Tag: california

EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture

OAKLAND, Calif.—A federal judge spent over four hours on Friday questioning lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and from the Department of Justice in an ongoing digital surveillance-related lawsuit that has dragged on for more than six years. During the hearing, US District Judge Jeffrey White heard arguments from both sides in his attempt to wrestle with the plaintiffs’ July 2014 motion for partial summary judgment . He went back and forth between the two sides, hearing answers to his list of 12 questions that were published earlier this week in a court filing. That July 2014 motion asks the court to find that the government is “violating the Fourth Amendment by their ongoing seizures and searches of plaintiffs’ Internet communications.” The motion specifically doesn’t deal with allegations of past government wrongdoing, nor other issues in the broader case. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture

T-Mobile gives up fight over cramming fees, will pay $90M back to customers

T-Mobile US has given up its fight against a lawsuit filed by the US government, agreeing  today to refund $90 million or more to customers who were charged premium text message fees without their consent. The Federal Trade Commission alleged that T-Mobile made hundreds of millions of dollars off the practice of passing along third-party charges to customers without their authorization and taking a commission on each charge. T-Mobile could end up paying much more than $90 million. “The settlement requires that they provide full refunds to consumers, with a total of ‘at least’ $90 million,” an FTC spokesperson explained. “The $90 million is a floor. If they receive refund requests of more than that, they have to provide them.” In addition to everything it pays back customers, T-Mobile will pay $18 million in fines and penalties to state attorneys general and $4.5 million to the Federal Communications Commission. If T-Mobile receives less than $90 million worth of refund requests, the extra fines can be counted toward the minimum payment of $90 million. If the payment is still under $90 million, “the balance must be remitted to the FTC for additional consumer redress, consumer education, or other uses,” the FTC said. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile gives up fight over cramming fees, will pay $90M back to customers

Activist group sues San Diego Police Department over “stingray” records

A legal advocacy group has sued the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and the city of San Diego in an attempt to force the release of public records relating to stingrays, also known as cell-site simulators. Stingrays are often used covertly by local and federal law enforcement to locate target cellphones and their respective owners. However, stingrays also sweep up cell data of innocent people nearby who have no idea that such collection is taking place. Stingrays can be used to intercept voice calls and text messages as well. Earlier this week, a local judge in Arizona ruled that a local reporter could not receive similar stingray documents from the Tucson Police Department because disclosure “would give criminals a road map for how to defeat the device, which is used not only by Tucson but other local and national police agencies.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Activist group sues San Diego Police Department over “stingray” records

FCC expected to fine Sprint $105 million for overcharging customers

The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly on the verge of fining Sprint $105 million for cramming charges that brought complaints from tens of thousands of customers. The $105 million fine would match one levied on AT&T , which was accused of the same illegal practice. The US government has also sued T-Mobile  over cramming charges. The FCC has not confirmed the action against Sprint, but it was reported Monday in the National Journal  and yesterday in The   Wall Street Journal . “According to the enforcement action, which hasn’t been finalized, Sprint billed customers for third-party services it knew they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want,”  National Journal wrote. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC expected to fine Sprint $105 million for overcharging customers

Apple ceases online sales in Russia due to extreme ruble fluctuations

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Apple has ceased all online sales in Russia as the country has been unable to keep its currency from fluctuating dramatically. In the last month, Apple had already increased the price of its iPhone 6 in that country by 25 percent due to currency uncertainties. “Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing,” Alan Hely, a spokesman for the Cupertino, California-based company, told Bloomberg. “We apologize to customers for any inconvenience.” It is uncertain when Apple will reinstate its operations in Russia. Bloomberg noted that the Ruble sank 19 percent today, “with a surprise interest-rate increase failing to stem a run on the currency.” At one point during the day, the ruble sank to 80 on the dollar. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple ceases online sales in Russia due to extreme ruble fluctuations

A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast

Jason Koebler writes: Tucows Inc., an internet company that’s been around since the early 90s — it’s generally known for being in the shareware business and for registering and selling premium domain names — announced that it’s becoming an internet service provider. Tucows will offer fiber internet to customers in Charlottesville, Virginia — which is served by Comcast and CenturyLink — in early 2015 and eventually wants to expand to other markets all over the country. “Everyone who has built a well-run gigabit network has had demand exceeding their expectations, ” Elliot Noss, Tucows’ CEO said. “We think there’s space in the market for businesses like us and smaller.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast

Cops illegally nailed webcam to utility pole for 6 weeks to spy on house

A federal judge on Monday tossed evidence that was gathered by a webcam—turned on for six weeks—that the authorities nailed to a utility pole 100 yards from a suspected drug dealer’s rural Washington state house. The Justice Department contended that the webcam, with pan-and-zoom capabilities that were operated from afar—was no different from a police officer’s observation from the public right-of-way. The government argued  (PDF): Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops illegally nailed webcam to utility pole for 6 weeks to spy on house

Feds used Adobe Flash to identify Tor users visiting child porn sites

A little more than 16 months ago, word emerged that the FBI exploited a recently patched Firefox vulnerability to unmask Tor users visiting a notorious child pornography site. It turns out that the feds had waged an even broader uncloaking campaign a year earlier by using a long-abandoned part of the open source Metasploit exploit framework to identify Tor-using suspects. According to Wired , “Operation Torpedo,” as the FBI sting operation was dubbed, targeted users of three darknet child porn sites. It came to light only after Omaha defense attorney Joseph Gross challenged the accuracy of evidence it uncovered against a Rochester, New York-based IT worker who claims he was falsely implicated in the campaign. Operation Torpedo used the Metasploit Decloaking Engine to identify careless suspects who were hiding behind Tor, a free service used by good and bad guys alike to shield their point of entry to the Internet. The Decloaking Engine went live in 2006 and used five separate methods to break anonymization systems. One method was an Adobe Flash application that initiated a direct connection with the end user, bypassing Tor protections and giving up the user’s IP address. Tor Project officials have long been aware of the vulnerability and strenuously advise against installing Flash. According to Wired: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds used Adobe Flash to identify Tor users visiting child porn sites

4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

Researchers say they can have computers examine body camera video footage and accurately identify a person wearing a body-mounted device in about four seconds, according to a recently released paper . The authors of the study had their software look at biometric characteristics like height, stride length, and walking speed to find the identity of the person shooting the footage. As they point out, this could have both positive and negative implications for civilians, law enforcement, and military personnel if they’re using body-mounted cameras. (It’s important to note that this research paper,  Egocentric Video Biometrics , was posted  to the arXiv repository . As such, it’s not considered a final, peer-reviewed work.) Using static, mounted cameras to match a person’s height and gait is a relatively common and well-researched vector for narrowing down the identity of people caught in videos. The authors said that, to get an accurate read of the biometric data of the person wearing the body cam, the footage has to be from a camera secured to one point on a person’s body (handheld cameras don’t work), and it has to have at least four seconds of video of the camera-wearer walking. Despite these restrictions, the two researchers from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem noted that once the necessary information had been gathered, “the identity of the user can be determined quite reliably from a few seconds of video.” “This is like a fingerprint,” Shmuel Peleg, one of the paper’s authors, told The Verge. “In order to find the person you have to have their fingerprint beforehand. But we can compare two people and say whether two videos were shot by the same person or not.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

11 Secret Weapons Developed By Japan During World War 2

Normally, it’s the Western Powers who are remembered for developing some of the most innovative and conceptual weapons of the Second World War. But when it came to experimental military technologies, Japan suffered from no shortage of ideas. Here are 11 you should know about. Read more…

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11 Secret Weapons Developed By Japan During World War 2