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John Lemke

Spy Babe Now Wants to Design Astronaut Outfits | Danger Room | Wired.com - 0 views

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    Is your national space program fashion-forward enough? Astronauts getting a little frumpy after the Cold War? Having trouble getting that space plane off the ground? Why not lift morale and brighten up the place with some fierce new uniforms designed by planet Earth's most infamous ex-spy? Yes, Russia's famously outed sleeper agent Anna Chapman is back in yet another installment of her merciless publicity tour. This time, she's looking to help the ground crew at Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center work it down the runway in style. Frilly epaulets for all! "Chapman told me that she intends to participate in designing clothing for the Khrunichev [Space] Center, in what capacity, designer or financially, she did not specify," the Gagarin Astronaut Training Center's top astronaut told Russian state media today.
John Lemke

Guitar maker sues Web-based t-shirt vendor for shirts reading "born to rock" | Ars Tech... - 0 views

  • A guitar design firm called Born to Rock has won an initial victory over the user-generated T-shirt-printing website CafePress in a legal battle over whether CafePress users will be allowed to use the company's name as part of their T-shirt designs. While the guitar firm initially registered the phrase only for use selling guitars, it has taken the position that any use of the phrase "born to rock" by a CafePress user infringes its trademarks.
John Lemke

New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It - The Intercept - 0 views

  • Documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection program that appeared designed to collect information about the communications of New Zealanders.
  • Those actions are in direct conflict with the assurances given to the public by Prime Minister John Key (pictured above), who said the law was merely designed to fix “an ambiguous legal framework” by expressly allowing the agency to do what it had done for years, that it “isn’t and will never be wholesale spying on New Zealanders,” and the law “isn’t a revolution in the way New Zealand conducts its intelligence operations.”
  • Snowden explained that “at the NSA, I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called ‘X KEYSCORE.”" He further detailed that “the GCSB provides mass surveillance data into XKEYSCORE. They also provide access to the communications of millions of New Zealanders to the NSA at facilities such as the GCSB facility in Waihopai, and the Prime Minister is personally aware of this fact.”
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  • Top secret documents provided by the whistleblower demonstrate that the GCSB, with ongoing NSA cooperation, implemented Phase I of the mass surveillance program code-named “Speargun” at some point in 2012
  • Over the weekend, in anticipation of this report, Key admitted for the first time that the GCSB did plan a program of mass surveillance aimed at his own citizens, but claimed that he ultimately rejected the program before implementation. Yesterday, after The Intercept sought comment from the NSA, the Prime Minister told reporters in Auckland that this reporting was referring merely to “a proposed widespread cyber protection programme that never got off the ground.” He vowed to declassify documents confirming his decision.
  • That legislation arose after it was revealed in 2012 that the GCSB illegally surveilled the communications of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, a legal resident of New Zealand. New Zealand law at the time forbade the GCSB from using its surveillance apparatus against citizens or legal residents. That illegal GCSB surveillance of Dotcom was followed by a massive military-style police raid by New Zealand authorities on his home in connection with Dotcom’s criminal prosecution in the United States for copyright violations. A subsequent government investigation found that the GCSB not only illegally spied on Dotcom but also dozens of other citizens and legal residents. The deputy director of GCSB resigned. The government’s response to these revelations was to refuse to prosecute those who ordered the illegal spying and, instead, to propose a new law that would allow domestic electronic surveillance.
    • John Lemke
       
      The Dotcom raid was ruled illegal.  Yet the Dotcom spying was exactly the type of activity of this plan.
  • n high-level discussions between the Key government and the NSA, the new law was clearly viewed as the crucial means to empower the GCSB to engage in metadata surveillance. On more than one occasion, the NSA noted internally that Project Speargun, in the process of being implemented, could not and would not be completed until the new law was enacted.
John Lemke

Stepson of Stuxnet stalked Kaspersky for months, tapped Iran nuke talks | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Since some time in the second half of 2014, a different state-sponsored group had been casing their corporate network using malware derived from Stuxnet, the highly sophisticated computer worm reportedly created by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
  • the malware was more advanced than the malicious programs developed by the NSA-tied Equation Group that Kaspersky just exposed. More intriguing still, Kaspersky antivirus products showed the same malware has infected one or more venues that hosted recent diplomatic negotiations the US and five other countries have convened with Iran over its nuclear program.
  • We see this battle or arms race emerging and now it involves some kind of confrontation between the security industry and nation-state sponsored spies
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  • Kaspersky officials first became suspicious their network might be infected in the weeks following February's Security Analyst Summit, where company researchers exposed a state-sponsored hacking operation that had ties to some of the developers of Stuxnet. Kaspersky dubbed the highly sophisticated group behind the 14-year campaign Equation Group. Now back in Moscow, a company engineer was testing a software prototype for detecting so-called advanced persistent threats (APTs), the type of well-organized and highly sophisticated attack campaigns launched by well-funded hacking groups. Strangely enough, the developer's computer itself was having unusual interactions with the Kaspersky network. The new APT technology under development, it seemed, was one of several things of interest to the Duqu attackers penetrating the Kaspersky fortress. "For the developer it was important to find out why" his PC was acting oddly, Kamluk said. "Of course, he did not consider that machine could be infected by real malware. We eventually found an alien module that should not be there that tried to mask behind legitimate looking modules from Microsoft. That was the point of discovery."
  • What they found was a vastly overhauled malware operation that made huge leaps in stealth, operational security, and software design. The Duqu actors also grew much more ambitious, infecting an estimated 100 or so targets, about twice as many as were hit by the 2011 version.
  • So the Duqu 2.0 attackers pulled an audacious feat that Kaspersky researchers had never seen before. Virtually all of the malware resided solely in the memory of the compromised computers or servers. When one of them was restarted, the infection would be purged, but as the rebooted machine reconnected to the network, it would be infected all over again by another compromised computer in the corporate network. The secret lynchpin making this untraceable reinfection scheme possible was the Windows vulnerability Microsoft patched only Tuesday, which has been designated
John Lemke

Quadruped CHEETAH robot to outrun any human - 0 views

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    It would be scary to be chased by a military robot. It would also be scary to be chased by a cheetah. So, imagine what it would be like to have a military robotic cheetah sprinting after you. Such a scenario could one day be possible, as robotics company Boston Dynamics recently announced that America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded it a contract to design and build such a ... critter. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier.
John Lemke

BGU Students Develop Thought-Controlled, Hands-Free Computer For The Disabled - 0 views

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    BGU software engineering students have developed innovative technology that could enable people to operate a computer without using a keyboard or mouse - only their brainwaves. While there have been previous attempts to develop devices to read brainwaves and operate specific programs, they were cumbersome and not feasible outside of a laboratory setting. The BGU technology features a helmet equipped with 14 EEG connect points that sense brain activity. According to Dr. Rami Puzis, "The technology is designed to assist those who are physically disabled who might otherwise be unable to manipulate a computer mouse or keyboard." The student team, Ori Ossmy, Ofir Tam and Ariel Rozen, developed the prototype application for their bachelor's degree project under supervision at BGU by Prof. Mark Last, Dr. Rami Puzis, Prof. Yuval Elovich and Dr. Lior Rokah. As part of a recent demonstration, a student composed and sent a hands-free e-mail using only thought combined with the adaptive hardware. The students and BGU team plan to continue research working with the disabled.
John Lemke

Java-based malware driving DDoS botnet infects Windows, Mac, Linux devices | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • takes hold of computers by exploiting CVE-2013-2465, a critical Java vulnerability that Oracle patched in June. The security bug is present on Java 7 u21 and earlier. Once the bot has infected a computer, it copies itself to the autostart directory of its respective platform to ensure it runs whenever the machine is turned on. Compromised computers then report to an Internet relay chat channel that acts as a command and control server.
  • The botnet is designed to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks on targets of the attackers' choice. Commands issued in the IRC channel allow the attackers to specify the IP address, port number, intensity, and duration of attacks.
John Lemke

Surprise: ASCAP and Music Labels Colluded To Screw Pandora | Techdirt - 0 views

  • A key part of this was that the major labels, key members of ASCAP, suddenly started "dropping out" of ASCAP in order to do licensing directly. At first we thought this was a sign of how the labels might be realizing that ASCAP was obsolete and out of touch, but it has since become clear that these "removals" were all something of a scam to force Pandora into higher rates.
  • What happened was that ASCAP and Pandora had first negotiated a higher rate than Pandora had agreed to in the past -- reaching a handshake agreement. However, before that agreement could be finalized, these labels started "withdrawing" from ASCAP in order to negotiate directly. As part of that, both ASCAP and the labels refused to tell Pandora which songs had been withdrawn, meaning that if Pandora accidentally played one of the withdrawn songs (again, without knowing which songs were withdrawn),
  • Your Honor, by the time Pandora asked for this information on November 1st, both ASCAP and Mr. Brodsky [Sony Executive VP] had in their possession this very list. The deposition testimony from ASCAP was that this list as is could have been delivered to Pandora within 24 hours were it only to get the go-ahead from Sony to do so. ASCAP never received the go-ahead. We cited much of the internal back-and-forth on this in our briefs... My favorite is the following exchange between Mr. DeFilippis and Mr. Reimer of ASCAP on December 19th, 2013, PX 193. You see the question being asked by Mr. DeFilippis: why didn't Sony provide the list to Pandora? Mr. Reimer's response: Ask me tomorrow. Mr. DeFilippis: Right. With drink in hand. And the inference here is just incredible. This data was sitting there, your Honor, and nobody was willing to give it to Pandora.
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  • There's a lot more in there, but it seems abundantly clear that these labels "withdrawing" from ASCAP had nothing to do with competition or market rates. It appears that it had little to do with even withdrawing from ASCAP. Instead, it seems to have been designed from the start to basically screw over Pandora, in what certainly smells an awful lot like collusion, by forcing Pandora to pay exorbitant rates or suddenly face a massive copyright liability because no one would tell them what songs were being "withdrawn" from an existing licensing agreement.
John Lemke

Uroburos Rootkit: Most sophisticated 3-year-old Russian Cyber Espionage Campaign - The ... - 0 views

  • The researchers claimed that the malware may have been active for as long as three years before being discovered and appears to have been created by Russian developers.
  • The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.
  • The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.
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  • we assume that the group behind Uroburos is the same group that performed a cyberattack against the United States of America in 2008 with a malware called Agent.BTZ
  • The attacks carried out with Uroburos are targeting government institutions, research institutions, intelligence agencies, nation states, research institutions or companies dealing with sensitive information as well as similar high-profile targets. The oldest drivers identified by the researchers was compiled in 2011 is the evidence that the malware was created around three years ago and was undetected.
John Lemke

This Internet of Things radio is the size of an ant | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • The radios are fitted onto tiny silicon chips, and cost only pennies to make thanks to their diminutive size. They are designed to compute, execute, and relay demands, and they are very energy efficient to the point of being self-sufficient. This is due to the fact that they can harvest power from the incoming electromagnetic signal so they do not require batteries, meaning there is no particular lifetime associated with the devices.
John Lemke

Curiosity rover reaches long-term goal: a massive Martian mountain | The Verge - 0 views

  • NASA recently announced that the rover has arrived at the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high mountain that Curiosity has been heading towards since July of 2013.
  • Curiosity was designed to travel a maximum of 660 feet per day and navigate difficult terrain on its six wheels. The Spirit rover traveled only 4.8 miles over its lifespan, although the still-active Opportunity rover has logged about 25 miles since 2003. Curiosity's path was rerouted earlier this year after scientists found that sharp rocks were poking holes in its wheels.
John Lemke

NSA reportedly targeted as many as 122 world leaders for surveillance | The Verge - 0 views

  • The documents, leaked to the publications by Edward Snowden, contain a list of 11 world leaders that have been targeted by a system known as Nymrod — however the document implies the actual number targeted was 122. Nymrod is reportedly a system designed to automatically extract citations ("cites") out of a multiplicity of sources, including voice and computer communications. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is listed by name, as are more obvious targets like Syrian president Bashar Asad and former Ukranian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Various leaders apparently have "cites" automatically added to to a "Target Knowledge Database."
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