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Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Cracking Linux with the backspace key? [LWN.net] - 0 views

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    "Anybody who has been paying attention to the net over the last week or so will certainly have noticed an abundance of articles with titles like "How to hack any Linux machine just using backspace". All this press does indeed highlight an important vulnerability, but it may not be the one that they think they are talking about."
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    "Anybody who has been paying attention to the net over the last week or so will certainly have noticed an abundance of articles with titles like "How to hack any Linux machine just using backspace". All this press does indeed highlight an important vulnerability, but it may not be the one that they think they are talking about."
Paul Merrell

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required | Ars Technica - 6 views

  • BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients. The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it's not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network. BitTorrent, Inc. (yes, there is a legitimate company behind BitTorrent) took to its blog to announce the move from a pre-alpha, private program to the publicly available alpha. Additions since the private alpha include one-way synchronization, one-time secrets for sharing files with a friend or colleague, and the ability to exclude specific files and directories.
  • BitTorrent Sync provides "unlimited, secure file-syncing," the company said. "You can use it for remote backup. Or, you can use it to transfer large folders of personal media between users and machines; editors and collaborators. It’s simple. It’s free. It’s the awesome power of P2P, applied to file-syncing." File transfers are encrypted, with private information never being stored on an external server or in the "cloud." "Since Sync is based on P2P and doesn’t require a pit-stop in the cloud, you can transfer files at the maximum speed supported by your network," BitTorrent said. "BitTorrent Sync is specifically designed to handle large files, so you can sync original, high quality, uncompressed files."
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    Direct P2P encrypted file syncing, no cloud intermediate, which should translate to far more secure exchange of files, with less opportunity for snooping by governments or others, than with cloud-based services. 
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    Hey Paul, is there an open source document management system that I could hook the BitTorrent Sync to?
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    More detail please. What do you want to do with the doc management system? Platform? Server-side or stand-alone? Industrial strength and highly configurable or lightweight and simple? What do you mean by "hook?" Not that I would be able to answer anyway. I really know very little about BitTorrent Sync. In fact, as far as I'd gone before your question was to look at the FAQ. It's linked from . But there's a link to a forum on the same page. Giving the first page a quick scan confirms that this really is alpha-state software. But that would probably be a better place to ask. (Just give them more specific information of what you'd like to do.) There are other projects out there working on getting around the surveillance problem. I2P is one that is a farther along than BitTorrent Sync and quite a bit more flexible. See . (But I haven't used it, so caveat emptor.)
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    There is a great list of PRISM Proof software at http://prism-break.org/. Includes a link to I2P. I want to replace gmail though, but would like another Web based system since I need multi device access. Of course, I need to replace my Google Apps / Google Docs system. That's why I asked about a PRISM Proof sync-share-store DMS. My guess is that there are many users similarly seeking a PRISM Proof platform of communications, content and collaborative computing systems. BusinessIndiser.com is crushed with articles about Google struggling to squirm out from under the NSA PRISM boot-on-the-back-of-their-neck situation. As if blaming the NSA makes up for the dragnet that they consented/allowed/conceded to cover their entire platform. Perhaps we should be watching Germany? There must be tons of startup operations underway, all seeking to replace Google, Amazon, FaceBook, Microsoft, Skype and so many others. It's a great day for Libertyware :)
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    Is the NSA involvement the "Kiss of Death"? Google seems to think so. I'm wondering what the impact would be if ZOHO were to announce a PRISM Proof productivity platform?
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    It is indeed. The E.U. has far more protective digital privacy rights than we do (none). If you're looking for a Dropbox replacement (you should be), for a cloud-based solution take a look at . Unlike Dropbox, all of the encryption/decryption happens on your local machine; Wuala never sees your files unencrypted. Dropbox folks have admitted that there's no technical barrier to them looking at your files. Their encrypt/decrypt operations are done in the cloud (if they actually bother) and they have the key. Which makes it more chilling that the PRISM docs Snowden link make reference to Dropbox being the next cloud service NSA plans to add to their collection. Wuala also is located (as are its servers) in Switzerland, which also has far stronger digital data privacy laws than the U.S. Plus the Swiss are well along the path to E.U. membership; they've ratified many of the E.U. treaties including the treaty on Human Rights, which as I recall is where the digital privacy sections are. I've begun to migrate from Dropbox to Wuala. It seems to be neck and neck with Dropbox on features and supported platforms, with the advantage of a far more secure approach and 5 GB free. But I'd also love to see more approaches akin to IP2 and Bittorrent Sync that provide the means to bypass the cloud. Don't depend on government to ensure digital privacy, route around the government voyeurs. Hmmm ... I wonder if the NSA has the computer capacity to handle millions of people switching to encrypted communication? :-) Thanks for the link to the software list.
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    Re: Google. I don't know if it's the 'kiss of death" but they're definitely going to take a hit, particularly outside the U.S. BTW, I'm remembering from a few years back when the ODF Foundation was still kicking. I did a fair bit of research on the bureaucratic forces in the E.U. that were pushing for the Open Document Exchange Formats. That grew out of a then-ongoing push to get all of the E.U. nations connected via a network that is not dependent on the Internet. It was fairly complete at the time down to the national level and was branching out to the local level and the plan from there was to push connections to business and then to Joe Sixpack and wife. Interop was key, hence ODEF. The E.U. might not be that far away from an ability to sever the digital connections with the U.S. Say a bunch of daisy-chained proxy anonymizers for communications with the U.S. Of course they'd have to block the UK from the network and treat it like it is the U.S. There's a formal signals intelligence service collaboration/integration dating back to WW 2, as I recall, among the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Don't remember its name. But it's the same group of nations that were collaborating on Echelon. So the E.U. wouldn't want to let the UK fox inside their new chicken coop. Ah, it's just a fantasy. The U.S. and the E.U. are too interdependent. I have no idea hard it would be for the Zoho folk to come up with desktop/side encryption/decryption. And I don't know whether their servers are located outside the reach of a U.S. court's search warrant. But I think Google is going to have to move in that direction fast if it wants to minimize the damage. Or get way out in front of the hounds chomping at the NSA's ankles and reduce the NSA to compost. OTOH, Google might be a government covert op. for all I know. :-) I'm really enjoying watching the NSA show. Who knows what facet of their Big Brother operation gets revealed next?
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    ZOHO is an Indian company with USA marketing offices. No idea where the server farm is located, but they were not on the NSA list. I've known Raju Vegesna for years, mostly from the old Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 Conferences. Raju runs the USA offices in Santa Clara. I'll try to catch up with him on Thursday. How he could miss this once in a lifetime moment to clean out Google, Microsoft and SalesForce.com is something I'd like to find out about. Thanks for the Wuala tip. You sent me that years ago, when i was working on research and design for the SurDocs project. Incredible that all our notes, research, designs and correspondence was left to rot in Google Wave! Too too funny. I recall telling Alex from SurDocs that he had to use a USA host, like Amazon, that could be trusted by USA customers to keep their docs safe and secure. Now look what i've done! I've tossed his entire company information set into the laps of the NSA and their cabal of connected corporatists :)
Paul Merrell

German Parliament Says No More Software Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • The German Parliament recently took a huge step that would eliminate software patents (PDF) when it issued a joint motion requiring the German government to ensure that computer programs are only covered by copyright. Put differently, in Germany, software cannot be patented. The Parliament's motion follows a similar announcement made by New Zealand's government last month (PDF), in which it determined that computer programs were not inventions or a manner of manufacture and, thus, cannot be patented.
  • The crux of the German Parliament's motion rests on the fact that software is already protected by copyright, and developers are afforded "exploitation rights." These rights, however, become confused when broad, abstract patents also cover general aspects of computer programs. These two intellectual property systems are at odds. The clearest example of this clash is with free software. The motion recognizes this issue and therefore calls upon the government "to preserve the precedence of copyright law so that software developers can also publish their work under open source license terms and conditions with legal security." The free software movement relies upon the fact that software can be released under a copyright license that allows users to share it and build upon others' works. Patents, as Parliament finds, inhibit this fundamental spread.
  • Just like in the New Zealand order, the German Parliament carved out one type of software that could be patented, when: the computer program serves merely as a replaceable equivalent for a mechanical or electro-mechanical component, as is the case, for instance, when software-based washing machine controls can replace an electromechanical program control unit consisting of revolving cylinders which activate the control circuits for the specific steps of the wash cycle This allows for software that is tied to (and controls part of) another invention to be patented. In other words, if a claimed process is purely a computer program, then it is not patentable. (New Zealand's order uses a similar washing machine example.) The motion ends by calling upon the German government to push for this approach to be standard across all of Europe. We hope policymakers in the United States will also consider fundamental reform that deals with the problems caused by low-quality software patents. Ultimately, any real reform must address this issue.
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    Note that an unofficial translation of the parliamentary motion is linked from the article. This adds substantially to the pressure internationally to end software patents because Germany has been the strongest defender of software patents in Europe. The same legal grounds would not apply in the U.S. The strongest argument for the non-patentability in the U.S., in my opinion, is that software patents embody embody both prior art and obviousness. A general purpose computer can accomplish nothing unforeseen by the prior art of the computing device. And it is impossible for software to do more than cause different sequences of bit register states to be executed. This is the province of "skilled artisans" using known methods to produce predictable results. There is a long line of Supreme Court decisions holding that an "invention" with such traits is non-patentable. I have summarized that argument with citations at . 
munna1357

Crocodile Attack on food people screem around the way. - YouTube - 1 views

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    Crocodiles are brilliant animals. They have been around since the season of the dinosaurs, and they have taken this opportunity to consul themselves into a definitive executing machines. They are bosses of disguise, solid, and if necessary they can abandon sustenance for quite a while. They are the animals of numerous individuals' bad dreams. However, when you are cautious around crocodile domain, you don't need to dread them, you can simply appreciate them for what they are, the guardians of the waterways. What's more, please add to crocodile protection.  The entire group of various species is known as the 'crocodilians'. This incorporates salt-water crocodiles, new water crocodiles, gators, gharials and caimans. At present there are 23 unique types of crocodilians around the globe. The majority of these are imperiled however, in light of the fact that human development is gradually assuming control over their region. This implies lodging improvements are worked around the waterways where they live, and crocodilians are pursued out. This is a disgrace, and unbalances the entire eco-frameworks of these waterways. Numerous other creature species have adjusted to the crocodiles around them, and crocs live by the tenet of the fittest will survive. They eat feeble and wiped out creatures. Crocodile protection is critical and merits much more consideration than it as of now gets.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Stand up for your freedom to install free software - Free Software Foundation - working... - 0 views

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    [Microsoft has announced that if computer makers wish to distribute machines with the Windows 8 compatibility logo, they will have to implement a measure called "Secure Boot." However, it is currently up for grabs whether this technology will live up to its name, or will instead earn the name Restricted Boot. When done correctly, "Secure Boot" is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won't boot unauthorized operating systems -- including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved. ...]
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Trusted Computing Group - Benefits - 1 views

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    "Benefits Trusted Computing makes computing more secure. Systems based on Trusted Computing: Protect critical data and systems agains a variety of attacks Enable secure authentication and strong protection of unlimited certificates, keys, and passwords that otherwise are accessible Establish strong machine identity and integrity Help satisfy regulatory compliance with hardware-based security Cost less to manage, removing need for expensive tokens and peripherals"
Gary Edwards

Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future | Enterprise | WIRED - 1 views

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    Great story that is at the center of a new cloud computing platform. I met David Flynn back when he was first demonstrating the Realmsys flash card. Extraordinary stuff. He was using the technology to open a secure Linux computing window on an operating Windows XP system. The card opened up a secure data socket, connecting to any Internet Server or Data Server, and running applications on that data - while running Windows and Windows apps in the background. Incredible mesh of Linux, streaming data, and legacy Windows apps. Everytime I find these tech pieces explaining Fusion-io though, I can't help but think that David Flynn is one of the most decent, kind and truly deserving of success people that I have ever met. excerpt: "Apple is spending mountains of money on a new breed of hardware device from a company called Fusion-io. As a public company, Fusion-io is required to disclose information about customers that account for an usually large portion of its revenue, and with its latest annual report, the Salt Lake City outfit reveals that in 2012, at least 25 percent of its revenue - $89.8 million - came from Apple. That's just one figure, from just one company. But it serves as a sign post, showing you where the modern data center is headed. 'There's now a blurring between the storage world and the memory world. People have been enlightened by Fusion-io.' - Gary Gentry Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you'll find thousands of computer servers. Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it's packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the same stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn't have any moving parts, which means it's generally more reliable. It c
Gary Edwards

These 28 Words Explain Why PayPal's Creators Are Funding A Startup To Kill It - Busines... - 0 views

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    "One of the strangest things about Stripe - or perhaps, one of the strangest things about Paypal - is the list of people who are funding Stripe. Three of its biggest individual backers are people who played a key role in making PayPal a success: cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, along with Elon Musk, who joined PayPal through an acquisition. Why would Thiel, Levchin, and Musk fund a machine built destroy their baby? Probably because, in Silicon Valley, PayPal is viewed as a lost cause. We've heard a lot of complaints about how awful and hard it is to implement. " Stripe isn't the only well-funded startup going after what it views as a decrepit, disrupt-ble incumbent. Jack Dorsey's Square is too, and it's now worth billions of dollars. Another heavily funded startup, Braintree, owns the technology millions of people use to pay for things inside apps like Uber. Finally, some of eBay's bigger rivals such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are gunning for PayPal too.
Paul Merrell

XKeyscore Exposé Reaffirms the Need to Rid the Web of Tracking Cookies | Elec... - 0 views

  • The Intercept published an expose on the NSA's XKeyscore program. Along with information on the breadth and scale of the NSA's metadata collection, The Intercept revealed how the NSA relies on unencrypted cookie data to identify users. As The Intercept says: "The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies." The NSA slides released by The Intercept give detailed guides to understanding the data transmitted by these cookies, as well as how to find unique machine identifiers that analysts can use to differentiate between multiple machines using the same IP address. We've written before about how spy agencies piggyback on social media account data to find Internet users' names or other identifying info, and these slides drive home the point that HTTP cookies leave users vulnerable to government surveillance, since any intermediary (or spy agency) can read the sensitive data they contain.
  • Worse yet, most of the time these identifying cookies come from third-party sources on webpages, and users have no meaningful way to opt out of receiving them (short of blocking all third party cookies) since advertisers (the main server of these types of cookies) refuse to honor the Do Not Track header.  Browser makers could help address this sort of non-consensual tracking by both advertisers and the NSA with some simple technical changes—changes that have been shown to reduce the number of third party cookies received by 67%. So far, though, they've been unwilling to build privacy protecting features in by default. Until they do, the best way for users to protect themselves is by installing a privacy protecting app like Privacy Badger, which is designed to block these types of uniquely identifying tracking cookies, or HTTPS Everywhere to block the transmission of HTTP cookies.
Gary Edwards

SitePen Blog » Inside the Dojo Toolbox - 0 views

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    Great insight into Adobe AiR and the transition from browser based surfing to web application building.
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    Building the Dojo Toolbox allowed us to dive into Adobe® AIR™, and to create a blended toolchain of JavaScript, PHP, Python and Rhino (JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine) for developing an amazing desktop application using open web technologies. One of the most noticeable things you'll see when moving from typical browser-based development to AIR is that you only have one browser to worry about. Dojo does a great job of masking browser JavaScript API differences, but there are still enough differences in CSS and other aspects of application development that it is somewhat refreshing to only have one platform to develop again. Also, since AIR includes WebKit, it has one of the fastest JavaScript implementations around and offers numerous useful experimental CSS properties that you can use in the AIR context. Apple has invested a lot in WebKit development, and AIR will naturally inherit those benefits when they next upgrade the included WebKit.
Gary Edwards

Ballmer offers more on 'Windows Cloud' | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News - 0 views

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    "Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet,".... "Windows Cloud will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet that runs .NET." ..... "a shift in Microsoft's overall developer tools, means putting .Net in the browser, which we've done with our Silverlight technology," Ballmer said.... "PC applications have better user interface, and you can integrate them more. Browser applications run on non-Windows machines, and they're easier to manage. We need to bring the benefits of both of those things together on Windows, and through our Silverlight technology permit the targeting of other systems."
Gary Edwards

Software Imaging :: XPS Viewer - 0 views

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    Non Microsoft XPS Viewer! I blew up my machine twice trying to install Microsoft's XPS Viewer. The Software Imaging version flew right thru, and works like a charm. Recommended for those having problems with XPS formats.
Paul Merrell

The New York Times Archives + Amazon Web Services = TimesMachine - Open - Code - New Yo... - 0 views

  • TimesMachine is a collection of full-page image scans of the newspaper from 1851–1922 (i.e., the public domain archives). Organized chronologically and navigated by a simple calendar interface, TimesMachine provides a unique way to traverse the historical archives of The New York Times.
  • Using Amazon Web Services, Hadoop and our own code, we ingested 405,000 very large TIFF images, 3.3 million articles in SGML and 405,000 xml files mapping articles to rectangular regions in the TIFF’s. This data was converted to a more web-friendly 810,000 PNG images (thumbnails and full images) and 405,000 JavaScript files — all of it ready to be assembled into a TimesMachine. By leveraging the power of AWS and Hadoop, we were able to utilize hundreds of machines concurrently and process all the data in less than 36 hours.
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Gary Edwards

MWC 2010: The Year of the Android | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 2 views

  • Forget about the iPhone. Microsoft is in a death-match with Google and its free OS.
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    ARCELONA - This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google's operating system debuted here two years ago. Last year we expected a slew of handsets, and saw just a trickle. This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines. This is great news for us, the consumer. Android is stable, powerful and now it even runs Flash (I got a sneak peek of Flash running on a Motorola handset here at the show. It crashed). It's even better for the manufacturers, as - unlike Windows Mobile - Android is free. It's also open, so the phone makers can tweak it and trick it out as much as they like. And they do like. Most of the Android phones here at Mobile World Congress are running custom versions of Android, which differentiates them and, in theory at least, makes them easier to use, hiding the complexities of a proper multitasking OS from the user.
Maluvia Haseltine

OpenNebula :: The Open Source Toolkit for Building Clouds - 0 views

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    OpenNebula is a Virtual Infrastructure Manager that orchestrates storage, network and virtualization technologies to enable the dynamic placement of multi-tier services (groups of interconnected virtual machines) on distributed infrastructures, combining both data center resources and remote cloud resources, according to allocation policies. OpenNebula provides internal and Cloud administration and user interfaces for the full management of the Cloud platform.
Paul Merrell

DOJ Pushes to Expand Hacking Abilities Against Cyber-Criminals - Law Blog - WSJ - 0 views

  • The U.S. Department of Justice is pushing to make it easier for law enforcement to get warrants to hack into the computers of criminal suspects across the country. The move, which would alter federal court rules governing search warrants, comes amid increases in cases related to computer crimes. Investigators say they need more flexibility to get warrants to allow hacking in such cases, especially when multiple computers are involved or the government doesn’t know where the suspect’s computer is physically located. The Justice Department effort is raising questions among some technology advocates, who say the government should focus on fixing the holes in computer software that allow such hacking instead of exploiting them. Privacy advocates also warn government spyware could end up on innocent people’s computers if remote attacks are authorized against equipment whose ownership isn’t clear.
  • The government’s push for rule changes sheds light on law enforcement’s use of remote hacking techniques, which are being deployed more frequently but have been protected behind a veil of secrecy for years. In documents submitted by the government to the judicial system’s rule-making body this year, the government discussed using software to find suspected child pornographers who visited a U.S. site and concealed their identity using a strong anonymization tool called Tor. The government’s hacking tools—such as sending an email embedded with code that installs spying software — resemble those used by criminal hackers. The government doesn’t describe these methods as hacking, preferring instead to use terms like “remote access” and “network investigative techniques.” Right now, investigators who want to search property, including computers, generally need to get a warrant from a judge in the district where the property is located, according to federal court rules. In a computer investigation, that might not be possible, because criminals can hide behind anonymizing technologies. In cases involving botnets—groups of hijacked computers—investigators might also want to search many machines at once without getting that many warrants.
  • Some judges have already granted warrants in cases when authorities don’t know where the machine is. But at least one judge has denied an application in part because of the current rules. The department also wants warrants to be allowed for multiple computers at the same time, as well as for searches of many related storage, email and social media accounts at once, as long as those accounts are accessed by the computer being searched. “Remote searches of computers are often essential to the successful investigation” of computer crimes, Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman wrote in a letter to the judicial system’s rulemaking authority requesting the change in September. The government tries to obtain these “remote access warrants” mainly to “combat Internet anonymizing techniques,” the department said in a memo to the authority in March. Some groups have raised questions about law enforcement’s use of hacking technologies, arguing that such tools mean the government is failing to help fix software problems exploited by criminals. “It is crucial that we have a robust public debate about how the Fourth Amendment and federal law should limit the government’s use of malware and spyware within the U.S.,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on technology issues.
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  • A Texas judge who denied a warrant application last year cited privacy concerns associated with sending malware when the location of the computer wasn’t known. He pointed out that a suspect opening an email infected with spyware could be doing so on a public computer, creating risk of information being collected from innocent people. A former computer crimes prosecutor serving on an advisory committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference, which is reviewing the request, said he was concerned that allowing the search of multiple computers under a single warrant would violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against overly broad searches. The proposed rule is set to be debated by the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules in early April, after which it would be opened to public comment.
Gary Edwards

Box, Dropbox rethink future in midst of price war - San Jose Mercury News - 0 views

  • "Right now there is a huge arms race between Apple, Google, Microsoft, and now Amazon has thrown their hat in the ring," said Vineet Jain, co-founder and CEO of Egnyte, a Mountain View company that sells software that allows companies to store data both in the cloud and on premise. "These four guys are capable of making it free or nearly free, and the price points that you're seeing from these vendors such as Box will have to come down, or they will have a shrinking user base. You cannot out-compete Microsoft and Google on price -- you just can't."
  • For Box and Dropbox -- and the investors who have poured millions of dollars into them -- there's a lot of money on the line. In 2013, cloud storage companies raised $1.2 billion from venture capitalists, compared to $427 million in 2010 and $185 million in 2009, according to the Dow Jones. Silicon Valley cloud storage companies accounted for 14 of the top 20 venture-backed deals, with Box leading with more than $350 million in funds raised; Dropbox raised $250 million.
  • "The problem is pricing on storage has just been collapsing," said Randy Chou, CEO and co-founder of Panzura, which sells hardware and software that allows businesses to collaborate on massive documents, and counts Electronic Arts and the U.S. Department of Justice among its customers. "Whatever anyone is paying today, they'll pay half next year, and half the year after that."
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    Commentary on the expected Box and Dropbox IPO, which are being delayed. The author explains the delay, but misses the incredibl eimpact Office 365 is having on the mobile Cloud Productivity platform. And this is the platform war of all wars. It is the race to dominate the 3rd Wave of computing. "It wasn't long ago that cloud storage companies such as Box and Dropbox were among the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, blessed with vast amounts of venture capital and poised to go public in blockbuster IPOs. But now, thanks to a price war launched by Google, Amazon and other tech giants, almost anyone with a laptop or tablet can get cloud storage for less than the price of a latte. That means Box and Dropbox, which sell software for businesses and consumers to store and use files on the Internet rather than a machine, are confronting a precarious future: They must figure out how to go head-to-head with the world's most powerful tech companies. The jockeying has forced both startups to rethink their plans to go public -- Box filed for an IPO in March, but has delayed trading, and Dropbox, once poised to be one of the biggest tech IPOs of the year, may not have a public offering in its immediate future."
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Demos Real-Time Translation Over Skype - Slashdot - 1 views

  • "Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
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    Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.   Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition." Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother. But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.  And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook. What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow. 
Paul Merrell

The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle - 0 views

  • AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania. In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
  • With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.
  • Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”
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  • According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto. Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”
  • The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
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    Remember all those NSA claims that no evidence of their misbehavior has emerged? That one should never take wing again. Monitoring call content without the involvement of any court? Without a warrant? Without probable cause?  Was there even any Congressional authorization?  Wiretapping unequivocally requires a judicially-approved search warrant. It's going to be very interesting to learn the government's argument for this misconduct's legality. 
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