We already know that the NSA intercepts computer deliveries to introduce backdoors into hardware , but now a story in the New York Times suggests that the Agency uses radio technology to spy on 100, 000 computers that aren’t connected to the internet. Read more…
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The NSA Uses Radio Waves to Monitor 100,000 Computers Without Internet
Every year at CES, the Eureka Park outpost where they stick the scrappy startups is the best damn part of the whole shindig. This is where all the people with a screw loose or a decided lack of good common sense come to peddle their spaghetti-cooking robot or aroma-powered computer – or, as happened this year, their solar-powered beer cooler . SolarCooler is a “world first,” which is a common epithet at Eureka Park, and it’s currently undergoing crowdfunding on Indiegogo. The startup is looking for $150,000 to make their portable refrigerator (it even makes ice!) a reality, but it’s currently looking like it’ll need a real groundswell of support to get there. Here’s the big issue: the entry-level model costs just under $1,000, and that’s a special backer-only price. Retail for the SolarCooler is $1,200, which is bound to be a bitter pill to swallow even for the most ardent of tailgaters. Still, this is essentially a solar-powered 12V battery backup for everything combined with a cooler that offers true, continuous refrigeration, so that price tag starts to look at lot more reasonable when you consider its other potential uses. It also has a lot of potential to help out in commercial and medical settings as a transport for goods that need to be kept cool when direct power is in scarce supply and loading up a device with a significant number of batteries would make it cumbersome to use. SolarCooler is pursuing a flex funding goal, meaning it walks away with whatever it raises, and the founder seems keen on building it whatever the outcome, but there are still over 40 days left in the campaign, so it could still turn into a Cinderella story. All I know is I like beer, and I like it cold (that ‘best served at room temperature stuff’ is BS) so SolarCooler makes sense to me.
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SolarCooler Keeps Your Brews Icy With The Power Of The Sun, But It’ll Cost You $1K
Flexible, stretchable , bendable circuits will make futuristic wearable devices and implantable medical sensors possible. Today, a Swiss research team revealed a big new step in that field : a super-thin circuit that can function while wrapped around a human hair or laid on a contact lens. Read more…
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Science Makes a Circuit So Thin, It Can Sit On a Contact Lens
The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013 , giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup. The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent. Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice. Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original): Almost no high-end phones are popular . Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report. What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small . So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else. Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.
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Nokia Closes Out 2013 With 92% Of The Windows Phone Market
People attribute a lot of annoying internet stuff to bots. Twitterbot followers, bots that sneak past spam filters, bots that send weird gibberish on messaging services. It sounds kind of tired, but maybe the situation is exactly as bad as everyone thinks. Read more…
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More Than Half of Internet Traffic Is Just Bots
Reuters reports that the NSA paid massive computer security firm RSA $10 million to promote a flawed encryption system so that the US spook organization could wiggle its way around security. In other words, it bribed the firm to leave the back door to computers all over the world open. Read more…
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NSA Paid Security Firm $10 Million Bribe to Keep Encryption Weak
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Jacob Kastrenakes reports on The Verge that as part a response to the NSA’s wide-reaching surveillance programs, BitTorrent is unveiling a secure messaging service that will use public key encryption, forward secrecy, and a distributed hash table so that chats will be individually encrypted and won’t be stored on some company’s server. ‘It’s become increasingly clear that we need to devote hackathons, hours and resources to developing a messaging app that protects user privacy, ‘ says Christian Averill, BitTorrent’s director of communications. Because most current chat services rely on central servers to facilitate the exchange of messages, ‘they’re vulnerable: to hackers, to NSA dragnet surveillance sweeps.’ BitTorrent chat aims to avoid those vulnerabilities through its encryption methods and decentralized infrastructure. Rather than checking in with one specific server, users of BitTorrent chat will collectively help each other figure out where to route messages to. In order to get started chatting, you’ll just need to give someone else your public key — effectively your identifier. Exchanging public keys doesn’t sound like the simplest way to begin a chat, but Averill says that BitTorrent hopes to make it easy enough for anyone interested. ‘What we’re going to do is to make sure there are options for how this is set up, ‘ says Averill. ‘This way it will appeal to the more privacy conscious consumer as well as the less technically inclined.’ For now, it remains in a private testing phase that interested users can apply for access to. There’s no word on when it’ll be open to everyone, but with all of the recent surveillance revelations, it’s easy to imagine that some people will be eager to get started.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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BitTorrent Unveils Secure Chat To Counter ‘NSA Dragnet Surveillance’
Apple has just announced that its new Mac Pro computer , featuring that signature ‘Darth Vader’ design, will be available for sale starting tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 19 beginning at $2,999. There’s another version with better specs for $3,999, and a number of custom order options that will vary the prices upwards from there. Orders kick off tomorrow online through Apple’s official web-based store, as well as in retail stores and at authorized resellers, according to Apple’s official announcement, so conceivably we could see the first customers actually take theirs home tomorrow, though it’s much more likely that orders will kick off first with stock arriving at locations gradually over the next few days. The $2,999 configuration of the Mac Pro features a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, not one but two AMD FirePro D500 workstation GPUs with 2GB of dedicated RAM per unit, 12GB of system RAM and a 256 flash storage module. The $3,999 version boosts the processor to a 3.5GHz six-core version, provides 3GB of dedicated RAM to each of those workstation GPUs, 16GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. Custom configurations allow for 8- or 12-core processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of RAM, a maximum of 64GB of system memory and up to 1TB of flash storage. Apple first revealed the new Mac Pro back in June at its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference. The sleek black cylindrical unity is assembled in the U.S., and features a design that maximizes cooling through a jet turbine-like system that funnels air through the top opening. It features an all-black aluminum enclosure, and comes in at under 10 inches tall. It dramatically reduces its size versus the previous version, and to do that, moves the modularity outside of the case thanks to six Thunderbolt 2 ports, as well as four USB 3.0 connections on the back. It can power up to three 4k displays, too, and also features two Gigabit Ethernet jacks and an HDMI 1.4 UltraHD out. At Apple’s special event in October, we got the chance to go hands-on with the new Mac Pro , and found it to be incredibly silent while working, despite the amount of power contained under the hood. It features a number of impressive details like the back panel that automatically lights up when it detects the computer is being moved to help you see which ports are which, especially handy if you’re working in a darkened studio. IMG_0117 IMG_0116 IMG_0115 IMG_0114 IMG_0126 IMG_0125 IMG_0124 IMG_0123 IMG_0122 IMG_0121 IMG_0120 IMG_0119 IMG_0118 IMG_0079 IMG_0077 IMG_0075 IMG_0074 IMG_0073 View Slideshow Previous Next Exit The price range of this new Mac Pro means that as its name implies, it’ll likely be most sought after by working pros who’ve been clinging to their aging silver aluminum models and holding out for something more, but it’s a device that shows Apple is still invested in its longtime bedrock of creative professionals. It’s also a demonstration device in terms of showcasing Apple’s hardware engineering, and a way for Apple to highlight its efforts to bring at least part of its manufacturing and assembly chain back home to the U.S. It’s definitely a machine we’re eager to test more extensively, and we’ll report back once we do.
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Apple’s New Mac Pro Goes On Sale Dec. 19 Online And In Retail Starting At $2,999
The Washington Post is reporting that, according to a newly released internal document, the National Security Agency isn’t just swiping location data from our cell phones ; they actually have the ability to decode private, encrypted data, putting all our texts and calls right at their disposal. Read more…
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The NSA Can Decode Private, Encrypted Cellphone Conversations
cold fjord writes “Yahoo reports, ‘A California man was arrested on Tuesday on accusations he ran a ‘revenge porn’ website, one that featured nude pictures of women often posted by jilted or angry ex-lovers … The San Diego arrest, the latest action by the state to crack down on such websites, comes after California Governor Jerry Brown signed a first-in-the-nation law in October specifically targeting revenge porn. The law defines revenge porn as the posting of private, explicit photos of other people on the Internet to humiliate them. But authorities did not charge 27-year-old Kevin Bollaert under that law, because it is geared to those who post the incriminating pictures and not those who run websites that feature them …. Bollaert’s site, which is no longer operational, had featured over 10, 000 sexually explicit photos, and he charged women up to $350 each to remove their photos, officials said. … Bollaert was charged under a California identity theft law that prohibits using identifying information of a person without their permission, and under anti-extortion legislation, according to court documents. Unlike many other revenge porn websites, Bollaert’s site had required users post the photo subject’s full name, location, age and a link to the person’s Facebook profile, the Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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California Man Arrested for Running ‘Revenge Porn’ Website