Three House members—Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)—have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.
via Congress and SpaceX: Red tape ties up private space..
That’s why this whole thing looks to me to be a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.
As expected, the hype is pretty high over this. But from the beginning, the story didn’t make sense to me. There are obvious details missing: are the passwords in plaintext or encrypted, what sites are they for, how did they end up with a single criminal gang? The Milwaukee company that pushed this story, Hold Security, isn’t a company that I had ever heard of before. I was with Howard Schmidt when I first heard this story. He lives in Wisconsin, and he had never heard of the company before either. The New York Times writes that “a security expert not affiliated with Hold Security analyzed the database of stolen credentials and confirmed it was authentic,” but we’re not given any details. This felt more like a PR story from the company than anything real.
via Schneier on Security: Over a Billion Passwords Stolen?.
From: Krebs on Security in an article entitled Q&A on the Reported Theft of 1.2B Email Accounts
These actors — mostly spammers and malware purveyors (usually both) — focus on acquiring as many email addresses and account credentials as they can. Their favorite methods of gathering this information include SQL injection (exploiting weaknesses in Web sites that can be used to force the site to cough up user data) and abusing stolen credentials to steal even more credentials from victim organizations.
Overall Krebs trusts some researcher who claims to have seen this data first hand. According to Krebs:
I’ve known Hold Security’s Founder Alex Holden for nearly seven years.
and
Alex isn’t keen on disclosing his methods, but I have seen his research and data firsthand and can say it’s definitely for real.
The implications are enormous since if a Canadian court has the power to limit access to information for the globe, presumably other courts would as well. While the court does not grapple with this possibility, what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database? Or if Iran orders it remove Israeli sites from the database? The possibilities are endless since local rules of freedom of expression often differ from country to country. Yet the B.C. court adopts the view that it can issue an order with global effect.
GHash is in a position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain and which miners reap mining rewards. They could keep 100% of the mining profits to themselves if they so chose. Bitcoin is currently an expensive distributed database under the control of a single entity, albeit one that requires constantly burning energy to maintain — worst of all worlds.
via It’s Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork :: Hacking, Distributed.
“Lumen’s motivation in this litigation was to extract a nuisance settlement from FTB on the theory that FTB would rather pay an unjustified license fee than bear the costs of the threatened expensive litigation,” Cote stated in the order she issued on Friday. “Lumen’s threats of ‘full-scale litigation,’ ‘protracted discovery,’ and a settlement demand escalator should FTB file responsive papers, were aimed at convincing FTB that a pay-off was the lesser injustice.”
via Payback time: First patent troll ordered to pay “extraordinary case” fees | Ars Technica.
I do not know precisely what this means, as I have no contact with the developers anymore: but this is what was agreed upon.
They should no longer be trusted, their binaries should not be executed, their site should be considered compromised, and their key should be treated as revoked. It may be that they have been approached by an aggressive intelligence agency or NSLed, but I don’t know for sure.
While the source of 7.2 does not appear to my eyes to be backdoored, other than obviously not supporting encryption anymore, I have not analysed the binary and distrust it. It shouldn’t be distributed or executed.
via TrueCrypt Website Says To Switch To BitLocker – Slashdot.
From: TrueCrypt Final Release Repository
TrueCrypt’s formal code audit will continue as planned. Then the code will be forked, the product’s license restructured, and it will evolve. The name will be changed because the developers wish to preserve the integrity of the name they have built. They won’t allow their name to continue without them. But the world will get some future version, that runs on future operating systems, and future mass storage systems.
There will be continuity . . . as an interesting new chapter of Internet lore is born.
Thus, according to the ECtHR, a news website should anticipate types of stories that might attract defamatory or insulting comments and be prepared to remove them promptly – or even before the comment has been reported, which might mean websites will be forced to pre-moderate any comment it publishes. One only has to look at the type and volume of comment posted below the line on websites from the FT’s to the Daily Mail’s to see the implications of this ruling. And, as any moderator will tell you, controversial comments can appear in the unlikeliest of places.
Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight.
The letter follows new revelations, including photos, published in a book based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden alleging that the NSA intercepted equipment from Cisco and other manufacturers and loaded them with surveillance software. The photos, which have not been independently verified, appear to show NSA technicians working with Cisco equipment. Cisco is not said to have cooperated in the NSA’s efforts.
via In Letter to Obama, Cisco CEO Complains About NSA Allegations | Re/code.
If it bothers you that I’m doing this, I want to point out that everyone is going to be doing crap like this after the FCC rips apart Net Neutrality. It’s time for the web to organize and stand up against these thugs before they ruin everything that the web stands for.