linux – Page 146 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation

An anonymous reader writes with a link to an article by the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch, carried by Gizmodo, which reports that the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department “took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that ‘All [license plate] data is investigatory.’ The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter. This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired. ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. … Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taken from:
L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation

Navy Database Tracks Civilians’ Parking Tickets, Fender-Benders

schwit1 (797399) writes with this excerpt from the Washington Examiner: “A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military. The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Navy Database Tracks Civilians’ Parking Tickets, Fender-Benders

Is DIY Brainhacking Safe?

An anonymous reader writes “My colleague at IEEE Spectrum, Eliza Strickland, looked at the home transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) movement. People looking to boost creativity, or cure depression, are attaching electrodes to their heads using either DIT equipment or rigs from vendors like Foc.us. Advocates believe experimenting with the tech is safe, but a neuroscientist worries about removing the tech from lab safeguards…” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View original post here:
Is DIY Brainhacking Safe?

Weak Apple PRNG Threatens iOS Exploit Mitigations

Trailrunner7 writes “A revamped early random number generator in iOS 7 is weaker than its vulnerable predecessor and generates predictable outcomes. A researcher today at CanSecWest said an attacker could brute force the Early Random PRNG used by Apple in its mobile operating system to bypass a number of kernel exploit mitigations native to iOS. ‘The Early Random PRNG in iOS 7 is surprisingly weak, ‘ said Tarjei Mandt senior security researcher at Azimuth Security. ‘The one in iOS 6 is better because this one is deterministic and trivial to brute force.’ The Early Random PRNG is important to securing the mitigations used by the iOS kernel. ‘All the mitigations deployed by the iOS kernel essentially depend on the robustness of the Early Random PRNG, ‘ Mandt said. ‘It must provide sufficient entropy and non-predictable output.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View original post here:
Weak Apple PRNG Threatens iOS Exploit Mitigations

XKCD Author’s Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller

destinyland writes “Wednesday the geeky cartoonist behind XKCD announced that he’d publish a new book answering hypothetical science questions in September. And within 24 hours, his as-yet-unpublished work had become Amazon’s #2 best-selling book. ‘Ironically, this book is titled What If?, ‘ jokes one blogger, noting it resembles an XKCD comic where ‘In our yet-to-happen future, this book decides to travel backwards through time, stopping off in March of 2014 to inform Amazon’s best-seller list that yes, in our coming timeline this book will be widely read…’ Randall Munroe’s new book will be collecting his favorite ‘What If…’ questions, but will also contain his never-before published answers to some questions that he’d found ‘particularly neat.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
XKCD Author’s Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller

Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry – To Shut It Down

cartechboy writes “What’s $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87, 000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don’t have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can’t do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry – To Shut It Down

School Tricks Pupils Into Installing a Root CA

First time accepted submitter paddysteed writes “I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA’s, and found my school’s. I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad, but what my school has done is install their certificate on people’s own machines — which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad. We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within five minutes, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had ‘fixed’ it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk. I want to take this further but to get the school’s management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non-technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PC Game Prices — Valve Starts the Race To Zero

An anonymous reader writes “Last week Valve made an interesting but seemingly innocuous announcement: they’re giving game developers control of their own pricing on Steam. Nicholas Lovell now claims that this has effectively kicked off a race to zero for PC game pricing. He says what’s starting to happen now will mirror what’s happened to mobile gaming over the past several years. Quoting: ‘Free is the dominant price point on mobile platforms. Why? Because the two main players don’t care much about making money from the sale of software, or even In-App Purchases. The AppStore is less than 1% of Apple’s revenue. Apple has become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the strength of making high-margin, well-designed, highly-desirable hardware. … Google didn’t create Android to sell software. It built Android to create an economic moat. … In the case of both iOS and Android, keeping prices high for software would have been in direct opposition to the core businesses of Apple (hardware) and Google (search-related advertising). The only reason that ebooks are not yet free is that Amazon’s core business is retail, not hardware. … Which brings me to Steam. The Steambox is a competitor to consoles, created by Valve. It is supposed to provide an out-of-the-box PC gaming experience, although it struggles to compete on either price or on marketing with the consoles. It doesn’t seem as if Steam is keen to subsidize the costs of the box, not to the level that Microsoft and Sony are. But what if Steam’s [unique selling point] was thousands or tens of thousands of games for free?'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit link:
PC Game Prices — Valve Starts the Race To Zero

F-Secure: Android Accounted For 97% of All Mobile Malware In 2013

An anonymous reader writes “Back in 2012, Android accounted for 79 percent of all mobile malware. Last year, that number ballooned even further to 97 percent. Both those data points come from security firm F-Secure, which today released its 40-page Threat Report for the second half of 2013. More specifically, Android malware rose from 238 threats in 2012 to 804 new families and variants in 2013. Apart from Symbian, F-Secure found no new threats for other mobile platforms last year.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
F-Secure: Android Accounted For 97% of All Mobile Malware In 2013

Tor Is Building an Anonymous Instant Messenger

An anonymous reader writes in with news about a new anonymous instant messenger client on the way from Tor. “Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There’s a new messaging tool worth watching. Tor, the team behind the world’s leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.