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John Lemke

NSA moves from bugging German Chancellor to bugging German ministers | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Still, that moratorium on spying didn't extend beyond those world leaders, and Reuters, translating from the BamS source, writes that the source said, “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly.” Specifically, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's confidants, was called out as being a target of the NSA's increased spying efforts.
John Lemke

FBI Arrested CEO of 'StealthGenie' for Selling Mobile Spyware Apps - 0 views

  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested the CEO of a UK-based company for allegedly advertising and selling a spyware app to individuals who suspect their romantic partners of cheating on them.
  • The dodgy cell phone spyware application, dubbed as StealthGenie, monitors victims’ phone calls, text messages, videos, emails and other communications "without detection" when it is installed on a target's phone, according to the Department of Justice.
  • Once installed on the phone, it allows conversations to be monitored as they take place, enables the purchaser to call the phone and activate it at any time to monitor all surrounding conversations within a 15-foot radius, and collects the user’s incoming and outgoing email and SMS messages, incoming voicemail, address book, calendar, photographs, and videos. All of these functions are enabled without the knowledge of the user of the phone.
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  • Akbar was charged with conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious interception device, advertisement of a known interception device and advertising a device as a surreptitious interception device in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
John Lemke

UK prime minister wants backdoors into messaging apps or he'll ban them | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • He said the Paris attacks, including the one last week on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, underscored the need for greater access.
    • John Lemke
       
      Did they use such encryption in the attack? Would they have been caught even if encryption were not being used? what is up with that, we didn't do any better at catching thugs when they used CBs and many thugs are no smart enough to use encryption and still go uncaught.
John Lemke

DNA from maggot guts used to identify corpse in criminal case | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • It had already been suggested by other researchers that the gastrointestinal contents of maggots could be used to identify the subjects they feed on. However, never before has the theory been trialed in a legal, criminal case. Pathologists at Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico, led by María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones and Marta Ortega-Martínez, carried out short tandem repeat typing tests (a common method of DNA profiling) on the matter extracted from three dissected maggots found on the victim's face and neck, and separately on the alleged father of the missing woman. Preliminary results showed that the body was female, and the final outcome was a 99.685 percent probability of positive paternity—the victim had been identified.
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    "It had already been suggested by other researchers that the gastrointestinal contents of maggots could be used to identify the subjects they feed on. However, never before has the theory been trialed in a legal, criminal case. Pathologists at Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico, led by María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones and Marta Ortega-Martínez, carried out short tandem repeat typing tests (a common method of DNA profiling) on the matter extracted from three dissected maggots found on the victim's face and neck, and separately on the alleged father of the missing woman. Preliminary results showed that the body was female, and the final outcome was a 99.685 percent probability of positive paternity-the victim had been identified."
John Lemke

Feathered dinosaur death site is an "animal Pompeii" | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The fossils of the Jehol Biota are from the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago, and they comprise a wide variety of animals and plants. So far, about 60 species of plants, 1,000 species of invertebrates, and 140 species of vertebrates have been found in the Jehol Biota.
  • One of the most remarkable discoveries to arise from these fossils came in 2010, when Michael Benton of the University of Bristol found color-banding preserved in dinosaur fossils. These stripes of light and dark are similar to stripes in modern birds, and they provided further evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Benton also found that these fossils had intact mealnosomes—organelles that make pigments. This discovery allowed paleontologists to tell the colors of dinosaurs' feathers for the first time.
John Lemke

Want to remotely control a car? $20 in parts, some oily fingers, and you're in command ... - 0 views

  • untraceable, off-the-shelf parts worth $20 that can give wireless access to the car's controls while it's on the road.
  • Illera and fellow security researcher Javier Vazquez-Vidal said that they had tested the CAN Hacking Tool (CHT) successfully on four popular makes of cars and had been able to apply the emergency brakes while the car was in motion, affect the steering, turn off the headlights, or set off the car alarm.
  • currently only works via Bluetooth,
John Lemke

Snowden documents show British digital spies use viruses and 'honey traps' * The Register - 0 views

  • "deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible.
  • According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence has tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up Royal Concierge. It was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.
  • A PowerPoint presentation from 2010 states that JTRIG activities account for five per cent of GCHQ's operations budget and uses a variety of techniques. These include "call bombing" to drown out a target's ability to receive messages, attacking targets in hotels, Psyops (psychological operations) against individuals, and going all the way up to disrupting a country's critical infrastructure.
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  • Targets can also be discredited with a "honey trap", whereby a fake social media profile is created, maybe backed up by a personal blog to provide credibility. This could be used to entice someone into making embarrassing confessions, which the presentation notes described as "a great option" and "very successful when it works."
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    All that evil spy stuff in the hands of the government.   Big Brother is real.  Too Fin' real.
John Lemke

Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ | World news | theguardi... - 0 views

  • Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
  • between 2008 and 2010
  • Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs
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  • Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
John Lemke

Video: Sun has 'flipped upside down' as new magnetic cycle begins - Science - News - Th... - 0 views

  • The sun has "flipped upside down", with its north and south poles reversed to reach the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, Nasa has said. Now, the magnetic fields will once again started moving in opposite directions to begin the completion of the 22 year long process which will culminate in the poles switching once again."A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event," said Nasa’s Dr. Tony Phillips."The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the 'heliosphere') extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space."
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    It is topics like these that Lumpy and Brian often discuss on Tech Net News and Opinion which airs Monday's from 8-10 PM EST. Feel free to join us in geekshed.net IRC in #indienation. We encourage listener participation and having listeners on the air.
John Lemke

FireChat: The internet-free messaging app that's sweeping the world - News - Gadgets an... - 0 views

  • t's a messaging app for iOS.
  • based on peer-to-peer “mesh networking” and connects to nearby phones using Bluetooth and WiFi, with connectivity increasing as more people use it in an area.
  • In Hong Kong mostly, where pro-democracy protesters are using it to communicate amid fears of network shutdowns. It's also been used by Iraqis and Taiwanese students during their anti-Beijing Sunflower Movement. Aside from not being reliant on the internet (which some governments restrict), it is more clandestine and less traceable.
John Lemke

Earth's Impending Magnetic Flip - Scientific American - 0 views

  • The European Space Agency's satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century. A weakening magnetic field may indicate an impending reversal, which scientists predict could begin in less than 2,000 years. Magnetic north itself appears to be moving toward Siberia.
  • There is a good chance the weakening magnetic field that the Swarm satellites observed will not lead to a full flip. Indeed, Glatzmaier notes that there have been several false starts over geologic history. The intensity of Earth's magnetic field, though waning, now equals its average strength over millions of years. The field would need to weaken at its current rate for around 2,000 years before the reversal process actually begins.
  • It is hard to know how a geomagnetic reversal would impact our modern-day civilization, but it is unlikely to spell disaster. Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions or increased radiation damage during past reversals. A flip could possibly interfere with power grids and communications systems—external magnetic field disturbances have burned out transformers and caused blackouts in the past. But Glatzmaier is not worried. “A thousand years from now we probably won't have power lines,” he says. “We'll have advanced so much that we'll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”
    • John Lemke
       
      Likely not the end of the world for past reversals have not show evidence of mass extinctions.
John Lemke

Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record | University of Cambridge - 0 views

  • three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
  • Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.
  • Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.
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