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California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP: All 800 police departments in California must begin using a new online tool launched Thursday to report and help track every time officers use force that causes serious injuries… The tool, named URSUS for the bear on California’s flag, includes fields for the race of those injured and the officers involved, how their interaction began and why force was deemed necessary. “It’s sort of like TurboTax for use-of-force incidents, ” said Justin Erlich, a special assistant attorney general overseeing the data collection and analysis. Departments must report the data under a new state law passed last November. Though some departments already tracked such data on their own, many did not… “As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force, ” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a news release. It’s an open source tool developed by Bayes Impact, and California plans to share the code with other interested law enforcement agencies across the country. Only three other states currently require their police departments to track data about use-of-force incidents, “but their systems aren’t digital, and in Colorado’s case, only capture shootings.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force

Spam Hits Its Highest Level Since 2010

Long-time Slashdot reader coondoggie quotes Network World: Spam is back in a big way — levels that have not been seen since 2010 in fact. That’s according to a blog post from Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet… “Many of the host IPs sending Necurs’ spam have been infected for more than two years. “To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions… This greatly complicates the job of security personnel who respond to spam attacks, because while they may believe the offending host was subsequently found and cleaned up, the reality is that the miscreants behind Necurs are just biding their time, and suddenly the spam starts all over again.” Before this year, the SpamCop Block List was under 200, 000 IP addresses, but surged to over 450, 000 addresses by the end of August. Interestingly, Proofpoint reported that between June and July, Donald Trump’s name appeared in 169 times more spam emails than Hillary Clinton’s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Probe Of Leaked US NSA Hacking Tools Examines Operative’s Mistake

Joseph Menn and John Walcott, reporting for Reuters: A U.S. investigation into a leak of hacking tools used by the National Security Agency is focusing on a theory that one of its operatives carelessly left them available on a remote computer and Russian hackers found them, four people with direct knowledge of the probe told Reuters. The tools, which enable hackers to exploit software flaws in computer and communications systems from vendors such as Cisco Systems and Fortinet Inc, were dumped onto public websites last month by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The public release of the tools coincided with U.S. officials saying they had concluded that Russia or its proxies were responsible for hacking political party organizations in the run-up to the Nov. 8 presidential election. On Thursday, lawmakers accused Russia of being responsible. Various explanations have been floated by officials in Washington as to how the tools were stolen. Some feared it was the work of a leaker similar to former agency contractor Edward Snowden, while others suspected the Russians might have hacked into NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Probe Of Leaked US NSA Hacking Tools Examines Operative’s Mistake

Cops Are Raiding Homes of Innocent People Based Only On IP Addresses

Kashmir Hill has a fascinating story today on what can go wrong when you solely rely on IP address in a crime investigation — also highlighting how often police resort to IP addresses. In the story she follows a crime investigation that led police to raid a couple’s house at 6am in the morning, because their IP address had been associated with the publication of child porn on notorious 4chan porn. The problem was, Hill writes: the couple — David Robinson and Jan Bultmann — weren’t the ones who had uploaded the child porn. All they did was voluntarily use one of their old laptops as a Tor exit relay, a software used by activists, dissidents, privacy enthusiasts as well as criminals, so that people who want to stay anonymous when surfing the web could do so. Hill writes: Robinson and Bultmann had specifically operated the riskiest node in the chain: the exit relay which provides the IP address ultimately associated with a user’s activity. In this case, someone used Tor to make the porn post, and his or her traffic had been routed through the computer in Robinson and Bultmann’s house. The couple wasn’t pleased to have helped someone post child porn to the internet, but that’s the thing about privacy-protective tools: They’re going to be used for good and bad purposes, and to support one, you might have to support the other.Robinson added that he was a little let down because police didn’t bother to look at the public list which details the IP addresses associated with Tor exit relays. Hill adds: The police asked Robinson to unlock one MacBook Air, and then seemed satisfied these weren’t the criminals they were looking for and left. But months later, the case remains open with Robinson and Bultmann’s names on police documents linking them to child pornography. “I haven’t run an exit relay since. The police told me they’d be back if it happened again, ” Robinson said; he’s still running a Tor node, just not the end point anymore. “I have to take the threat seriously because I don’t want my wife or I to wake up with guns in our faces.”Technologist Seth Schoen, and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in a white paper aimed at courts and cops. “For many reasons, connecting an individual to a crime linked to an IP address, without any additional investigation, is irresponsible and threatens the civil liberties of innocent people.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cops Are Raiding Homes of Innocent People Based Only On IP Addresses

China Confirms Its Space Station Is Falling Back to Earth

The Tiangong-1, China’s prototype space station which was launched in September 2011, is no longer under the control of China. PopularMechanics reports: China’s Tiangong-1 space station has been orbiting the planet for about 5 years now, but recently it was decommissioned and the Chinese astronauts returned to the surface. In a press conference, China announced that the space station would be falling back to earth at some point in late 2017. Normally, a decommissioned satellite or space station would be retired by forcing it to burn up in the atmosphere. This type of burn is controlled, and most satellite re-entries are scheduled to burn up over the ocean to avoid endangering people. However, it seems that China’s space agency is not sure exactly when Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere, which implies that the station has been damaged somehow and China is no longer able to control it. This is important because it means Tiangong-1 won’t be able to burn up in a controlled manner. All we know is it will burn up at some point in late 2017, but it is impossible to predict exactly when or where. This means that there is a chance debris from the falling spacecraft could strike a populated area. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Confirms Its Space Station Is Falling Back to Earth

GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

GoDaddy has announced “an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers, ” called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity, ” according to the announcement, “streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms.” GoDaddy’s submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is “out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment.” “GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process, ” the site reports, “by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, WordPress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries… in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they’ve done it all correctly.” Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy’s implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering “said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

Run Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Your PC With Android-x86 6.0

This week saw the first stable release of Android-x86 6.0 (marshmallow-x86) — and a new version of Remix OS for PC, a PC-optimized version of Android. Slashdot reader prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Android-x86 6.0 has been in the works since early this year, and it received a total of two RC (Release Candidate) builds during its entire development cycle, one in June and another in August. After joining the Remix OS team, Chih-Wei Huang now has all the reasons to update and improve its Android-x86 system for the latest Android releases. Therefore, as you might have guessed already, Android-x86 6.0 is the first stable version of the project to be based on Google’s Linux kernel-based Android 6.0 Marshmallow mobile operating system, and includes the most recent AOSP (Android Open Source Project) security updates too. Under the hood, Android-x86 6.0 is using the long-term supported Linux 4.4.20 kernel with an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 12.0.2 3D Graphics Library, and offers support for Samsung’s F2FS file system for SSD drives, better Wi-Fi support after resume and suspend, and initial HDMI audio support. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GM Commits To 100% Renewable Energy By 2050

We’ve seen a number of entities announce plans to operate with 100% renewable energy over the years. Costa Rica, for example, has gone 76 straight days using 100% renewable electricity. General Motors is the latest company to release a roadmap to achieving 100% renewable energy. The catch? It won’t be until 2050. CleanTechnica reports: American multinational General Motors, or GM, has committed to generating or sourcing 100% of the electricity for its operations across 59 countries from 100% renewable energy by 2050. GM made the announcement on Wednesday, revealing that it planned to generate or source all its electrical power needs for its 350 operations in 59 countries with 100% renewable energy such as wind, solar, and landfill gas, by 2050. In turn, the company has joined the 100% renewable energy campaign RE100, lending its considerable global business weight to an already important and successful campaign. “Establishing a 100% renewable energy goal helps us better serve society by reducing environmental impact, ” said Mary Barra, GM Chairman and CEO. “This pursuit of renewable energy benefits our customers and communities through cleaner air while strengthening our business through lower and more stable energy costs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GM Commits To 100% Renewable Energy By 2050

Over 500K People Have Installed a Pokemon Go-Related App That Roots and Hijacks Android Devices

An anonymous reader writes: Over 500, 000 people have downloaded an Android app called “Guide for Pokemon Go” that roots the devices in order to deliver ads and installs apps without the user’s knowledge. Researchers that analyzed the malware said it contained multiple defenses that made reverse-engineering very difficult — some of the most advanced they’ve seen — which explains why it managed to fool Google’s security scanner and end up on the official Play Store. The exploits contained in the app’s rooting functions were able to root any Android released between 2012 and 2015. The trojan found inside the app was also found in nine other apps, affecting another 100, 000 users. The crook behind this trojan was obviously riding various popularity waves, packing his malware in clones for whatever app or game is popular at one particular point in time. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla Is Suing An Oil-Company Executive For Impersonating Elon Musk

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Tesla is suing an oil executive under suspicion of impersonating Elon Musk to dig up confidential financial information from the company, Forbes reported on Wednesday. The lawsuit, reportedly filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, claimed that Todd Katz, the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, emailed Tesla’s chief financial officer using a similar email address as Musk’s looking to gain information that wasn’t disclosed in an earnings call with investors. Quest Integrity Group has partnerships with BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil, the Forbes report said. According to the lawsuit, Katz used “elontesla@yahoo.com” to send an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler asking about the company’s sales and financial projections. The email named in the suit reads: “why you so cautious w Q3/4 gm guidance on call? also what are your thoughts on disclosing M3 res#? Pros/cons from ir pov? what is your best guess as to where we actually come in on q3/4 deliverables. honest guess? no bs. thx 4 hard work prepping 4 today. em.” Tesla is seeking “undisclosed financial compensation, ” as well as compensation for the cost of the investigation and legal fees, according to Forbes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Is Suing An Oil-Company Executive For Impersonating Elon Musk

Ken May

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