Tuesday, 7. June 2016

FBI: Exploit that revealed Tor-enabled child porn users wasn’t malware


A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that a case against Edward Matish, a man accused of downloading child pornography, should stand—preserving the defendant’s upcoming trial date. Also on Wednesday, an FBI agent explicitly denied that the "network investigative technique" (NIT) used to locate Matish and break through his Tor-enabled defenses is malware.

arstechnica.com

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Jacob Appelbaum


Jacob Appelbaum leaves the Tor Project

This is what I could gather:

25.5. - Shepard posts bfb9a7c833a5fc8f5a938d816b1bbc4acaa06519fdb1af4c8632719596807dac on Twitter

2.6. - Tor project extremely briefly announces that Applebaum leaves Tor

3.6. - Shepard reveals the hash was sha256("It seems one rapist is one rapist too many\n")

3.6. - Meredith L. Patterson says Applebaum raped enough people that Tor org could no longer ignore it

reddit.com

Confirmed: Jacob Appelbaum left Tor amid sexual harassment complaints

Those who have worked with Jake won't be surprised at all by this. These are accusations coming from multiple people in the tech/privacy/infosec crowd, not from the government.

For those thinking these are government-sponsored lies, do you think Meredith Patterson of Status 451 Blog is working with the government?

twitter.com

blog.torproject.org/blog/jacob-appelbaum-leaves-tor-project … is a gross disservice to the Tor community. People deserve to know why Tor evicted its resident sociopath.

twitter.com

Tor had the chance to nip this in the bud back when Jake was just a plagiarist. They ignored it, and he graduated to sexual assault.

twitter.com

.@mmeijeri Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as an organisation couldn't ignore it anymore.

reddit.com

Jacob Appelbaum on Twitter: "Berlin, June 6, 2016 In the past few days, a calculated and targeted attack has been launched to spread (cont) t.co"

reddit.com

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Tor Developer Jacob Appelbaum Resigns Amid Sex Abuse Claims


Jacob Appelbaum has courted controversy throughout his career as a privacy and transparency activist, picking fights with several of the world’s most powerful government agencies over surveillance and state secrecy. Now he’s at the center of an entirely different sort of controversy: accused of rampant sexual and emotional abuse. On Saturday, the privacy-focused non-profit Tor Project where Appelbaum held a position as a developer and activist released a statement explaining that Appelbaum had resigned from his position with the group as a result of a series of “serious, public allegations of sexual mistreatment” made by unnamed victims against 33-year-old Appelbaum. An anonymous website collecting testimonials from those alleged victims published the same day, with five victims detailing claims that range from uninvited groping and kissing to rape.

wired.com

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Jacob Appelbaum: Vorwürfe sind "komplett falsch"


Journalist und tritt nach Druck durch das Tor-Projekt zurück Die gegen ihn erhobenen Vorwürfe der sexuellen Nötigung sind "komplett falsch". Mit einer ausführlichen Stellungnahme auf Twitter meldet sich Jacob Appelbaum nun, zu am Wochenende öffentlich gemachten Vorwürfen, zu Wort. Darin schreibt er von "kalkulierten und zielgerichteten Attacke", mit der "boshafte und falsche Anschuldigungen" gegen ihn verbreitet werden sollten.

derstandard.at

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Three Years Later: How Snowden Helped the U.S. Intelligence Community


Three years ago today, The Guardian published the first story based on the huge archive of documents that that Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency while working as an NSA contractor. Then-Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department quickly charged Snowden with felonies for theft of government property and mishandling classified information. Last week, however, Holder praised Snowden. “I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder said.

/lawfareblog.com

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Trump, Clinton, and the end of the Snowden era


Two years before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, he took to Fox & Friends to discuss Edward Snowden's then-recent revelation of the unconstitutional mass surveillance of innocent Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). "I think Snowden is a terrible threat; I think he's a terrible traitor and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country," Trump said. "You know what we used to do to traitors, right?" "Well, you killed them, Donald," one of the hosts replied — and Trump agreed.

/theweek.com

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On anniversary of Snowden leaks, group lobbies against mass surveillance


Several groups have banded together to call for an end to warrantless mass surveillance. Fight for the Future and a coalition of groups are using the third anniversary of Edward Snowden's revelations of the extent of the NSA's surveillance practices to drum up support for the end of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

scmagazine.com

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EU clamps down on free speech


In this piece, Tim Dieppe comments on news that the EU is to collaborate with major social media platforms in removing anything deemed 'hate speech'.

The European Commission has announced a new code of conduct for ‘hate speech’ online, in collaboration with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Youtube. These IT companies have agreed to review valid complaints about online content within 24 hours, and remove or disable access to the content if appropriate. This powerful new code was announced without any public consultation, or discussion by democratically elected leaders. It will nevertheless, affect the civil liberties of 500 million people, which serves to illustrate the undemocratic nature of the EU.

christianconcern.com

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Europäische Union erklärt der freien Rede im Internet den Krieg


Die Gegner entgegnen, dass die Initiative ein Angriff auf die Redefreiheit in Europa darstellt. Sie sagen, dass die Definition von "Hassrede" und "Anstiftung zur Gewalt" der Europäischen Union so vage ist, dass es praktisch alles enthalten könnte, was von den europäischen Behörden als politisch inkorrekt eingestuft wird, einschliesslich Kritik an Massenmigration, Islam oder auch der EU selbst.

gatestoneinstitute.org

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The Incredibly Weird Story Behind Tetris


Tetris turns 32 today. Here's the remarkable and strange story of how this classic game was born. This article originally ran at Den of Geek UK. We're bringing back this article in honor of the 32nd anniversary of Tetris. Somewhere in Moscow in 1984, 29-year-old computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov sat at his work station, deep within a building called the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Here, in front of his hulking computer, an Elektronika 60, Pajitnov was working on one of his latest programs. If you’d been one of his superiors, Pajitnov would have told you that he was examining its code for bugs. But in reality, he was addicted.

denofgeek.com

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Luxembourg to Invest $227 Million in Asteroid Mining


On Friday, the tiny European nation of Luxembourg announced that it would open a 200 million Euro ($227M U.S.) fund to entice companies focused on mining asteroids to locate there. Luxembourg’s economy minister said that the fund’s budget could expand if needed, and that it is aimed at making the country, which is about the size of the Dallas metro area, a global leader in space.

fortune.com

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The Early, State-Sanctioned LSD Experiments in Communist Bulgaria


Bulgarians were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out long before hippies.

LSD is usually associated with the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s. What has not been known until recently is that dozens of experiments involving the psychedelic drug were carried out in Communist Bulgaria, from 1962 to 1968, by the Bulgarian psychiatrist Marina Boyadjieva. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners, truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These research subjects were involved in some 140 trials.

atlasobscura.com

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