Topic: SECURITY - on December 18, 2011 at 12:04:00 PM CET
History of Hacking
During the 1970′s, the phone phreaks or phone hackers appeared: they learned ways to hack the telephonic system and make phone calls for free.
John Draper built a ‘blue box’ that could do this and the Esquire magazine published an article on how to build them. Fascinated by this discovery, two kids, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, decided to sell these blue boxes, starting a business friendship which resulted in the founding of Apple.
Getting their laughs and skills from hacking and cracking into primitive computers and exploiting the Arpanet (predecessor to the internet), they created a novelty that would become the target of federal crackdown in years to come.
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Topic: SECURITY - on December 18, 2011 at 11:57:00 AM CET
Army Arrested Manning Based on Unconfirmed Chat Logs
The military arrested alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning last year in Iraq based in large part on unconfirmed information that former hacker Adrian Lamo had gleaned from his chats with Manning, according to the government’s first witness in Manning’s hearing.
Special Agent Toni Graham, an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and the first witness called on Saturday, testified that she relied on information provided by Lamo, identified in court only as a confidential informant, that a video of an Army helicopter attack that Manning allegedly gave to WikiLeaks and that WikiLeaks published in April 2010 was a classified video.
Graham said she did not verify this was true before submitting an affidavit that was the basis for ordering Manning into confinement that lasted more than a year and a half before this week’s hearing.
wired.com Bradley Manning hearing: court told of Iraq unit's intelligence security chaos Army: Manning Kept a Copy of His Chatroom Confession Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed
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Topic: ROBOT - on December 18, 2011 at 8:35:00 AM CET
Drone-Ethics Briefing: What a Leading Robot Expert Told the CIA
Last month, philosopher Patrick Lin delivered this briefing about the ethics of drones at an event hosted by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture-capital arm. It's a thorough and unnerving survey of what it might mean for the intelligence service to deploy different kinds of robots.
Robots are replacing humans on the battlefield--but could they also be used to interrogate and torture suspects? This would avoid a serious ethical conflict between physicians' duty to do no harm, or nonmaleficence, and their questionable role in monitoring vital signs and health of the interrogated. A robot, on the other hand, wouldn't be bound by the Hippocratic oath, though its very existence creates new dilemmas of its own.
The ethics of military robots is quickly marching ahead, judging by news coverage and academic research. Yet there's little discussion about robots in the service of national intelligence and espionage, which are omnipresent activities in the background. This is surprising, because most military robots are used for surveillance and reconnaissance, and their most controversial uses are traced back to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in targeted strikes against suspected terrorists. Just this month, a CIA drone --a RQ-170 Sentinel--crash-landed intact into the hands of the Iranians, exposing the secret US spy program in the volatile region.
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Topic: Phone - on December 17, 2011 at 2:46:00 PM CET
How to Stop Your Smartphone from Constantly Tracking Your Location
Your smartphone tracks your location for all sorts of useful things—driving navigation, updating the weather forecast, and even live traffic updates. However, if you'd rather not have Google and Apple tracking that information—not to mention having it available on your phone for thieves to find—here's how you can turn off location tracking.
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Topic: War and Peace News - on December 17, 2011 at 2:32:00 PM CET
Iran Arrests Another CIA Spy
Iranian Intelligence Ministry announced on Saturday that it has arrested an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Iran immediately after he started his spying activities inside the country.
The Ministry's public relations office said in a statement that the US administration had designed a very complicated and massive plot to pave the way for infiltrating the intelligence apparatus of the Islamic Republic; in the same line, the CIA tasked one of its intelligence analysts with putting this complicated intelligence-operational plan into action.
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Topic: SECURITY - on December 17, 2011 at 12:01:00 PM CET
US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says
The US stealth drone broadcast last week on Iranian state television was captured by spoofing its GPS coordinates, a hack that tricked the bird into landing in Iranian territory instead of where it was programmed to touch down, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
The 1700-word article cited an unnamed Iranian engineer who said he's studying the inner workings of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel that recently went missing over Iranian airspace. He said the spoofing technique made the craft “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center.
theregister.co.uk techspot.com Debka: Whoever hacked the drone, hacked the CIA Lost U.S. Drone Was Monitoring Iranian Nuclear Facilities, Sources Say dailytech.com Did Iran hijack the 'beast'? Iran Shows Off Downed US RQ-170 Sentinel Spy Drone [youtube] IN-DEPTH PHOTO ANALYSIS OF THE SUPPOSED RQ-170 SENTINEL DRONE IN IRANIAN HANDSComputer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet [October 8, 2011] April, 2011 report identifying problems with drone communications including the risk of jamming and "lost link" events CIA Drone Run On Warez [Oct 14, 2010] Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones [December 18, 2009] Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students [July 4, 2009]
Interference issues [wiki] TERCOM [wiki]
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Topic: POLICE REPORT - on December 17, 2011 at 9:51:00 AM CET
Police Brutality Coloring Book Begs Question, ‘What Color Is Pepper Spray?’
Don’t let the cops see your kid coloring in this book — they might confiscate that box of Crayolas, or worse.
Forty-six artists, including Shepard Fairey, have contributed black-and-white artwork to the Police Brutality Coloring Book, a 48-page DIY publication inspired by incidents of violent police action against Occupy Wall Street activists.
“I wasn’t directly involved with the movement, but I had been down there a few times and was sympathetic to the cause,” said Police Brutality Coloring Book creator Joe “Heaps” Nelson in an interview with Wired.com. Then it turned out that Chelsea Elliott, one of four women pepper-sprayed during a Sep. 24 protest march in Manhattan, was a friend of a friend of the New York artist.
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Topic: Space - on December 17, 2011 at 9:44:00 AM CET
Awesome ISS Space-Timelapse in HD
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km. All credit goes to them.
HD, refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc. All in all I tried to keep the looks of the material as original as possible, avoided adjusting the colors and the like, since in my opinion the original footage itself already has an almost surreal and aestethical visual nature.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
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Topic: TV - on December 16, 2011 at 9:50:00 AM CET
TorTV :: Run Tor on your TV
TorTV is a build of the Tor Project maintained to run on TV devices and set-top boxes, so that anyone with such an household appliance can contribute to strengthen the Tor network.
Easy to deploy user downloads are provided, as well some developer documentation and mostly the code used: TorTV does not reimplements nor modifies the Tor source code in any way, it just provides binaries for embedded targets and some scripting to facilitate ease of installation.
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Topic: SECURITY - on December 16, 2011 at 9:49:00 AM CET
iBahn, supplier of hotel internet services, denies breach
iBahn, a provider of internet services to some 3,000 hotels worldwide, denied on Thursday a news report that its network was breached by hackers.
Bloomberg wrote that a highly skilled group of hackers based in China, which U.S. investigators have called "Byzantine Foothold," attacked iBahn, citing unnamed sources, including one U.S intelligence official.
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Topic: STRANGE - on December 16, 2011 at 9:04:00 AM CET
Chinese Government Says it Will Control Rainfall to Generate 10 Percent More Precipitation by 2015
China‘s boom in industry and population has put a strain on its natural resources – not to mention the health of the environment – over the past few decades. In order to alleviate the stress of growing crops for an ever-increasing population, the government is intervening with nature by rolling out four regional programs to artificially increase precipitation across the country by 10 percent before 2015. The program, which was included in the newly released 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), is anticipated to bring in an additional 230 billion cubic meters of precipitation per year. This is on top of the 50 billion China already artificially creates annually in the northeastern province of Jilin.
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Topic: DRUGS - on December 15, 2011 at 10:17:00 AM CET
Weed Wars: Medical Marijuana Hits Reality TV
"Most of our patients and our staff were really skeptical about doing a reality TV show because they were watching Jersey Shore and The Kardashians," says Andrew DeAngelo, general manager of Oakland, California's Harborside Health Center, the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world. Andrew and his brother, Harborside's Executive Director Steve DeAngleo, are co-stars of Weed Wars, a new show by the Discovery Channel that looks into lives of those who run Harborside, the patients that seek out their services, and the politicians looking to shut them down.
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