03.21.14
Posted in Microsoft at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Everyone “Scroogled” by Microsoft
Summary: Microsoft is working against citizens of the United States, at the expense of citizens of the United States, according to new leaks
AT THE end of last year it was revealed that the CIA had paid companies like Microsoft (plus telecoms) for illegal surveillance on law-abiding citizens. It’s not just about the NSA, which is very close to Microsoft. Some correctly point out that the panic over NSA helps distract from an even worse offender, which is the FBI, maker of CIPAV for Windows. The FBI uses DDOS and malware against US citizens, essentially cracking and doing online what it did back in the days of COINTELPRO.
Yesterday we wrote about Microsoft's censorship and privacy being worse than China's, citing the fact that Microsoft staff gets access to users’ data and abusing this access (here is another new article about it). Also consider how Microsoft ‘research’ is now behaving like the NSA, drawing connections between everyone and making it public too.
According to this new explosive report, the “Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hackers have reportedly obtained documents that reveal how much money the FBI pays Microsoft each time agents try to obtain or view an individual customer’s communication information.”
In other words, Microsoft is profiting from privacy abuse. To quote further: “While the public now has a basic figure showing how much taxpayer money is dedicated to surveillance, these numbers only include Microsoft – whereas the taxpayer cost for companies like Verizon, Google, and others are almost certainly in the millions as well.”
But we don’t know about all those other companies, do we? Microsoft is the company which goes out of its way to facilitate mass surveillance, as PRISM leaks helped prove. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 12:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Articles about GNU/Linux and “malware” are more like misinformation that the press is awash with this week
AFTER some exaggerated panic over GnuTLS we hear a lot of noise about some Windows malware that’s claimed to be coming from UNIX and GNU/Linux servers. One ‘minor’ fact that the likes of Symantec (Symantec and others) always fail to point out is that lazy/negligent people (worse than human error) are to blame, not GNU/Linux.
SJVN wrote this good response (“Linux and botnets: It’s not Linux’s fault!”) which points out: “With Darlloz, which tends to attack devices such as small office/home office (SOHO) Internet routers, it’s one way of infection is to try 13 combinations of the default user names and passwords on a device. If the gadget’s owner has done the bare minimal of security: Change the blasted default user ID and/or password, they can’t be infected. That’s it!”
Don’t relay baseless reports which leave out the real security problem, which is Windows, the operating system with back doors (by design). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote talk at SXSW, he answered a question about the controversial plan to add DRM to next version of HTML. HTML 5, a standard currently under debate at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the latest battleground in the long-running war over the design of general-purpose computers. Berners-Lee defended the proposition, and claimed that without it, more of the Web would be locked up in un-searchable, unlinkable formats like Flash.
Some in the entertainment industry have long harboured fantasies about redesigning computers to disobey their owners, as part of a profit-maximisation strategy that depends on being able to charge you piecemeal for the right to use the files on your hard-drive.
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Apple does not support the Trusted Platform Module [9] that Microsoft will require all PC makers to support starting next year…
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Keurig is setting itself up to attempt a type of coffee “DRM” on the pods used in its coffee-making machines, according to a report from Techdirt. Keurig’s next-gen machines would be unable to interact with third-party coffee pods, thus locking customers into buying only the Keurig-branded K-cups or those of approved partners.
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Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that’s the last day you’ll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.
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The Unlocking Consumer Choice Act (H.R. 1123), which was introduced in March by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was widely supported by members on both sides of the aisle.
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Humble feel it would harm their reputation to ask a developer to sit out and wait for the next bundle for the sake of a Linux version.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Censorship
Traffic
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While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it’s deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I’ve affectionately labeled “fiber to the press release.” In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that “ISP X” has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?
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Europe
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In what some industry observers are calling a “Back-to-the-Future” moment, the need for faster and wider pipes to deliver video and other data-intense applications is driving a raft of tie-ups between mobile and cable operators that is only expected to accelerate.
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- iophk: “It’s not so much that it would create a fast lane, but that it creates artificially slow lanes which make once normal service look fast in comparison. Can the proposal be pruned of noxious riders or is it a poison pill for the otherwise consumer-friendly proposal?”
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- iophk: “Looks like certain interests are learning now to use riders on legislation.”
Control
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Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.
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On a sleepy Friday afternoon last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce dropped what seemed, to many, like a bombshell: It intends to transition its coordinating role over the Internet’s domain name system—those web addresses you type into your browser—to the global Internet community.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mass Surveillance
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In breaking the cycle, the implications of a true decentralized social network are profound.
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The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains, and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding — quite literally — Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists, and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.
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Ledgett said the NSA’s core problem was that it was lousy at PR, rather than that it was invading innocent people’s privacy. The bigwig said that the former US President James Madison, one of the key writers of the US Constitution, “would be proud” that the checks and balances he helped install still worked in today’s digital age.
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Staff at the United States’ National Security Agency reportedly “hunted” system administrators because they felt doing so would yield passwords that enabled easier surveillance.
So says The Intercept, which claims this document came its way thanks to one E. Snowden, late of Moscow.
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The latest revelation from the cache of Snowden documents shows that the NSA targets sysadmins to gain access to the infrastructure that they are responsible for.
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A new report from The Intercept reveals that the NSA has been hunting and hacking system administrators the world over in order to gain access to the networks they control.
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NSA general counsel Rajesh De says big tech companies like Yahoo and Google provided ‘full assistance’ in legally mandated collection of data
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The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording every phone call made in a foreign country, according to new leaks by Edward Snowden.
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I’m seeing a bunch of folks passing around a story by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian, claiming that tech companies lied about their “denials” of PRISM. The story is incredibly misleading. Ackerman is one of the best reporters out there on the intelligence community, and I can’t recall ever seeing a story that I think he got wrong, but this is one. But the storyline is so juicy, lots of folks, including the usual suspects are quick to pile on without bothering to actually look at the details, insisting that this is somehow evidence of the tech companies lying.
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The deputy head of the NSA spying agency accused fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Thursday of displaying “amazing arrogance” in revealing US eavesdropping techniques.
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The German Bundestag announced it will investigate surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency and its foreign partners, as well as whether any German officials knew of the spying that targeted the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Germany’s Bundestag is taking a close look at Western spying activities in Germany. Spectacular results are not expected from the parliamentary inquiry, as witnesses are likely to stonewall.
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Orange has been cooperating allegedly illegally for years with France’s main intelligence agency (the DGSE). According to a newly found report by Edward Snowden and an investigation by Le Monde, the DGSE was given access to all of Orange’s data (not just metadata).
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Thankfully, there are some Americans willing to stand up and do something to slow the National Security Agency’s (NSA) construction of the surveillance state.
In Utah, for example, a group of activists is working to cut off the supply of water to the NSA’s massive Utah Data Center located near Bluffdale.
Drones
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The United States apparently wants nothing to do with a United Nations Human Rights Council discussion on whether the country’s drone strikes may violate international human rights law.
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The revelation comes from a high-level review of a complaint that the £23m BT communications line supported drone missions that had accidentally killed between 426 and 1005 civilians in the last decade in the course of strikes on suspected insurgents, according to estimates of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
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A woman dressed in a black hijab is highlighted by the glare from a computer screen as she works with forensic architects in digitally recreating her home, the scene of a drone strike in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, Pakistan where five men, one of them her brother-in-law, were directly hit and killed on Oct. 4, 2010. This is the spot where she had laid out a rug in the courtyard, she explains, and where her guests sat one evening when the missile dove into their circle, leaving a blackened dent in the ground and scattering flesh that later, she and her husband had to pick up from off of the ground so they could bury their dead. Morbidly, the reconstruction of a drone strike is similar – the gathering of flecks of information when nothing else is available: through satellite imagery and video, the length of a building’s shadow, the pattern of shrapnel marks on a wall, and the angle of a photo, can help forensic architects determine where a missile struck and determine how it led to civilian deaths.
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With drone strikes, not only is collateral damage recognized as a possible likelihood; it has become an accepted part of our foreign policy. Not only is America firing on citizens of sovereign nations, but they do so knowing that innocent people who had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time are going to die. The old saying about the path of good intentions comes to mind.
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As the weekly – sometimes daily – news stories never tire of telling us, domestic drones are coming. And as ABC News reported on March 17, they are arriving faster than the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can suss out the rules over their use. Though it’s technically illegal, and the FAA may issue fines if they catch you, ABC reports that commercial use of drones is starting to happen whether or not the government approves – as long as it doesn’t notice.
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The Pakistani draft, which was obtained by Foreign Policy, urges states to “ensure transparency” in record-keeping on drone strikes and to “conduct prompt, independent and impartial investigations whenever there are indications of any violations to human rights caused by their use.” It also calls for the convening of “an interactive panel discussion” on the use of drones.
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For all of the nonchalant assurances that he is neither a “dictator” nor an “emperor,” Barack Obama is certainly trigger-happy with the power jokes.
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Lucien rises from bed in the early morning. He dresses quietly, careful not to awaken his wife and infant son. He walks briskly across the city of Algiers in the pre-dawn light to a square that is already thick with people, their gaze fixed on a wooden platform and rising from it the stark outline of a guillotine.
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Camus’ essay on the barbarity of the death penalty was written in 1956, against the backdrop of the executions of hundreds of dissidents during the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, as well as the execution of Algerian revolutionaries condemned to death by French tribunals. He notes that by 1940 all executions in France and England were shielded from the public. If capital punishment was meant to deter crime, why hold the killings in secret? Why not make them a public spectacle?
Venezuela
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Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it. With a wide variety of sources and people on the ground to talk to, I thought I was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But even I was not prepared for what I saw in Caracas: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.
Secrecy
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SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge-fund firm that agreed to pay a record fine to settle insider-trading charges, moved to boost surveillance by hiring Palantir Technologies, a Central Intelligence Agency-backed software maker.
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The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects – positive and negative—of the federal government’s policies.
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Sen. Mark Udall called on the White House again Thursday to declassify a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program during the war on terror.
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Senate staffers say the agency tortured prisoners in ways that went beyond what the Bush-era DOJ approved, according to an Al-Jazeera America report.
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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s remarks in support of fellow legislator Dianne Feinstein, who is embroiled in a dispute with the CIA, ought to be the sort of thing that alarms everyone. After all, another powerful member of Congress claims that the spy agency she is charged with overseeing illegitimately resists checks on its autonomy.
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Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee believe that laws may have been broken in their bitter dispute over top secret documents relating to the C.I.A.’s detention program and who has the right to read them.
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In the nine days since Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had spied on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating CIA torture programs, the issue has been all but dropped by the political establishment and the media.
Ukraine
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Putin was strongest in his accusations of western hypocrisy. His ironic welcoming of the West having suddenly discovered the concept of international law was very well done. His analysis of the might is right approach the West had previously adopted, and their contempt of the UN over Iraq and Afghanistan, was spot on. Putin also was absolutely right in describing the Kosovo situation as “highly analogous” to the situation in Crimea. That is indeed true, and attempts by the West – including the Guardian – to argue the cases are different are pathetic exercises in special pleading.
The problem is that Putin blithely ignored the enormous logical inconsistency in his argument. He stated that the Crimean and Kosovo cases were highly analogous, but then used that to justify Russia’s action in Crimea, despite the fact that Russia has always maintained the NATO Kosovo intervention was illegal(and still refuses to recognize Kosovo). In fact of course Russia was right over Kosovo, and thus is wrong over Crimea.
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The attempt to downplay Russia’s diplomatic isolation was also a bit strange. He thanked China, though China had very pointedly failed to support Russian in the Security Council. When you are forced to thank people for abstaining, you are not in a strong position diplomatically. He also thanked India, which is peculiar, because the Indian PM yesterday put out a press release saying Putin had called him, but the had urged Putin to engage diplomatically with the interim government in Kiev, which certainly would not be welcome to Putin. I concluded that Putin was merely trying to tell his domestic audience Russia has support, even when it does not.
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Ukraine’s breakaway region of Crimea will ask Tatars to vacate part of the land where they now live in exchange for new territory elsewhere in the region, a top Crimean government official has said.
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