The superefficient Biolite woodstove will boil water in minutes from twigs and charge your phone while it does it. Read the rest
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Superefficient campstove that charges your phone while it boils water, using only twigs
An Indian certificate authority in the Microsoft root of trust has been caught issuing fake Google subdomain certificates that would allow nearly undetectable eavesdropping on “secure” connections to services like Google Docs. Read the rest
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Fake Google subdomain certificates found in the wild
Allison writes, “The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is not only gorgeous with its soaring ceilings, it also was an instrumental site for developing modern microchip technology.” Read the rest
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Supercomputing center in a beautiful, deconsecrated church
In Post-Industrious Society: Why Work Time will not Disappear for our Grandchildren , researchers from Oxford’s Centre for Time Use Research argue that there has been a radical shift in the relationship between leisure, work and income. Where once leisure time was a mark of affluence, now it is a marker for poverty. The richer you are, the more likely you are to work long hours; while the poorer you are, the fewer hours you are likely to work every week. The researchers theorise multiple causes for this. Poor people are more likely to be underemployed and unable to get the work-hours they want (and need) to support themselves. Rich people are likely to work in jobs that disproportionately advance and reward workers who put in overtime, so a 10% increase in hours worked generates more than 10% in expected career-gains. They also claim that rich workers are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, but I’m skeptical of this — I think that relative to unskilled workers doing at-will 0-hours temp work whose every move is constrained and scripted by their employers, this is probably true, but I don’t think that the white-collar world is producing a lot of people who think that their work is meaningful and rewarding. In today’s advanced economies things are different. Overall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure. There are a number of explanations. One has to do with what economists call the “substitution effect”. Higher wages make leisure more expensive: if people take time off they give up more money. Since the 1980s the salaries of those at the top have risen strongly, while those below the median have stagnated or fallen. Thus rising inequality encourages the rich to work more and the poor to work less. Nice work if you can get out [The Economist] ( via /. ) ( Image: Lonely Hammock , Micky Zlimen, CC-BY-SA )
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Having leisure time is now a marker for poverty, not riches
Alan sez, “According to various media reports ( e.g. BBC ) the technology subreddit has scrubbed its moderator team after users discovered that the sub was holding a secret censorship list of banned words that included ‘National Security Agency’, ‘GCHQ’, ‘Anonymous’, ‘anti-piracy’, ‘Bitcoin’, ‘Snowden’, ‘net neutrality’, ‘EU Court’, ‘startup’ and ‘Assange’. On its face, this looks like a list of politicized terms, and blocking them looks like a highly political and partisan act — for example, by blocking “net neutrality,” then stories that are critical of network discrimination would be blocked, while straight news stories that overwhelmingly quoted corporate spokespeople using uncritical terms would make the front door. More charitably, it may have been the act of overworked (and ultimately irresponsible) moderators to simply ban hot-button topics altogether. Here’s the Reddit post that outed /r/technology’s moderators. Once the news got publicized, the moderator team did a ‘U turn’ and removed the auto-deletion software, as well as booting the mods responsible for it in the first place. Still, as the BBC story notes, the technology sub is no longer “featured”, meaning it doesn’t appear in the subreddits that are promoted to new users and appear on the front page. Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship [BBC] ( Thanks, Alan ! )
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Reddit’s /r/technology demoted over scandal of secret censorship that blocked Internet freedom stories
The Turkish government has doubled down on its Internet censorship program, blocking all of Youtube in addition to its ban on Twitter . Despite theories about the political theatre of blocking Twitter , it seems like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is also genuinely concerned with suppressing a recording of a conversation with his son in which he conspires to hide the money he is thought to have received through corrupt dealing. As with the Twitter block, this one was undertaken as an administrative order from the PM’s office, without judicial oversight. The Twitter ban has since been rescinded by the Turkish courts, but the block may not be lifted before the elections. There is still no official announcement by TİB, the government authority in charge of internet regulation and the organ who implements blocking decisions. However, YouTube’s URL and title appeared on BTK’s (higher organ that includes TİB) web page where the blocked URLs are listed. The site is still accessible through some ISPs, but the blocking is expected to be implemented fully in an hour’s time by all ISPs. The government banned Twitter last week on the grounds that the company fails to remove ‘illegal’ content according to Turkish authorities. Yesterday, an administrative court ruled for the suspension of the execution of Twitter blocking. Last week, Google Inc. has announced that it declined the requests coming from the Turkish government in recent weeks to remove YouTube videos revealing extensive corruption involving PM, his family, ministers, businessmen and several government officials, the Wall Street Journal reported. Turkish government takes down YouTube too [updated] [Noyan Ayan/Webrazzi] ( via Engadget )
Just a few days after Turkey’s scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter’s IP addresses , in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls ). Following the ban, Turkey’s Twitter usage grew by 138 percent. Now that Twitter’s IP range is blocked, more Turkish Internet users are making use of Tor and VPNs, and they continue to use SMS for access to the service. It’s interesting that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has singled out Twitter for his attacks (“Twitter, schmitter! We will wipe out Twitter . I don’t care what the international community says.”) Why not Facebook or Google Plus? I’m not certain, but my hypothesis is that Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy — which make you liable to disconnection from the service if you’re caught using an alias — make them less useful for political dissidents operating in an environment in which they fear reprisals. According to the Internet activist collective Telecomix, there also were reports that devices configured to use Google’s DNS service or other DNS providers outside the country were being hijacked to a local DNS server by the Wi-Fi network at Istanbul’s airport. The move has driven up the usage of VPN services and the Tor anonymizing network in Turkey. Telecomix has been providing a list of Tor gateways for Turkish users. Tor network metrics show a huge spike in users directly connecting to the Tor network over the past few days, growing from 25,000 users to 35,000 since March 19. Downloads of VPN software have also exploded with VPN apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android becoming the most downloaded apps from their respective app stores in Turkey. After DNS change fails, Turkish government steps up Twitter censorship [Sean Gallagher/Ars Technica]
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Turkey orders block of Twitter’s IP addresses
Facebook continues to tighten the screws on the businesses that use the service to market to their customers. Independent research shows that new updates from businesses reach about six percent of the people who follow those businesses. It is rumored that Facebook intends to reduce this number to “between one and two percent” over time. Businesses that want to reach the people who follow them at higher rates will have to pay Facebook to reach them through paid advertisements. If you’re building your business’s marketing and customer relations strategy atop Facebook, take note — and remember that if you have a real website, all your readers see your posts, even if you don’t pay Facebook! Facebook declined to comment on the percentage of fans that see posts from a typical Facebook page (the last publicly disclosed figure was 16 percent in the summer of 2012), but the company admitted in December that posts from Pages are reaching less users. Facebook attributes this change to increased competition as more people and companies join its service. The typical user is inundated with 1,500 posts per day from friends and Pages, and Facebook picks 300 to present in the News Feed. Getting squeezed out are both posts from Pages and meme photos as Facebook shifts its focus to what it deems “high quality” content. The solution for brands with declining engagement, according to Facebook, is to buy ads. “Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook [Victor Luckerson/Time] ( Image: flaming LIKE , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zaigee’s photostream )
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Unless companies pay, their Facebook updates reach 6 percent of followers
The day after a Snowden leak revealed that the NSA builds fake versions of Facebook and uses them to seed malicious software in attacks intended to hijack “millions” of computers, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg telephoned President Obama to complain about the NSA’s undermining of the Internet’s integrity. As many have pointed out, it would have been nice to hear Zuckerberg taking the Internet’s side before his own stock portfolio was directly affected, but better late than never. Zuckerberg’s post on his conversation excoriates the US government for its Internet sabotage campaign, and calls on the USG to “be the champion for the internet, not a threat.” Curiously, Zuckerberg calls for “transparency” into the NSA’s attacks on the Internet, but stops short of calling for an end to government-sponsored attacks against the net. In the end, though, Zuckerberg calls on companies to do a better job of securing themselves and their users against intrusive spying. It’s not clear how that will work for Facebook, though: its business model is predicated on tricking, cajoling, and siphoning personal data out of its users and warehousing it forever in a neat package that governments are unlikely to ignore. I’m told that 90% of US divorce proceedings today include Facebook data; this is a microcosm of the wider reality when you make it your business to stockpile the evidentiary chain of every human being’s actions. The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world. This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government. The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst. I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform. So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I’m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part. As the world becomes more complex and governments everywhere struggle, trust in the internet is more important today than ever. ( Image: Mark Zuckerberg Facebook SXSWi 2008 Keynote , a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from deneyterrio’s photostream )
Developers from the Replicant project (a free Android offshoot) have documented a serious software back-door in Samsung’s Android phones , which “provides remote access to the data stored on the device.” They believe it is “likely” that the backdoor could provide “over-the-air remote control” to “access the phone’s file system.” At issue is Samsung’s proprietary IPC protocol, used in its modems. This protocol implements a set of commands called “RFS commands.” The Replicant team says that it can’t find “any particular legitimacy nor relevant use-case” for adding these commands, but adds that “it is possible that these were added for legitimate purposes, without the intent of doing harm by providing a back-door. Nevertheless, the result is the same and it allows the modem to access the phone’s storage.” The Replicant site includes proof-of-concept sourcecode for a program that will access the file-system over the modem. Replicant has created a replacement for the relevant Samsung software that does not allow for back-door access. Samsung Galaxy devices running proprietary Android versions come with a back-door that provides remote access to the data stored on the device. In particular, the proprietary software that is in charge of handling the communications with the modem, using the Samsung IPC protocol, implements a class of requests known as RFS commands, that allows the modem to perform remote I/O operations on the phone’s storage. As the modem is running proprietary software, it is likely that it offers over-the-air remote control, that could then be used to issue the incriminated RFS messages and access the phone’s file system. …The incriminated RFS messages of the Samsung IPC protocol were not found to have any particular legitimacy nor relevant use-case. However, it is possible that these were added for legitimate purposes, without the intent of doing harm by providing a back-door. Nevertheless, the result is the same and it allows the modem to access the phone’s storage. However, some RFS messages of the Samsung IPC protocol are legitimate (IPC_RFS_NV_READ_ITEM and IPC_RFS_NV_WRITE_ITEM) as they target a very precise file, known as the modem’s NV data. There should be no particular security concern about these as both the proprietary implementation and its free software replacement strictly limit actions to that particular file. Samsung Galaxy Back-door
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Samsung Galaxy back-door allows for over-the-air filesystem access