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John Lemke

Snowden Keeps Outwitting U.S. Spies - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • First, it assumes that Snowden’s master file includes data from every network he ever scanned. Second, it assumes that this file is already in or will end up in the hands of America’s adversaries. If these assumptions turn out to be true, then the alarm raised in the last week will be warranted. The key word here is “if.”
    • John Lemke
       
      The two asumptions
  • One U.S. intelligence official briefed on the report said the DIA concluded that Snowden visited classified facilities outside the NSA station where he worked in Hawaii while he was downloading the documents he would eventually leak to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman. On Tuesday, Clapper himself estimated that less than 10 percent of the documents Snowden took were from the NSA.
    • John Lemke
       
      Seems not many of the documents were actually NSA documents.
  • assume
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  • DIA director Gen. Michael Flynn put it this way on Tuesday in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: “We
  • that Snowden, everything that he touched, we assume that he took, stole.”
  • The U.S. intelligence official briefed on the report said the DIA was able to retrace the steps Snowden took inside the military’s classified systems to find every site where he rummaged around. “Snowden had a very limited amount of time before he would be detected when he did this, so we
  • assume
  • he zipped up the files and left,” this official said.
  • Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert and cryptographer who Greenwald has consulted on the Snowden archive, said it was prudent to
  • assume
  • that lest some of Snowden’s documents could wind up in the hands of a foreign government.
  • In June, Greenwald told the Daily Beast that he did not know whether or not Snowden had additional documents beyond the ones he gave him. “I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published.”
    • John Lemke
       
      He is not willing to release stuff he felt that journalist should not publish...
  • Snowden, however, has implied that he does not have control over the files he took. “No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect,” he wrote in July in a letter to former New Hampshire Republican senator Gordon Humphrey. “While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China). You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.”
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

Apple CarPlay debuts with Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo | Technology | theguardian.com - 0 views

  • Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo as the first partners to build it into their vehicles.
  • connect iPhones into in-car information and entertainment systems
  • in-car equivalent to Apple’s AirPlay technology in the living room.
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  • The company said today it also has deals with 13 more manufacturers to integrate CarPlay in the future: BMW Group, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai Motor Company, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia Motors, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan Motor Company, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota Motor Corp.
John Lemke

NSA paid $10 Million bribe to RSA Security for Keeping Encryption Weak - 0 views

  • According to an exclusive report published by Reuters, there is a secret deal between the NSA and respected encryption company RSA to implement a flawed security standard as the default protocol in its products.
  • Earlier Edward Snowden leaks had revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system (Dual_EC_DRBG), Dual Elliptic Curve, which RSA used in its Bsafe security tool and now Snowden has revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. So, anyone who knows the right numbers used in Random number generator program, can decipher the resulting cryptotext easily.
John Lemke

Leaked Snowden documents detail NSA's plans for 'millions' of malware attacks | The Verge - 0 views

  • A program known as TURBINE, first revealed last year, is meant to dramatically speed the process: one document says it will "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."
  • The scaling process, according to Greenwald, started in 2004, when the NSA operated only 100 to 150 software implants. The number of implants used in the years between 2010 to 2012, by contrast, is described as numbering in the tens of thousands.
John Lemke

Hubble spots water spurting from Europa : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

  • “If this pans out, it’s potentially the biggest news in the outer Solar System since the discovery of the Enceladus plume,” says Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who was not involved in the research.
  • Roth’s team spotted the plumes when Europa was at its greatest distance from Jupiter. Changing stresses in the moon's crust, caused by tidal forces between the moon and planet, may explain why the researchers didn't see any plumes in the November observation when Europa and Jupiter were close. “Maybe Europa is just burping once in a while,” Pappalardo says.
John Lemke

YouTube goes nuts flagging game-related content as violating copyright | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • According to TubeFilter, YouTube told these MCNs last week that it would begin pre-screening a sample of their affiliates' videos for copyright violation before the video posts to YouTube, in a process that could take as little as a few hours or up to a few days. The pre-screening system is also be based on good behavior, so to speak, and affiliates who are never caught uploading copyrighted material will be checked less frequently.
John Lemke

Shellshock: Code injection vulnerability found in Bash | LIVE HACKING - 0 views

  • A code injection vulnerability in the Bourne again shell (Bash) has been disclosed on the internet. If exploited then arbitrary commands can be executed, and where Bash is used in relation to a network service, for example in CGI scripts on a web server, then the vulnerability will allow remote code execution.
  • The problem is that Bash does not stop after processing the function definition; it continues to parse and execute any shell commands following the function definition
  • The vulnerability is deemed as critical because Bash is used widely on many types of UNIX-like operating systems including Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X.
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  • The most prominent attack vector is via HTTP requests sent to CGI scripts executed by Bash. Also, if SSH has been configured to allow remote users to run a set of restricted commands, like rsync or git, this bug means that an attacker can use SSH to execute any command and not just the restricted command.
John Lemke

Active malware operation let attackers sabotage US energy industry | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers.
  • the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a
  • Called Dragonfly
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  • "This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems," the Symantec report stated. "While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
  • been in operation since at least 2011
  • "The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically," the Symantec report stated. "Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a 'soft underbelly' by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies."
John Lemke

Artificial spleen cleans up blood : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

  • A device inspired by the spleen can quickly clean blood of everything from Escherichia coli to Ebola, researchers report on 14 September in Nature Medicine1.
  • Blood infections can be very difficult to treat, and can lead to sepsis, an often-fatal immune response. More than 50% of the time, physicians cannot diagnose the cause of an infection that has prompted sepsis, and so they resort to antibiotics that attack a broad range of bacteria2. This approach is not always effective, and can lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
  • To test the device, Ingber and his team infected rats with either E. coli or Staphylococcus aureus and filtered blood from some of the animals through the biospleen. Five hours after infection, 89% of the rats whose blood had been filtered were still alive, compared with only 14% of those that were infected but not treated.
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  • the device had removed more than 90% of the bacteria from the rats' blood.
  • The researchers then tested whether the biospleen could handle the volume of blood in an average adult human — about 5 litres. They ran human blood containing a mixture of bacteria and fungi through the biospleen at a rate of 1 litre per hour, and found that the device removed most of the pathogens within five hours.
  • That degree of efficacy is probably enough to control an infection, Ingber says. Once the biospleen has removed most pathogens from the blood, antibiotics and the immune system can fight off remaining traces of infection — such as pathogens lodged in the organs, he says.
    • John Lemke
       
      In short, it remove enough pathogens to be an effective human treatment.
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

'Solid' light could compute previously unsolvable problems - Princeton Engine... - 0 views

  • The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place.
  • The results raise intriguing possibilities for a variety of future materials. But the researchers also intend to use the method to address questions about the fundamental study of matter, a field called condensed matter physics.
  • To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single "artificial atom." They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them. Normally photons do not interact with each other, but in this system the researchers are able to create new behavior in which the photons begin to interact in some ways like particles. "We have used this blending together of the photons and the atom to artificially devise strong interactions among the photons," said Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the authors. "These interactions then lead to completely new collective behavior for light – akin to the phases of matter, like liquids and crystals, studied in condensed matter physics."
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