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Is This the Golden Age of Hacking? [15Jun11] - 0 views

it.slashdot.org/firehose.pl hacking
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 17 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."
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One Per Cent: Kinect hack merges the real and virtual worlds [02Nov11] - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...t-hack-merges-the-real-an.html 4AR
shared by Dan R.D. on 02 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.
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Obama Tries to Bypass Congress with Deadly Global Internet Treaty ACTA [28Jan12] - 0 views

thenewamerican.com/...ly-global-internet-treaty-acta internet treaty acta
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.
  • the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.
  • Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.
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  • Twenty-two EU member states signed the treaty at a ceremony in Tokyo on January 26. Other nations interested in signing the agreement have until May 2013 to do so. According to Wikipedia, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement “creates a governing body outside national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.” The scope of the agreement includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, and pirated copyright-protected works.
  • The provisions of ACTA grant copyright holders direct powers to demand that ISPs remove material from the Internet, without the requirement of a court order, and permit foreign influence over ISPs in the United States. Advocates of the treaty seek to give copyright holders the ability to demand that users who do violate intellectual property rights have their Internet connections terminated as a punishment. To enforce such a system would require the creation of an individual Internet ID.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes”/Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers.
  • The EFF has been vehement in its opposition to ACTA, particularly regarding the secrecy surrounding the treaty negotiations. Likewise, Michael Geist, in writing for Copyright News, asserted that ACTA was “shrouded in secrecy.” He pointed out that ACTA negotiations did not include civil society groups or developing countries, noting also that “reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty’s provisions leaking to the public.” The European Commission denied this allegations in 2008, arguing, “It is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion.”
  • As noted on Wikipedia, opponents of ACTA also assert that it will impinge upon freedom of expression and communication privacy. A large number of the World Trade Organization’s 157 members have voiced concerns that the treaty would have a negative impact on trade. Others have pointed out that ACTA does not include provisions for legal safeguards protecting ISPs from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Without such provisions, ISPs will be forced to invade the privacy of their subscribers in order to protect themselves. Aaron Shaw, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, stressed that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”
  • The technology news and information website ArsTechnica.com argues that ACTA encourages ISPs to collect and provide information about suspects by providing for those ISPs “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” In protest against the treaty, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into the Federal Trade Commission’s cybersecurity advice website on January 24, replacing the homepage with the Anonymous logo, a rap song, and a message threatening more attacks if anti-piracy legislation in Congress were to pass. According to The Next Web: The message left temporarily on OnGuardOnline referred to the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. If they pass, the message said, "we will wage a relentless war against the corporate Internet, destroying dozens upon dozens of government and company websites."
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IBM's Andy Piper: Negotiating the Internet of Things - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...-andy-piper-negotiating-th.php 5RFID_IOT
shared by Dan R.D. on 19 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • He is officially called the "Messaging Community Lead" for IBM's WebSphere message queue (MQ) architecture, which is a title that grants some modicum of honor without claiming too much authority. Andy Piper has become IBM's point man for the concept of a planet enmeshed in billions, perhaps trillions, of signal-sending, communicating devices. The case may be made that anything that can be "on" could be made to send a signal on a network - perhaps something as simple as "on" itself, periodically. The possibilities for a world where the operating status of any electronic device may be measured from any point on the globe, are astounding.
  • Two weeks ago, IBM and its development partner Eurotech formally submitted Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol to the Eclipse Foundation open source group. It's being called "the" Internet of Things (IoT) protocol, but in fairness it's only one candidate. It would serve as the communications mechanism for devices whose size may scale down to the very small level, with negligible power and transmission radius of only a few feet.
  • One example application already in the field, Piper told RWW, is in pacemakers. Tiny transmitters inside pacemakers communicate using MQTT with message queue brokers at their patients' bedsides. Those brokers then communicate with upstream servers using more conventional, sophisticated protocols such as WebSphere MQ.
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  • "Look, this is engineered for a constrained environment," Piper emphasized. "But because of that, [these devices] are actually extremely efficient at doing things like conserving battery, and using very low bandwidth. So [MQTT] is actually a fairly sensible protocol for both the machine-to-machine (M2M) space that we're addressing with the Eclipse announcement, and also the mobile explosion as well. All these devices need to be connected."
  • "It's not as such about replacing the Web; it's about enabling devices to talk to the Web," says Piper. "And these devices are unlikely to have user interfaces; they're really about just collecting data."
  • IBM's model (like all IBM models through history) is layered and given a mnemonic. There are three classes of devices: intelligence, interconnect, and instrumentation. Unlike Microsoft's model, which argues that intelligence can be driven completely to the edge at the device level, IBM maintains intelligence at the core, maybe even in the cloud. Instrumentation, on the other hand, doesn't need to be all that intelligent. In fact, it can be essentially autonomic. But it can still communicate, and MQTT would be its protocol.
  • "When you look at the wire trace of an HTTP packet, you end up with a lot of stuff in the headers which you don't see as a user," he tells RWW. "HTTP was designed for getting documents to a user interface. And it's been kind of bent and twisted into being used for inter-application and server-side communication, and that's fine when you have the bandwidth. But if you just want to send, 'The temperature is ___,' and then send 61.7, 60,7, 61.7, every five seconds, you really don't want to be doing a full HTTP post to send that information to an endpoint. So [MQTT] is asynchronous push; it's not request/response, which is what HTTP is."
  • Current networks of devices, such as Cisco routers, utilize small packets of health and status data that some literally call "weather reports." They're sent at specific intervals, and when they don't arrive on time, servers conclude something may be wrong. Such "weather reports" have been said to constitute a majority of the actual messages sent between routers and other devices at the lower levels of the Internet.
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Livestreaming Journalists Want to Occupy the Skies With Cheap Drones [06Jan11] - 0 views

www.wired.com/...occupy-drones journalists video technology
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 06 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.
  • Along with “general assembly” and “99 percenters,” Occupy Wall Street has brought the phrase “live streaming” to the forefront. Rising-star reporters — known best by their Twitter and Ustream handles — such as Pool (timcast) in New York City and Spencer Mills (oakfosho) in Oakland are passionate, deeply embedded correspondents who provide live video reporting – sometimes lasting a dozen hours or more – of protests, general assemblies and other Occupy events. Instead of using a satellite truck, they broadcast live “TV” coverage from 3G- and 4G-equipped smartphones over video networks such as Ustream.com and Livestream.com.
  • The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a 24-year-old programmer from Brooklyn who’s helping Pool hack together an airborne news network.
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  • Having thoroughly figured out how to cover giant events from ground level, they are now exploring ultra-cheap alternatives to the hundreds of thousands of dollar news choppers used for aerial reporting of big events like protest marches and police clashes. In the process, the video bloggers are discovering both how far low-cost consumer technology has come and how much farther it needs to go.
  • Built-in Wi-Fi allows control from an iPhone or Android phone. The Wi-Fi also beams back moderate-resolution (640-by-480-pixel) video to the phone
  • Introduced in 2010, the one-pound styrofoam craft has four rotors and a plethora of sensors to keep it stable and navigable. In some ways, it resembles an iPhone, with accelerometers and a gyroscope to measure movement and location, for example. Parrot says that it can fly 50 feet high, up to 11 miles per hour and stay aloft for about 12 minutes on a charge.
  • Shapiro tracked down a European hobbyist group that had written its own software, called Javadrone, from scratch “and did a much better job of it.” Pool first used the AR Drone, which he’s dubbed the Occucopter, in December to cover a New York City rally for immigrant rights, but he said that the video from that attempt was unusable. He also made a test-run at Occupy Albany. Pool expects his first coverage with the new software and high-quality video will be at the Occupy Congress action on January 17 in Washington, DC.
  • the AR Done isn’t in his long-term plans due to its clear limitations. “You need perfect weather. It just doesn’t weigh enough,” said Shapiro.
  • Pool and Shapiro are already thinking bigger for their projects, and developing better tech to eventually provide to other live stream journalists. “The most important thing is the zeppelin,” said Pool. Basically a big balloon, it will be able to lift a lot of gear with just a little power for the rotors that steer it. And the slow speed is a benefit: It holds the camera steady and won’t suddenly go out of control. In fact, they are trying to build copters that work more like zeppelins.
  • “All it needs to do is hover and take a proper picture.” Instead of relying on constant commands from the ground, the zeppelin and copter will dial in periodically for updates.
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Google Wallet now Available for Galaxy Nexus on AT&T and Verizon - BriefMobile - 0 views

briefmobile.com/alaxy-nexus-on-att-and-verizon 3BT_NFC mobile payments
shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Since it was announced some time ago in 2011, Google Wallet has been completely exclusive to the Sprint Nexus S 4G. Every carrier other than Sprint has opposed the Google Wallet program and blocked it from being installed on their devices as they were preparing their own proprietary NFC payments system called Iris. That didn’t stop people from hacking Google Wallet and installing it onto non-Sprint Nexi, but still, we’d like to see more support from the carriers on this. Thanks to some brand new Android Market discoveries, however, it now looks like Google Wallet is officially available for all Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and AT&T!
  • Head over to the web version of the Android Market and search for Google Wallet. If you’re on a Verizon or AT&T (unlocked GSM) Galaxy Nexus, it now says Google Wallet is compatible with your phone! As a day one AT&T Galaxy Nexus user I can confirm it hasn’t always been this way and this could possibly be the first step towards seeing Google Wallet become a more widespread program. If you try to install from the app version of the Android Market it still says incompatible, so it’s probably in the first phase of rollout. Google Wallet is still apparently blocked for Galaxy Nexus users on T-Mobile, but hopefully that changes soon
  • If you are a Galaxy Nexus user on Verizon and AT&T, let us know in the comments if you successfully installed Google Wallet from the web version of the Android Market. I can confirm that installation worked perfect on my AT&T Galaxy Nexus.
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Grove.io: Hosted, Searchable IRC Chat For Teams [08Nov11] - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...veio-hosted-searchable-irc.php
shared by Marc-Alexandre Gagnon on 08 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Grove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.
  • It supports all the great IRC client apps, of course, but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setup and hosting.
  • Grove is the latest effort from Leah Culver, CEO and co-founder of Convore, and Convore developer/designer Jori Lallo. Culver was a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, which was an early challenger to the Twitter way of communicating that also allowed attachments and events. Pownce was acquired by SixApart in 2008, and the service itself was shut down.
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  • Geeks love IRC, but it comes with a few hassles, mainly having to host it, that have led teams away from using it in favor of easier IM solutions. As an old protocol, it also doesn't support user accounts in the way we've gotten used to in the Web 2.0 age.
  • But IRC has advantages over proprietary tools. It's a stable, open protocol - "like email," Culver points out - which means users can use whatever client application they want, on any platform, most of which are open-source and free. Without having to build apps for every platform, Grove can concentrate on eliminating the fiddly parts of IRC, and what's left is an easy, real-time, logged chat service for teams built around a trusted protocol.
  • Grove provides its users hosting, user accounts, channel access controls, and searchable archives, as well as a swanky Web-based client. But it still allows all the benefits of an open protocol like IRC, so team members can use whatever client app they desire on any device.
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Hackers For Egypt Advocate For A Better Democracy Through Technology [27May11] - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...acking-the-egyptian-revolution socialmedia
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 27 May 11 - No Cached
  • Post-revolution Egypt is in a state of flux overlooked by outsiders. New political parties are forming while various factions hustle for power. As Egypt gears up for free elections, tech-savvy geeks are betting that their projects will have a major impact on how people will vote.
  • A combination of academics and entrepreneurs recently worked with Egyptian activists on a “Hackathon for Egypt” that provides some interesting--and fascinating--clues.
  • Participants in the hackathon were organized by Cloud to Street, a project dedicated to aiding Egyptian activists through technology. Cloud to Street is headed up by a loose group of primarily Canadian scholars and diplomats. Approximately 75 programmers took part, as well as Egyptian activists who attended both in person and via teleconference
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Most of the tech created at the conference was aimed at Egypt's upcoming elections, which civil-society activists have been obsessively monitoring. The upcoming vote is expected to be the first free election for a leader in Egypt's long, long history. Elections are expected to occur in October or November; the ruling military junta has been unclear on the exact date.
  • The conference's most intriguing result was a platform for crowdsourcing the new Egyptian constitution. The platform, which appears to have drawn inspiration from a similar project in Tunisia, allows users to simultaneously browse constitutional texts from multiple countries, propose articles and ideas online and to collaborate on compiling the ideas into a workable text. Owing to Egypt's special circumstances, the platform also contains extensive provisions for off-computer use--many Egyptians simply don't have regular access to either a computer or the Internet.
  • Other projects worked on at the hackathon included a web platform for training Egyptian election monitors and an interactive tool that allows voters to explore the policies of various parliamentary candidates.
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Smarter hackers lurk in smart-grid future [31May11] - 0 views

www.greenbang.com/n-smart-grid-future_18239.html 5RFID_IOT
shared by Dan R.D. on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The internet of things, as the ultimate version of the smart grid is often described, could bring with it one of the downsides of today’s internet: hacker attacks.
  • the possibility that someone with bad intent and networking know-how could tap into the metering infrastructure and determine, for example, when a household is typically unoccupied and easier to break into.
  • The more connected our systems become, the more opportunities there will be for someone to exploit the various parts of it … as researchers studying the vulnerabilities of on-board computers in cars have already discovered.
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  • As a Guardian article on the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities notes, the capabilities of cyber-weapons have reached a “chilling new level.”
  • To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the price of greater energy freedom will be eternal vigilance.
  • Dan R.D. on 02 Jun 11
     
    Smarter hackers lurk in smart-grid future | Energy http://diigo.com/0hm4i
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An Apple TV-Based Webserver [18May11] - 0 views

apple.slashdot.org/firehose.pl socialmedia
shared by D'coda Dcoda on 21 May 11 - No Cached
  • "The folks over at Mac Mini Vault jailbroke an Apple TV, stuck lighttpd on it, and connected it up to the internet in the name of fun hacking. 'This project was a fun way to see how far we could take the A4 powered Apple TV. The Apple TV is running iOS 4.2.2 (obviously jailbroken) with lighttpd for a web server.'"
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Hactivate - A participant's perspective [22Jun11] - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ivate-participants-perspective 2QR_MT
shared by Dan R.D. on 22 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Both of these hacks were fully fledged platforms, another great project was more of a utility. ScanCampaign allows users to generate their own QR codes, which the author hoped could be used for donations to charity or for campaigns such as UK Uncut – to quickly share information.
  • Taking disparate data sources and giving them a unified view is tricky: do the data sets match? can you link the concepts contained? and so on. These guys did a great job doing those things and provided plenty of hooks for further thought.
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And Now You Have One More Reason To Ignore QR Codes [21Oct11] - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...malicious-qr-codes 2QR_MT risk
shared by Dan R.D. on 21 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • canning that mysterious QR code sticker that someone stuck on the wall in a tame but oh-so-technophilic act of modern vandalism.
  • Instead, the nasties are using QR codes to lure people into downloading Android malware. While some users are likely to assume that QR codes are unique to the Android market and thus be comfortable scanning them, these codes actually take you to an Android install package hosted on some third-party server. The QR code itself isn’t bad — but the link it’s obfuscating is.
  • Once downloaded, the dirty app (which, in the most recent case, was a hacked version of the Russian ICQ client, Jimm) begins firing off text messages to a premium number. Each text it sends (without your knowledge) sets you back around $5+. You can find an outline of the method by Kaspersky Labs here.
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  • It’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get nasty quick. Users, for the most part, would trust a QR code the same way they just a link on a company’s own website. Take a QR-enabled ad on a public wall, for example; how simple would it be for the “hacker” to simply slap a sticker of his nefarious QR code on top of yours? Would anyone notice?
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