Topic: SECURITY - on August 24, 2013 at 6:42:00 PM CEST
NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests
National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.
The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.
Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 24, 2013 at 6:41:00 PM CEST
Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA
The Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger fears journalists – and, by extension, everyone – will be reduced to using pen and paper to avoid prying American and British spooks online.
And his reporters must fly around the world to hold face-to-face meetings with sources ("Not good for the environment, but increasingly the only way to operate") because they believe all their internet and phone chatter will be eavesdropped on by the NSA and GCHQ.
"It would be highly unadvisable for … any journalist … to regard any electronic means of communication as safe," he wrote.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 24, 2013 at 6:39:00 PM CEST
Guardian partners with New York Times over Snowden GCHQ files
The Guardian has struck a partnership with the New York Times which will give the US paper access to some of the sensitive cache of documents leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The arrangement was made when the Guardian was faced with demands from the UK government to hand over the GCHQ files it had in its possession.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 23, 2013 at 5:10:00 PM CEST
NSA paid millions to cover Prism compliance costs for tech companies
The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.
The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 23, 2013 at 4:33:00 PM CEST
UK’s secret Mid-East internet surveillance base is revealed in Edward Snowden leaks
Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies, The Independent has learnt.
The station is able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region.
The information is then processed for intelligence and passed to GCHQ in Cheltenham and shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States. The Government claims the station is a key element in the West’s “war on terror” and provides a vital “early warning” system for potential attacks around the world.
independent.co.uk UK government now leaking documents about itself
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Topic: FUN - on August 23, 2013 at 2:51:00 PM CEST
Rasp Pi skydive: Ballsy Baumgartner best beware Brit bionic Babbage Bear
'Ted Bull' mascot stuffed with electronics for 39,000m plunge bid THIS Saturday
Austrian high-altitude geezer Felix Baumgartner had better watch his back, because there's a furry Brit contender for the world skydiving record preparing to leap into the void from a breathtaking 39,000m.
Tomorrow, weather permitting, Raspberry Pi Mascot Babbage Bear will ascend to the stratosphere over the green fields of Blighty before making his jump into the history books.
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Topic: PHOTO - on August 23, 2013 at 1:32:00 PM CEST
20 Historic Black and White Photos Colorized
One of the greatest facets of reddit are the thriving subreddits, niche communities of people who share a passion for a specific topic. One of the Sifter’s personal favourites is r/ColorizedHistory. The major contributors are a mix of professional and amateur colorizers that bring historic photos to life through color. All of them are highly skilled digital artists that use a combination of historical reference material and a natural eye for colour.
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Topic: LEGO - on August 23, 2013 at 1:28:00 PM CEST
Lego tower measuring 11 stories claims Guinness record
Students and teachers celebrated Monday at Dickinson High School in Milltown, Dela., as their 11-story-tall Lego tower, which qualifies as the tallest in the world, topped its way into the Guinness World Record books.
The tower -- measuring at 112 feet and 11 and 3-quarter inches -- took months to construct and consists of about 500,000 bricks. In front of a large crowd Monday evening, a crane raised Superintendent Merv Daugherty to the peak and he placed a simple red schoolhouse (the school district's logo) at the top to finish off the toy tower that weighs nearly a ton.
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Topic: FUN - on August 23, 2013 at 1:25:00 PM CEST
Yo-yo tricks through the ages
Here's a video of the 2013 World Yo-Yo Contest winner, Janos Karancz. His motion is so delicate and intricate, it's almost like he's doing needlepoint or something:
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Topic: MAKE - on August 23, 2013 at 1:21:00 PM CEST
MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner
MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis introduces the MakerBot Digitizer™ Desktop 3D Scanner, now available for sale at www.makerbot.com/digitizer! The MakerBot Digitizer quickly turns the things in your world into 3D models that you can modify, improve, share, and 3D print. There's no design, 3D modeling, or CAD expertise required to get started, and the MakerBot Digitizer delivers clean, watertight 3D models in approximately 12 minutes.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 23, 2013 at 1:20:00 PM CEST
NZ police affidavits show use of PRISM for surveillance
Police affidavits related to the raid on Kim Dotcom's Mega mansion appear to show that New Zealand police and spy agencies are able to tap directly into United States surveillance systems such as PRISM to capture email and other traffic.
The discovery was made by blogger Keith Ng who wrote on his On Point blog that the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) requested assistance from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the country's signals intelligence unit, which is charge of surveilling the Pacific region under the Five-Eyes agreement.
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 22, 2013 at 3:08:00 PM CEST
Laser listening: Could you eavesdrop on the Guardian?
The UK government has warned the Guardian newspaper that foreign agents could use laser technology to eavesdrop on them, in the wake of recent surveillance leaks. What are laser listening devices and are they effective?
When we speak, our voices produce sound waves. Sound waves travel in all directions and can hit anything in the room around you. If the sound waves hit something solid, they bounce off.
Laser listening devices are designed to pick up the vibrations produced by sound waves as they hit resonant surfaces - ones that are good for picking up vibrations - such as a window or a plastic cup.
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