54582149
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Looks like the copyright cartel have raided the public domain yet again — the US DoD has signed an exclusive contract with T3 Media to digitize their media archive in exchange for T3 having complete licensing control for 10 years. Considering that all output from the US government is, by law, ineligible for copyright, this deal seems borderline illegal at best. To make matters worse, it appears that there is no provision to make the digitized content freely accessible after the 10 years are up — which means we risk having all that content disappear into T3.
54386245
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Do you think that facebook tracks the stuff that people type and then erase before hitting (or the “post” button)? Turns out the answer is yes. If you start writing a message, and then think better of it and decide not to post it, Facebook still adds it to the dossier they keep on you.
54316609
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
IBM Corp has been sued by the Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund which accused it of concealing how its ties to what became a major U.S. spying scandal reduced business in China and ultimately caused its market value to plunge more than $12 billion.
53998125
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
What do you get when you train a Markov chain on the King James Bible and a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? King James Programming — a tumblr of auto-generated pseudo-scripture (or pseudo-compsci lessons).
Some examples:
"The LORD is the beginning (or prefix) of the code for the body of the procedure"
"More precisely, if P and Q are polynomials, let O1 be the order of blessed"
"In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out"
53797785
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual’s own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the “filter bubble” that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with.
A recent example of the filter bubble at work: Two people who googled the term “BP.” One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm.
53609957
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The latest from the front lines in the War on Dignity:
In 2012, Canadian Ellen Richardson was hospitalized for clinical depression. This past Monday she tried to board a plane to New York for a $6,000 Caribbean cruise. DHS denied her entry, citing supposedly private medical records listing her hospitalization.
53379127
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Newegg, an online retailer that has made a name for itself fighting the non-practicing patent holders sometimes called "patent trolls," sits on the losing end of a lawsuit tonight. An eight-person jury came back shortly after 7:00pm and found that the company infringed all four asserted claims of a patent owned by TQP Development
53029325
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Yes, there’s yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will effect the kinds of services you’re offered.
Based out of L.A.’s “Silicon Beach,” Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar “verify that you received this code” texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.
53004087
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
In early-2013, independent security researcher, Evan “treefort” Booth, began working to answer one simple question: Can common items sold in airports after the security screening be used to build lethal weapons? As it turns out, even a marginally “MacGyver-esque” attacker can breeze through terminal gift shops, restaurants, magazine stands and duty-free shops to find everything needed to wage war on an airplane.
52898433
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you're connected to. What could possibly go wrong?
51977737
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?
The answer is simple but subtle: There are good reasons to protect against insider attacks, and a court order is an insider attack.
51760591
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Florida's hanging chads ain't going nothing on Azerbaijan. Fully a day before the polls were to open, election results were accidentally released via an official smartphone app, confirming what everybody already knew — the election was rigged from the beginning. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008.
50150527
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
Forget the NSA — the DEA has been working hand-in-hand with AT&T on the Hemisphere database of records of every call that passes through AT&T's phone switches going back as far as 1987. The government pays AT&T for contractors who site side-by-side with DEA agents and do phone records searches for them.
49863069
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
The latest twist in the NSA coverage sounds like something out of a dime-store romance novel — NSA agents eavesdropping on their current and former girlfriends. Official categories of spying have included SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) and now the NSA has added a new category to the lexicon LOVEINT which is surely destined to be a popular hashtag now.
48903573
submission
Jah-Wren Ryel writes:
It's been just over a month since the NSA’s dragnet surveillance program was leaked to the public. Tomorrow, Congress is voting on an amendment that would block funding for NSA programs that collect the call records of innocent Americans.
A win tomorrow may start a chain reaction — but it won't happen unless we speak up. We have one day to convince Congress to act.
