February 2010
40 posts
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Spy cameras won't make us safer →
On January 19, a team of at least 15 people assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai police released video footage of 11 of them. Although it was obviously a very professional operation, the 27 minutes of video is fascinating in its banality. Team members walk through the airport, check into and out of hotels, get into and out of taxis. They make no effort to hide themselves from the...
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Military Monitored Planned Parenthood,... →
The U.S. military monitored Planned Parenthood and a white supremacist group as part of the government’s security preparations for the 2002 Olympics in Utah, according to new documents released by the Department of Defense. The U.S. Joint Forces Command liaison collected and disseminated information on U.S. citizens who were members of Planned Parenthood and the white supremacist group National...
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Open Source - The Real iPhone Killer →
The iPhone is the king of the hill when it comes to smartphones. Everyone knows that, right? Well, that isn’t exactly true – in North America RIM (the Blackberry) holds about half of the entire smartphone market. Globally, Symbian-based devices (primarily from Nokia) are the most popular, followed by the Blackberry and then the iPhone (with Windows Mobile and Android getting small portions of...
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Big Content condemns foreign governments that... →
In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.
Full Article (Ars Technica - arstechnica.com)
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Microsoft Ambushes Waledac Botnet, Shutters... →
Microsoft’s lawyers this week engineered a pair of important takedowns, one laudable and the other highly-charged. The software giant orchestrated a legal sneak attack against the Web servers controlling the Waledac botnet, a major distributor of junk e-mail. In an unrelated and more controversial move, Redmond convinced an ISP to shutter a popular whistleblower Web site for hosting a Microsoft...
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Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained →
If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on services that regular Gmail accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz. After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify and confirm the...
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Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res... →
In the early spring of 2009, a team of doctors at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University lifted a 2-year-old into an MRI scanner. The boy, whom I’ll call Bryce, looked tiny and forlorn inside the cavernous metal device. The stuffed monkey dangling from the entrance to the scanner did little to cheer up the scene. Bryce couldn’t see it, in any case; he was under general...
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BLADE: Hacking Away at Drive-By Downloads →
The online version of Technology Review today carries a story I wrote about a government funded research group that is preparing to release a new free tool designed to block “drive-by downloads,” attacks in which the mere act of visiting a hacked or malicious Web site results in the installation of an unwanted program, usually without the visitor’s consent or knowledge.
Full Article (Krebs on...
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Behind the Windows 7 memory usage scaremongering →
It was claimed yesterday that Windows 7 machines are “alarmingly low” on memory, with 86 percent of Windows 7 machines using 90-95 percent of their physical memory. Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software, a company developing performance monitoring software, cited data from his company’s XPnet community. Community members use a freely downloadable tool that periodically...
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Spike In Power Grid Attacks Likely In Next 12... →
Attacks against the power grid are likely to rise and intensify during the next 12 months as smart grid research and pilot projects advance, according to utility security experts and a recently published report that analyzes threats to critical infrastructure. The so-called Project Grey Goose Report on Critical Infrastructure points to state and/or non-state sponsored hackers from the Russian...
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Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA →
Sometimes geeky technical details matter only to engineers. But sometimes a seemingly arcane technical decision exposes deep social or political divisions. A classic example is being debated within the Mozilla project now, as designers decide whether the Mozilla Firefox browser should trust a Chinese certification authority by default. Here’s the technical background: When you browse to a...
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The Great Tech Divide: Your users are very stupid....
Re: Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login (ReadWriteWeb/Google/Facebook debacle)
uucsc:
More importantly, this highlights a more interesting and descriptive problem with technology today. Not that people are stupid, but just how detached a sizable chunk of the population is from the new structure of our society. If there are people who have trouble telling which site they are on, how...
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Parents: school used webcam to spy on our kid at... →
School-issued laptops are becoming more and more common these days, but thanks to the action of one high school, students and parents might have second thoughts about bringing them home. The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student, Blake J. Robbins, have filed a lawsuit against his school district after discovering that school officials had allegedly been remotely accessing the laptop in...
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On foursquare, location & privacy... #pleaserobme
Weekend Plan: Sit on couch. Send fake check-ins to @foursquare. Wait for evil robbers to show up. Whack them with baseball bat. #pleaserobme
…Profit?
@ataferner
Paranoia, anybody?
So in a previous post, I discussed “Convergence Theory“, which is the concept that argues people will “go with the crowd”. There’s a new fad in town, and it’s all about ditching foursquare because you think...
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Alleged Assassins Caught on Dubai Surveillance... →
Dubai authorities have released extensive footage from surveillance cameras that allegedly shows the movements of a professional 11-person assassination team in the hours before and after a top Hamas leader was killed last month in a hotel room. The footage, taken from cameras at the Dubai airport and several luxury hotels, follows the activities of ten men and one woman as they arrived in Dubai...
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Facebook Blackberry App scans your emails →
Facebook SPAM on BlackBerry Devices
I always thought the Facebook Application for BlackBerry was a buggy, slow piece of junk. Now I have noticed that this application is being abused by spammers to propagate Viagra and Percocet SPAM. The screen shot to the right is an actual Facebook notification I received on my BlackBerry. There seems to be an interesting bug in the Facebook Application for...
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Facebook hit with class action over privacy... →
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook over changes that the social networking site made to its privacy settings last November and December. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the modifications have in reality reduced privacy protections for Facebook users rather than increasing it, as the company had claimed it...
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Hacker Arrested in Billboard Porn Stunt →
Police in the southern city of Novorossiisk have arrested a man accused of hacking into a video billboard in Moscow last month and showing a pornographic movie that spawned a traffic jam as curious drivers slowed to watch the film. The suspected hacker, a 41-year-old unemployed man, was arrested in Novorossiisk and released Tuesday after promising to remain in the city, the Interior...
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Google Buzz Privacy Update →
Over the weekend, Google announced significant changes to its new social networking service, Buzz. Responding to criticism (including EFF’s), Google moved away from the system in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most. Instead, Google has adopted an auto-suggest model, in which you are shown the friend list with an option to de-select people...
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FCC wants 260 million people on 100Mbps broadband... →
Finally, the FCC has had it with “small ball”—and the agency is at last detailing some big-picture aspirational goals for US broadband. By 2020, the National Broadband Plan calls for 100 million homes to have 100Mbps Internet access, and the US should have the world’s largest “ultra-high-speed broadband testbeds.” In addition, Internet adoption rates should hit at...
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Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for... →
After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help...
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Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy →
First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.
Full Article (Technology Review - technologyreview.com)
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Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic... →
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch. As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of...
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Royalty-free codec still needed despite no-cost... →
MPEG LA has announced plans to extend the duration of no-cost h264 licensing for free Internet video until 2016. This move lifts some of the immediate ambiguity about h264 licensing and will allow the codec to continue to gain broad traction on the Internet. The patents that cover the various essential principles behind h264 video compression and streaming were obtained by a broad number of...
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Google Superbowl Ad Explains The Need for Search... →
Google’s ad during yesterday’s Superbowl explained in less than a minute how the story of someone’s life can be pieced together from their search queries. Using only the search terms and user’s clicks of the search results, Google told the story of a user who seeks love while studying abroad in Paris, finds it, moves to Paris, marries and has a child.
Full Article (EFF...
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How To Become A Spammer (as a programmer)... →
I saw a post by Max Klein today, How to become rich even if nobody is following you on twitter, it made me sad. Go have a read – I’ll wait… Do you know why I am sad? Because, there is a name for what he is advocating, it’s called spam! I’ve been interested in marketing (the regular kind and the online kind) for almost 2 years now and nothing Max said is a revelation. The shadier parts of the...
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Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit... →
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.
Full Article (TechCrunch -...
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How to protect your password from keyloggers →
Presumably, this means that keyloggers can detect that you’re typing a password by observing that the sequence of keypresses has high entropy. I believe this is an actual technique that’s used to identify password-like strings from a disk dump (although I’m unable to find the reference right now). However, I didn’t think it made sense in the keylogging context, and indeed...
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Hacker Unleashes BlackBerry Spyware Source Code →
A researcher at the ShmooCon hacker conference yesterday demonstrated how BlackBerry applications can be used to expose sensitive information without the use of exploits. Tyler Shields, senior researcher for Veracode’s Research Lab, also released proof-of-concept source code for a spyware app he created and demonstrated at the hacker confab in Washington, DC, that forces the victim’s...
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Android and the Linux Kernel Community →
As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I’m starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here’s my opinion on the whole matter… First off, let me say that I love the Android phone platform. Until last week, I used my developer G1, that I bought, every day. It worked...
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7 Things I Learned from World of Warcraft →
1. Kill injured monsters first
When facing multiple bad guys, the temptation is to go after the one who’s hitting you hardest. This is often a mistake. That injured razorback, the one who is running away? He’ll be back in 15 seconds, likely with other baddies in tow. So take a few clicks to kill him now. Once he’s dead, you can focus completely on the guy who’s smacking you.
The...
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Getting over the barriers to wiki adoption →
As I continue to research and write my upcoming book on wikis, I keep hearing one word over and over again. That word is “BUT” (complete with all-caps), as in, “I would like to use a wiki, BUT…” or “We tried using a wiki, BUT…” What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn’t a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her...
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Seven "Corporations of Interest" in Selling... →
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement of a new U.S. policy on global Internet Freedom included a bold new statement about the responsibilities of American technology companies: “…We are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility...
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Brokers must think twice before tweeting,... →
If you’re a registered broker or work for firm that sells any sort of investment products, you’ll want to think twice before blurting out anything that could be construed as investment advice on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has updated its guidelines for interpreting the rules that govern how brokers...
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Fire Outfoxed: Greasemonkey Creator Builds Native... →
When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts.
Full...
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ATM Skimmers, Part II →
Easily the most-viewed post at krebsonsecurity.com so far has been the entry on a cleverly disguised ATM skimmer found attached to a Citibank ATM in California in late December. Last week, I had a chance to chat with Rick Doten, chief scientist at Lockheed Martin’s Center for Cyber Security Innovation. Doten has built an impressive slide deck on ATM fraud attacks, and pictured below are some of...
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The best way for Adobe to save Flash is by killing... →
Having done several years of Flash development and having worked with many Flash developers, the recent controversy between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad is very amusing to me. First, there are a few arguments that I want to address directly:
Full Article (Uncompiled Thoughts - stevenwei.com)