcement action. The review was ordered because banks mishandled people’s paperwork and skipped required steps in the foreclosure process.
Unwitting Sensors: How DoD is Exploiting Social Media
January 7th, 2013Via: Defense News:
On any given day, 400 million short messages are typed or thumbed onto Twitter, and that’s just a fraction of the total communications sent through a social media universe that includes Facebook, Google+, chat rooms, bulletin boards and many other electronic forums. The messages are as diverse as all the conversations in the world, at least those parts where there are computers, smartphones and iPads. And the effort to extract important data points and patterns from this digital cacophony has become one of the biggest growth areas in intelligence.
“The face of ISR has changed,” says Joshua Hartman, a former senior Defense Department intelligence official who is CEO of Horizon Strategies Group. “Open-source and crowd-sourcing information is a critical component of ISR.”
The potential products of such tools are endless, and reach from the tactical and immediate to the strategic and global — not just to find out, say, who is “following” or retweeting the al-Shabaab postings, but to be able to query where anti-government sentiment may be clustered in Pakistan or what expat Iranians living in Dubai feel about the ayatollahs back home and at what time of day they feel that way. Is the riot in Cairo about food prices or about a video offensive to the prophet Mohammed?
Barry Costa, a senior program engineer at the federally funded MITRE Corp., recently coined the term “population-centric intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” It’s gradually replacing another term MITRE came up with: “social radar.”
…
Anyone can sign up for Twitter and follow a dozen or a hundred or a thousand fellow tweeters, but for a comprehensive analysis of all 400 million daily messages, you need to pay. What Twitter Inc. calls “the full Twitter Firehose” is a specific product that includes everything except private messages, and what the company calls “protected” tweets. Gold to marketing and brand analysts, the Firehose contains a stew of confessions, tastes and passions, a directory of people and their links to each other and what they are thinking about at any moment.
Among the small group of companies that buys the Firehose is Attensity Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., company that sucks in Twitter and many other social media and then markets a vast amount of data and analysis.
“We have a massive-scale social media feed,” said Michelle de Haaff, Attensity’s vice president of strategy and corporate development. “150 million sources across 32 languages, and we sell the feed along with the analytics. And we sell that to the government and to commercial entities.”
Twitter’s Firehose is one of the stars in the Attensity showcase. “We have a contract directly with Twitter,” de Haaff said. “We get everything across every language. We are pulling the whole thing. We are able to sense, understand and find signals: sentiments, hot spots, trends, actions, intent.”
In countries where people use Twitter, she said, the company culls rich information.
“In Libya,” she said, “we were able to track everything: where the arms were, where the rebels were moving. We had on a map where everything was going.”
Among Attensity’s early and crucial investors was In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency venture capital fund that backs technologies of potential use to intelligence agencies.
From the beginning, the CIA was not just an investor but also a customer.
“As part of their investment, the CIA gets the software. They get a license,” de Haaff said. “I can confirm they are still a customer, but that’s all I can do.”
…
Rainey Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that technically, it is indeed all legal, but she emphasized that people don’t really understand how their random thoughts, disclosures or opinions on social media may be exploited.
“I think people don’t realize when they sign up for these sites that the government is going to be routinely monitoring and sifting through this data,” she said.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
Police Search for Prescription Drugs as Man Spends Final Moments with Deceased Wife
January 7th, 2013Via: Deseret News:
A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.
Barbara Alice Mahaffey died of colon cancer in her bedroom last May. Ben D. Mahaffey, 80, said he was distraught and trying to make sure his wife’s body would be taken to the funeral home with dignity, when he says officers insisted he help them look for the drugs.
“I was holding her hand saying goodbye when all the intrusion happened,” he told the Deseret News.
‘New Weight Loss Gadget Sucks Food Straight Out of the Stomach’
January 7th, 2013Wow. Maybe they can somehow form the slurry into delicious and nutritious chow pellets. Which could… You know…
No?
Via: Independent:
Who would have thought that the future of weight loss might lie in the hands of the inventor of the Segway? Dean Kamen, creator of the two-wheeled wonder, along with a team from Aspire Bariatrics, of Philadelphia, has applied for a patent for a pump that can suck food and drink straight out of the stomach.
…
Initial setbacks… have occurred because the pump struggles to break up large foods. One patient reported “clogging” and had to avoid eating cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese food, stir fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips and steak.
Nuclear Security Helicopters Testing Radiation Levels Above DC Area
January 7th, 2013[???]
Via: CBS:
Helicopters have been conducting radiation tests above portions of the Washington, D.C. area using remote gamma radiation sensing technology.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has been flying the radiation missions since Dec. 27, 2012 and they will continue until next Friday, Jan. 11. The flights have been conducted during daylight only, and the pilots fly about 80 miles per hour at 150 feet above the approximately 70-square mile radiation assessment area.
Naturally-occurring radiation is measured so that baseline levels can be established and used in security and emergency preparedness, reads a statement from the NNSA.
Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa
January 7th, 2013This is a few months old.
Google has created some very unusual networking hardware for use in their datacenters. Some of this gear had been delivered to outsiders by mistake and information about it wound up on a networking equipment bulletin board.
My guess is that these switches might contain application specific silicon which would give Google much faster throughput than commodity gear could offer.
But custom ports??? Why not use standard optical interfaces?
My guess is that these are some form of custom parallel optical interface technology for extremely fast data rates over relatively short distances in the data center.
Via: Wired:
Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said.
The images were posted by two men who said the device had unexpectedly turned up at a branch office in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa — population: 641 — and they were hoping someone could tell them what it was.
Clearly, these two men were familiar with the ins and outs of computer networking, and clearly, this was a networking switch, a way of shuttling data between machines. But they’d never heard of the Pluto Switch, and it was littered with networking ports they’d never seen before. “Any ideas?” they asked. “The writing on the back is Finnish.”
According to posts they made to an obscure web discussion forum dedicated to networking hardware — networking-forum.com — they couldn’t actually get the thing to work. But they turned up a few clues indicating who the device belonged to, and eventually, after putting two and two together, they said they’d located the owner and sent the switch back.
It belonged, they said, to Google.
Research Credit: RP
