Group items tagged

Yikes - definitely a wakeup call?

""Not just here in this country, or in the United States, but virtually every adult human in the world has a cellphone, and they're all putting out data about where they are, what their preferences are, who they talk to and that data will run the world. That's why I call it the decade of data. "This is the beginning of it, not the end of it, we're just at the start," Pentland added. "

"The new documents reveal that a GCHQ unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, launched an operation called Rolling Thunder against the hacker collective in 2011. That operation included using DDoS attacks as well as malware to slow down the hackers and later identify them, as first reported by as reported by NBC News on Wednesday."

"We're tempted to file this one under "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A wristband, called Nymi, that taps the user's heartbeat as a biometric marker, will also double as a bitcoin wallet."

"A smartphone application called Peek, Portable Eye Examination Kit, utilizes the phone's camera and can conduct visual and color field tests, lens imaging for cataracts, and retinal imaging, among other tests to detect sight impairments and diseases."

"The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet."

Justin Engler and Paul Vines will demo a robot called the Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) at Defcon; it can work its way through every numeric screen-lock Android password in 19 hours.

"Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn't causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain's Digital Economy Act don't work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies. "

"India has started using a system that allows security agencies and income tax officials to directly intercept phone calls and emails without any court or legislative oversight, Reuters reported this summer."

"One prototype system that Wood has helped developed, called Second Skin, can be worn by patients with neuromuscular disorders to stimulate nerve activity and advance rehabilitation. He says that soft- and micro-robotic devices may one day be used inside the body to aid minimally invasive medical procedures."

"The Turing Test was passed for the first time by a chatbot called "Eugene Goostman" on Saturday by convincing 33% of the human judges that it was human, according to Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, in a statement."

"99 percent of the names submitted to the list are accepted; the court called this "wildly loose." The database has grown from 227,932 names in 2009 to its current stratospheric heights. There is no official, public procedure for having your name removed from the list. The US government is seeking to end the trial by invoking state secrecy."

"The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor's web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user's device a number that uniquely identifies it."

"The transparency report is in its third year, but it hasn't prevented attacks from advocates such as Edward Snowden, who called the company "hostile to privacy". "Dropbox is a targeted you know wannabe PRISM partner," he told the Guardian in July 2014. "They just put … Condoleezza Rice on their board … who is probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.""

"Three months passed. Then, on Wednesday, anonymous government officials reportedly confirmed that a local company called Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE or See Egypt) had won the bid to develop the system, which would allegedly allow the Egyptian government to sniff and analyze Internet and social media activity, as well as intercept Skype, WhatsApp and Viber conversations. "

"The verification codes required for logging into a 2-step enabled account can be generated either using a mobile app - like Authy or Google Authenticator - or you can have them sent to your mobile phone via a text message or a voice call. The latter option however will not work if the mobile phone associated with your account is outside the coverage area"

"President Obama has reassured US citizens that 'nobody is listening to your calls', but it's not the content of conversations that intelligence agencies crave"

"Upcoming cell phone chips from Qualcomm will use artificial intelligence to block malware before it infects your phone. The chip company said on Monday that the next-generation Snapdragon 820 processor used in a variety of Android smartphones will be the first chip that uses machine learning to detect threats and privacy issues thanks to an application called Snapdragon Smart Protect." Qualcomm is trying to use artificial intelligence in a chip for smart phones. The chip will learn to detect any privacy or security issues that would usually be hard to detect.