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
An anonymous reader writes The biggest complaint about Tesla Motors’ electric vehicles is that they’re far too expensive for the average motorist. The Roadster sold for $109, 000, and the Model S for $70, 000. Chris Porritt, the company’s VP of engineering, says their next model will aim for much broader availability. The compact Model E aims to be competitive with the Audi A4 and BMW 3-series, which both start in the low $30, 000 range. To reduce cost, the Model E won’t be built mostly with aluminum, like the Model S, and it will be roughly 20% smaller as well. The construction of the “Gigafactory” for battery production will also go a long way toward reducing the price. Their goal for launch is sometime around late 2016 or early 2017 Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Tesla Aims For $30,000 Price, 2017 Launch For Model E
Large Christian communities are not abundant in Muslim-dominated Egypt, but one of the more populace groups are the garbage scavenging Zabbaleen who have retained their Coptic beliefs and established the largest Christian church in the Middle East at the Monastery of Saint Simon. Read more…
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The Cave Church of Garbage City
Instant ramen is a poor shadow of the noodles you get at a ramen shop. Now you can make better-than-instant ramen at home for even less than those cheap packets you find at the grocery store. Read more…
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Make Your Own Delicious Ramen That’s Even Cheaper Than Instant
Charliemopps writes: “According to Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, ‘There have been queries, using U.S. person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.’ Basically, if you communicated with someone that is ‘reasonably believed’ to be a terrorist, you’ve lost constitutional protection against searches without a warrant, according to the NSA.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NSA Confirms It Has Been Searching US Citizens’ Data Without a Warrant
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 )
itwbennett writes “As Slashdot readers will remember, last month the U.S government ‘petitioned the court system’ to let the NSA retain phone call metadata for more than 5 years, ironically ‘because it needs to preserve it as evidence for the various privacy lawsuits filed against the government.’ Well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ruled against that request. The FISC’s Presiding Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled Friday (PDF) that the proposed amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of U.S. persons whose ‘telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government for five years to aid in national security investigation.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Court Denies NSA Request To Hold Phone Records Beyond 5 Years
The CIA’s Inspector General has asked the Justice Department to consider criminally charging CIA agents who spied on a senate committee that was engaged in writing a report that was highly critical of the CIA’s use of torture. Senator Mark Udall, who sits on a CIA oversight committee and whose staff was spied on by the CIA alleges that the CIA surveilled overseeing senators and their staff with Obama’s knowledge and consent. In a recent hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked the CIA director repeatedly whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America’s major anti-hacking statute, applied to the CIA, and whether the CIA spied domestically. CIA director John Brennan replied “yes” and “no,” respectively. If Udall’s allegations are correct, this means that Brennan lied to Congress (in the second instance) and committed a felony (in the first instance). The report that caused some CIA agents to spy on their bosses was about how the CIA was wasting time, getting nowhere and doing something illegal and cruel when it kidnapped terror suspects and tortured the shit out of them. McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings. Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles. “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday. Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims [Spencer Ackerman/The Guardian]
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CIA spied on Senate committee writing damning torture report and Obama knew about it
To clarify, the @HSCIC story that’s coming is, I believe, infinitely worse than patient hospital records being uploaded to Google BigQuery — ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) March 3, 2014 PA Consulting, a management consulting firm, obtained the entire English and Welsh hospital episode statistics database and uploaded it to Google’s Bigquery service . The stats filled 27 DVDs and took “a couple of weeks” to transfer to Google’s service, which is hosted in non-EU data centres. This is spectacularly illegal. The NHS dataset includes each patient’s NHS number, post code, address, date of birth and gender, as well as all their inpatient, outpatient and emergency hospital records. Google’s Bigquery service allows for full data-set sharing with one click. The news of the breach comes after the collapse of a scheme under which the NHS would sell patient records to pharma companies, insurers and others (there was no easy way to opt out of the scheme, until members of the public created the independent Fax Your GP service ). According to researcher and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, this story is just the beginning: there’s an “infinitely worse” story that is coming shortly. Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?” The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”. The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.” The revelations alarmed campaigners and privacy experts, who queried how Google maps could have been used unless some location data had been provided in the patient information files. NHS England patient data ‘uploaded to Google servers’, Tory MP says [Randeep Ramesh/The Guardian] ( via Charlie Stross )
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Full NHS hospital records uploaded to Google servers, "infinitely worse" story to come
Zothecula writes “In another step forward for laser weapons that brings to mind the Death Star’s superlaser, Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a30-kilowatt fiber laser produced by combining many lasers into a single beam of light. According to the company, this is the highest power laser yet that was still able to maintain beam quality and electrical efficiency, paving the way for a laser weapon system suitable, if not for a Death Star, for a wide range of air, land, and sea military platforms.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Many Lasers Become One In Lockheed Martin’s 30 kW Laser Weapon