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amateur spy-satellite spotting, a bit big article but really interesting. The budget alone of these satellites is quite impressive

"Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies" - I thought we were the good guys... ;-D

Forget about cube-sats, this is the low cost version of your personal spying device...

not a surprise though still bad to read ....

On a side note, it's hilarious to read an article on something repeatedly referred to as being secret...

quite self-explanatory described though: "The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant's customers. That's why it is unlawful for any record-keeper to disclose it has received a so-called National Security Letter. But under a deal brokered with the President Barack Obama administration, Google on Tuesday published a "range" of times it received National Security Letters demanding it divulge account information to the authorities without warrants. It was the first time a company has ever released data chronicling the volume of National Security Letter requests. National Security Letters allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and has even been reprimanded for abusing them. The NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and businesses like Google to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more as long as the FBI says the information is "relevant" to an investigation." and ""You'll notice that we're reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations. We plan to update these figures annually," Richard Salgado, a Google legal director, wrote in a blog post. Salgado was not available for comment. What makes the government's position questionable is that it is required by Congress to disclose the number of times the bureau issues National Security Letters. In 2011, the year with the latest available figures, the FBI issued 16,511 National Sec

Now I feel more safe.

Few news events can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record. Scroll down for the commercial. :)) Funny that when I keep complaining about privacy and monitoring, people still point and laugh.

And the direct link to the whole stash: https://ht.transparencytoolkit.org/ Their admin kept a plain text file with passwords on his desktop. Maybe they should have hired someone to do an audit :) More importantly, from the files it follows that this company found and exploited yet another vulnerability in Flash. So the current round of plugin/browser updates is thanks to this hack :)

The vulnerability only seemed to affect some of the more recent versions. Maybe from time to time we should downgrade flash to avoid them :))

interesting story with many juicy details on how they proceed ... (similarly interesting nickname for the "operation" chosen by our british friends) "The spies used the IP addresses they had associated with the engineers as search terms to sift through their surveillance troves, and were quickly able to find what they needed to confirm the employees' identities and target them individually with malware. The confirmation came in the form of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn "cookies," tiny unique files that are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as "target detection identifiers." Top-secret GCHQ documents name three male Belgacom engineers who were identified as targets to attack. The Intercept has confirmed the identities of the men, and contacted each of them prior to the publication of this story; all three declined comment and requested that their identities not be disclosed. GCHQ monitored the browsing habits of the engineers, and geared up to enter the most important and sensitive phase of the secret operation. The agency planned to perform a so-called "Quantum Insert" attack, which involves redirecting people targeted for surveillance to a malicious website that infects their computers with malware at a lightning pace. In this case, the documents indicate that GCHQ set up a malicious page that looked like LinkedIn to trick the Belgacom engineers. (The NSA also uses Quantum Inserts to target people, as The Intercept has previously reported.) A GCHQ document reviewing operations conducted between January and March 2011 noted that the hack on Belgacom was successful, and stated that the agency had obtained access to the company's

I knew I wasn't using TOR often enough...

Cool! It seems that after all it is best to restrict employees' internet access only to work-critical areas... @Paul TOR works on network level, so it would not help here much as cookies (application level) were exploited.

Powered by solar energy, Thales Alenia's Stratobus has an operation lifespan of five-years and only needs ground maintenance just a few days a year Can hover 12.4 miles (20km) in the air and reaches altitudes of 20,000 meters.

scaring ...

The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise",

Could it be used to measure ocean acidification? I found a study that links sound wave propagation with ocean acidity. Maybe we are able to do such measurement from space even? "Their paper, "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH," published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that fossil fuels are turning up the ocean's volume. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the overall pH of the world's oceans has dropped by about 0.1 units, with more of the changes concentrated closer to the poles. The authors found that sound absorption has decreased by 15 percent in parts of the North Atlantic and by 10 percent throughout the Atlantic and Pacific"

The last time I asked an oceanographer for the use of acoustic waves, she said it is still a bit problematic method to take into account its data, but we were referring to measuring ocean circulation. It may be more conclusive for PH measurements, though. The truth is that there is a whole underwater network with pulse emmitters/receivers covering the North Atlantic basin, remnant infrastructure for spying activities in the WW2 and in the cold war, that stays unexploited. We should look more into this idea

so if you want to hid anything from the NSA just say it in more than 2 min :-) ....

I am quite amazed that they apparently still use the capsules to return the pictures??? Hard to believe .... "Kobalt spacecraft reportedly carry canisters to return film to Earth during the satellite's mission, which will last at least several months."

he new SR-72 will use a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) that will employ the turbine engine at lower speeds, and use a scramjet at higher speeds. A scramjet engine is designed to operate at hypersonic velocities by compressing the air through a carefully designed inlet, but needs to be traveling supersonic before it is practical to begin with. So far research projects from NASA, the Air Force and other Pentagon entities have not been able to solve the problem of transitioning from the subsonic flight regime, through hypersonic flight with a single aircraft. Same problem as Reaction Engines is trying to solve, so I am not sure whether they actually cracked it. In any case, nice pictures. Not sure why the exhaust color is purple in color. Its not running on Argon I believe.

Weird article. Intermediate thruster stage (Ramjet) is missing. Scramjet has supersonic combustion and a normal turbine delivers subsonic flows. Even with afterburner - the Scramjet inlet would decelerate the flow down to subsonic velocity with "normal" subsonic combustion. The only thing I can imagine is that the Scramjet stage is bi-functional and covers both, subsonic and supersonic combustion. But the article doesn't say anything about it.