Tag: nsa

Square Acquires Evenly, A Venmo Competitor For Sending And Receiving Payments With Friends

Square has just announced that it has acquired Evenly , a company that was built to make it easy for friends to send and receive payments for splitting bills and other expenses. The company was founded in 2012, and was similar in concept to Venmo, an NYC-based startup that was acquired by Braintree last year . Evenly offered a mobile app that let people send and receive requests for funds from their contacts list, organized around events and experiences. For each participant in a pool, it would list what a user owed and what they’d already paid, if any, and you could see progress towards the total cost of an event displayed visually, as well as send reminders to all parties involved that they have to pay up. There’s also an activity feed that tracks progress and adds a social element to the bill sharing. Evenly will remain open and active until January 15, 2014 for existing users, and the team says on its own blog that it will give existing users “plenty of time” to get money out of the app and finish collections. Users can find out more here at an FAQ designed to guide those who will be transitioning off of the service. The app has been removed from the App Store, however, and new user registrations are turned off completely. On Square’s Engineering blog, the payment company’s Product Engineering Lead Gokul Rajaram says that the Evenly team will be working on “seller initiatives,” and it seems likely this is designed to bring Evenly’s talented five-person engineering and design team into the fold to boost Square Cash and help it continue to ‘square’ off against the now Braintree-owned Venmo and Google Wallet.

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Square Acquires Evenly, A Venmo Competitor For Sending And Receiving Payments With Friends

FreeBSD won’t use Intel & Via’s hardware random number generators, believes NSA has compromised them

The maintainers of the security-conscious FreeBSD operating system have declared that they will no longer rely on the random number generators in Intel and Via’s chips , on the grounds that the NSA likely has weakened these opaque hardware systems in order to ease surveillance. The decision is tied to the revelations of the BULLRUN/EDGEHILL programs, wherein the NSA and GCHQ spend $250M/year sabotaging security in standards, operating systems, software, and networks. “For 10, we are going to backtrack and remove RDRAND and Padlock backends and feed them into Yarrow instead of delivering their output directly to /dev/random,” FreeBSD developers said. “It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more.” In separate meeting minutes, developers specifically invoked Snowden’s name when discussing the change. “Edward Snowdon [sic] — v. high probability of backdoors in some (HW) RNGs,” the notes read, referring to hardware RNGs. Then, alluding to the Dual EC_DRBG RNG forged by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and said to contain an NSA-engineered backdoor, the notes read: “Including elliptic curve generator included in NIST. rdrand in ivbridge not implemented by Intel… Cannot trust HW RNGs to provide good entropy directly. (rdrand implemented in microcode. Intel will add opcode to go directly to HW.) This means partial revert of some work on rdrand and padlock.” “We cannot trust” Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto, FreeBSD developers say [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]        

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FreeBSD won’t use Intel & Via’s hardware random number generators, believes NSA has compromised them

Life from the near future of location surveillance

In Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data , the ACLU’s Jay Stanley presents a slide deck from the near future in which a government intelligence service presents a glowing account of how it convicted “Jack R Benjamin” of DUI pre-crime, by watching all the places he went, all the people he interacted with, and using an algorithm to predict that he would commit a DUI, and, on that basis, to peer into every corner of his personal life. The use of the slide deck is inspired here, echoing as it does the Snowden leaks (Snowden had been tasked with consolidating training documents from across the NSA, which is why he had access to such a wide variety of documents, and why they’re all in powerpoint form). And the kind of data-mining here is not only plausible, it’s likely — it’s hard to imagine cops not availing themselves of this capability. Just out of curiosity, who else has been visiting Mary Smith’s house? Looks like Mary has a few close friends. Wonder if Mr. Benjamin is aware of this Bill Montgomery character who spent a few nights with her? Going back to the main screen, looks like Mr. Benjamin is quite a union activist. Perhaps we should notify George over at BigCorp (he serves at the Fusion Center with us). Just in case our man has been involved in the trouble they’ve been having over there. Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data [Jay Stanley/ACLU] ( via MeFi )        

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Life from the near future of location surveillance

Spooks of Warcraft: how the NSA infiltrated gamespace

A new Snowden leak details how he NSA and GCHQ tasked its agents to infiltrate Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other MMOs to find jihadis and spy on them. The battalions of undercover orcs did indeed take much of gamespace, but there’s no evidence they ever spotted a plot. I was once questioned by members of an “unnamed branch of the State Department” at a games and public diplomacy event about the likelihood that jihadis were playing MMOs; and I said something like, “Sure, of course. Everyone plays MMOs.” I didn’t realize they’d take it all quite so much to heart. The absurdity of sending spies to infiltrate Warcraft can best be understood as a natural outflow of the doctrine that holds that if any two bad guys, anywhere in the world, can communicate in such a way that the NSA can’t listen in on them, all of society will crumble. Once you set yourself the insane task of eavesdropping on all conversations, everywhere, always, it’s inevitable that you’ll send Secret Squirrel and his pals to Azeroth. At the request of GCHQ, the NSA had begun a deliberate effort to extract World of Warcraft metadata from their troves of intelligence, and trying to link “accounts, characters and guilds” to Islamic extremism and arms dealing efforts. A later memo noted that among the game’s active subscribers were “telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies”. The UK agency did not stop at World of Warcraft, though: by September a memo noted GCHQ had “successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live”. Meanwhile, the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Humint Service were all running human intelligence operations – undercover agents – within the virtual world of Second Life. In fact, so crowded were the virtual worlds with staff from the different agencies, that there was a need to try to “deconflict” their efforts – or, in other words, to make sure each agency wasn’t just duplicating what the others were doing. By the end of 2008, such human intelligence efforts had produced at least one usable piece of intelligence, according to the documents: following the successful takedown of a website used to trade stolen credit card details, the fraudsters moved to Second Life – and GCHQ followed, having gained their first “operational deployment” into the virtual world. This, they noted, put them in touch with an “avatar [game character] who helpfully volunteered information on the target group’s latest activities”. Second Life continued to occupy the intelligence agencies’ thoughts throughout 2009. One memo noted the game’s economy was “essentially unregulated” and so “will almost certainly be used as a venue for terrorist laundering and will, with certainty, be used for terrorist propaganda and recruitment”. Revealed: spy agencies’ covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online games [James Ball/The Guardian]        

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Spooks of Warcraft: how the NSA infiltrated gamespace

You Can 3D Print Your Very Own Movie Prop From The Hobbit

If you fit into the piece of the Venn diagram between “Fans of The Hobbit, ” “Microsoft Users, ” and “Folks Who Have a 3D Printer, ” Microsoft and Warner Bros. UK have a treat: On December 13th, when the second Hobbit movie debuts, you’ll be able to download plans to 3D print your own souvenir: the Key to Erebor. Read more…        

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You Can 3D Print Your Very Own Movie Prop From The Hobbit

Route-Injection Attacks Detouring Internet Traffic

msm1267 writes “Attackers are using route injection attacks against BGP-speaking routers to insert additional hops in the traffic stream, redirecting traffic to third-party locations where it can be inspected before it’s sent to its destination. Internet intelligence company Renesys has detected close to 1, 500 IP address blocks that have been hijacked on more than 60 days this year, a disturbing trend that indicates attackers could finally have an increased interest in weaknesses inherent in core Internet infrastructure.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Route-Injection Attacks Detouring Internet Traffic

Report: NSA Put Spyware on Over 50,000 Networks Worldwide

Netherlands newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports today that newly-reviewed documents indicate the NSA has covertly installed spying malware on over 50, 000 computer networks worldwide. The documents, leaked by Edward Snowden, include a map of areas where the malware is installed . Read more…        

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Report: NSA Put Spyware on Over 50,000 Networks Worldwide

Bublcam Is A 360º Camera That Can Stream Immersive, Spherical Video In Real-Time

Meet Bublcam :  a 360 degree camera made by Canadian startup Bubl that lets you capture spherical panoramas of what’s going on around you – either as still photographs or spherical video that allows you to swipe around and explore the scene. The camera can even stream video in real-time over Wi-Fi, in case you want to broadcast every possible vista of your skiing holiday as it happens. Or it will be able to if Bubl hits its Kickstarter funding goal. Bublcam’s makers have taken to the crowdfunding site looking for $100,000 to go into production – aiming for a May 2014 shipping date. They’ve been working on the project for more than two years, funding the R&D work themselves – including by selling a previous business. “We’re all tapped out,” says Bubl founder and CEO Sean Ramsey, explaining why it’s taking to Kickstarter now. The ability to capture still panorama photography makes Bublcam similar to a device such as Ricoh’s Theta . However there are differences: Bublcam has zero blind spots in the image, thanks to its tetrahedral design which positions four 190º lenses so that they overlap and can therefore create a perfect image. Its video capture ability also sets it apart. Bublcam captures 14 mega pixel spherical photos, and videos at 1080p at 15 fps and 720p at 30fps. And then there’s the spherical playback. Neat hardware design aside, it’s Bubl’s software that does the real grunt work – taking a multiplex image consisting of the four separate camera views and stitching those quadrants together in real-time so that the user can share their environment spherically as events unfold. “Calibration became quite a bottleneck,” says Ramsey, discussing the process of creating software capable of stitching a quad-multiplex image into a sphere in real-time. “It went through a lot of iterations before we got that right.” Getting that right involved teaming up with university professors and students in Canada to hone the algorithms required to turn something flat and segmented into a dynamic sphere of content shaped more like life. (If you don’t fancy a fancy sphere, Bublcam’s output can also be converted into a flat equirectangular.) “Multiplex imagery was an untested area in general. Most people weren’t using it for anything other than security footage,” he adds. “There was very little use for multiplex imagery so it became something that I realised very quickly was free and open for patenting. “When we discovered a way to do it, that’s when we realised we really had something special.” So it’s the software process – of turning a multiplex image into a sphere in real-time, utilising techniques such as UV mapping – that Bubl is hoping will ultimately give it an edge, rather than just the selling of the camera hardware itself. That said, it’s starting with the basic hardware sales play on Kickstarter. The initial Bublcam is going to be priced at around $800, with the aim of pushing it down to around $700. Even so, that’s pretty steep for a single-use consumer gadget. (Kickstarter early birds do get the chance to bag a Bublcam for $400.) In future, if all goes to plan, Ramsey said Bubl is hoping to produce two additional versions of the camera: a cheaper version aimed at the consumer market, and a higher quality camera (that is capable of taking higher resolution shots) for the prosumer market. But selling camera hardware is just one quadrant of what Bubl plans. It sees the greatest potential in licensing both its hardware and software – and  having that handle on both hardware and software combined is what gives it its competitive advantage vs rivals in this space, argues Ramsey. “When Google came out with their Google Trekker… I was just like is this where the technology is really heading?… I’m still a little surprised,” he says. ”There’s been a couple of other companies that have come out with portable 360 devices. And the problem they have – which has become the biggest problem for this entire market – is you have the hardware and then you have the software, and most people try to tackle one or the other. “No one’s really tried to tackle them both together as a solution. That has made a huge differentiator for us.” Bubl is making a photo viewer and a video viewer (for desktop, desktop browser and as mobile apps) so that content captured with the Bublcam can be properly explored (although it will also be possible to export content in formats such as Jpeg and MP4 for viewing elsewhere). Bubl’s Kickstarter campaign notes: The bubl players have been developed to allow users to look up, down and all around and create their own experiences. It also provides users with imaging controls in order to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and zoom. Currently developed for desktop, desktop browser and in beta on iOS devices. Our development schedule also includes WebGL and Android devices, which will be released in the very near future. It’s also developing an open software API and hardware SDK so that developers can tap into Bublcam’s universe – envisaging applications for an AR gaming device like the Oculus Rift, or viewing bubls using the gesture-based Leap Motion controller. Down the line, assuming Bublcam captures enough imaginations, it’s aiming to license the camera technology to other electronics manufacturers – the Sonys, the LGs, the Samsungs of the world, as Ramsey puts it – and is working on an enterprise version of its software suite for licensing to various vertical markets that are focused on content creation. “There’s the opportunities to sit down with the ad agencies, and production companies, and televisions studios and broadcast networks,” he says. “We’re creating software with some interesting features pulled in to it to allow those places to create a lot more dynamic version of a bubl. Interactive features like if you want to create a virtual tour where you can click from one bubl to the next, if you want to have branding information included directly into the video. “Or if you want to create an experience where the content of the video had data visualisations – like image recognition, facial recognition. We want to be able to allow those features to built either on top of our player – through the API – and as the company grows, leverage some of those features ourselves internally so if you decide to license the software suite you will get access to feature that you’re not going to get through the free application.” Ramsey tells TechCrunch he originally came up with the idea for Bublcam some five years ago, while working at an ad agency and being asked by a client to come up with an experience where the car sat in the middle of the screen and was viewable from all angles and directions. “In developing that idea we realised that the technology wasn’t really there, and we’ll have to do something ourselves,” he says. “And after we did it, I realised that if we could do this for a still image, why couldn’t we do this for video?” Exactly who or what Bublcam is going to be for is TBC at this point. It’s partly why Bubl is taking to Kickstarter, rather than choosing and targeting one specific vertical itself. The concept is proven, the prototype is working but the applications still need to dreamt up. And that is probably Bublcam’s biggest barrier: getting people to see the potential in spherical video. Initially, Ramsey says he thought the security industry would be the likely adopters of Bublcam but various other applications have since suggested themselves – from gaming to action sports to immersive videochatting to advertising/industry applications – hence the decision to “put the content and the camera out into the world to see where it sticks best”. To see what early adopters do with it. (The quick-to-adopt-new-tech adult entertainment industry may well be one such early taker for Bublcam. Time will tell.) As it kicks off its Kickstarter campaign, Bubl is still tweaking the camera hardware to improve video capture so it can better compete with GoPro for action sports use-cases, says Ramsey – an enhancement that it has factored into its May 2014 ship date. In the meantime, it will be waiting to see what the crowdfunding community makes of Bublcam, and what the first crop of backers end up doing with it. “We are still in a place where we don’t know exactly where it’s going to go to first, how it’s going to be adopted quickest. We kind of wanted to put it out there and let the world dictate exactly how we want to use it. We have built a system and a product that will entertain and fit into many different verticals,” he says. “And although our goal is to try to disrupt as many markets as possible, which one’s going to be first, which one’s going to provide us with the best type of results, which one’s going to create the largest revenue stream – is still unfamiliar. This technology is really new, and people still don’t fully comprehend where it’s going to be able to go. We want to discover that along with everyone else.”

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Bublcam Is A 360º Camera That Can Stream Immersive, Spherical Video In Real-Time

HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?

New submitter codeusirae writes “An initial round of criticism focused on how many files the browser was being forced to download just to access the site, per an article at Reuters. A thread at Reddit appeared and was filled with analyses of the code. But closer looks by others have teased out deeper, more systematic issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?

Android 4.4 KitKat Targets Google’s Next Billion Users, Adds Pervasive Search & Improves Google Now

Today Google announced details of its long-awaited Android 4.4 KitKat operating system for the first time, going beyond just the candy bar branding. KitKat is designed around three major tentpoles, Google told TechCrunch, including reaching the next billion (it previously announced 1 billion activations ) Android users, putting so-called Google “smarts” across the entire mobile experience, and building for what comes next in mobile devices. Google said that Android is growing at three times the speed of developed markets in developing countries; but the phones that are catching on in those markets are mostly running Gingerbread, a version of Android that’s now many versions out of date. These phones, however, have lower specs with only around 512MB of memory available, and Gingerbread is what’s required to fit within those tech requirements. That presented a technical challenge Google was keen to tackle: How to build KitKat in such a way that it can bring even those older and lower-specced devices up-to-date, to help provide a consistent experience across the entire Android user base. That mean reducing OS resources, and then also modifying Google apps to stay within those boundaries, as well as rethinking how the OS manages available memory to make the most of what is present. None of this was enough, however, so Google went further to help third-party developers also offer their content to everyone on Android, rather than just those with the top-tier devices. A new API in KitKat allows devs to determine what amount of memory a phone is working with, and serve a different version of the app to each, making it possible for the same application to run on even the earliest Android devices. “People generally launch new versions of operating systems and they need more memory,” Android chief Sundar Pichai said at a Google event today. “Not with KitKat. We’ve taken it and made it run all the way back on entry level phones. We have one version of the OS that’ll run across all Android smartphones in 2014.” That’s the single biggest feature being announced here: Google wants to get everyone on the same platform, and is doing more than it ever has to end the fragmentation problem. One version over the next year is a hugely ambitious goal, but if the company is serious about not only serving a growing developing market, but offering it something like software version parity, it seems like it’s finally figured out how to go about doing that. It’ll still be up to manufacturers to decide whether or not devices get the KitKat upgrade, Google notes, so we’ll probably still see a fair amount of older devices get left out via official update channels. Here’s what’s coming with KitKat, which launched on the new Nexus 5 today. Lock & Home Screen Aside from making KitKat the One OS To Rule Them All, Google has also introduced a number of new features with this update. Album art is displayed full screen behind the lockscreen when music is playing, for instance, and you can scrub the track without unlocking. There’s a new launcher, with translucency effects on the navigation bar and on the top notification bar. Long-pressing a blank space on any homescreen zooms out to allow you to re-arrange them all, and when you’re running an app that is written for full-screen, the navigation bar and the notification bar both now disappear entirely from view. Launcher-specific stuff is Nexus-only initially, of course, and whether some of these elements make their way to manufacturer-specific home screens will depend on those OEMs. Dialer Android now offers up a new dialer, which incorporates search for easy reference. This means you can enter the name of a business even if you don’t know it’s number or have it stored in your address book, and then the dialer will retrieve it from the same database that powers Google Maps. It’s incorporating local data, as well as looking for the name used in your search. This also allows the phone to provide caller ID information for incoming calls, too, and there’s a new auto-populating favorites menu that builds a list of your most frequent dialled numbers. Hangouts Google has indeed consolidated the entire text/video/MMS experience with Hangouts, as predicted. It replaces the default messaging app, and allows you to send an SMS just as you would’ve before , to a number or to someone in your contact book. There’s also a new Places button for sharing map locations, and emoji support is finally built-in to your software keyboard. This is the iMessage equivalent that Android has been lacking thus far. It’s going to be a tremendously useful feature, especially for those who are transitioning to Android from BlackBerry in that next 5 billion Google is adamantly pursuing. You can now attach photos to communications not only from your local library, but also from Google Drive, and from Box, as well. Any third-party provider can provide a hook to be included, according to Google, which is impressive considering that Google isn’t limiting things to its own ecosystem. Camera New HDR+ software is built-in to Android KitKat, which has no apparent changes to the surface user experience – a device owner just snaps the shutter button. Behind the scenes, however, Google’s mobile OS is taking many photos at once, and fusing the best parts of each together seamlessly to come up with a better end product. Lights appear more natural, faces are visible even when backlighting threatens to overwhelm, and moving objects are more in focus. HDR+ is Nexus 5-only to start, but Google says they’re looking to bring it to other devices later on, too. Wireless Printing Developers can now add printing to individual apps, and Google will work with building it out for additional manufacturers, too, something it says is “easy” to accomplish. Right now, any HP wireless printer works with the system, and any printer that already supports Google Cloud Print will also be able to take advantage of the new feature. Google Search Search is at the core of Google’s overall product experience, the company explained, so it’s doing more to make that accessible on mobile. Search is now on every homescreen by default in Android, and it supports hotwording, so that you can just say “Okay, Google” to get search up and running at any time, much like you would on Glass. Speech is crucial to Google with this update, and it said it was proud of its improvements so far; the error rate of speech recognition dropped 20 percent last year, and there’s been a 25 percent increase in overall speech recognition accuracy over the past few years, according to Pichai. Using voice recognition also now allows you to tap a word and bring up a list of alternatives to select from. The system also now asks more clarifying questions, using natural language, to ensure better service overall. Google Now Google Now has been updated to be accessed via a swipe form the left side of the screen, which is a tweak from when it was accessed via swiping up in previous versions of Android. Google also focused on answering questions like “How can we help users in more ways, and bring up the most relevant content?” with this update, which means new types of cards. Now can now figure out that The Walking Dead is a favorite show of the user, for instance, and offer up articles related to it and its progress. So not only is Google Now aware of your surroundings and schedule, but also what type of content you’re interested in. It can also note which blogs you check regularly, and provide you info about when new posts appear; in other words, Google is adding some of the features that were core parts of Google Reader to Now, and making them more contextually-aware. It can also incorporate crowd-sourced data to make better recommendations. For instance, it could know that people often search for geyser times at Yellowstone National Park, and provide a card with those if it sees you’re in the area. If you’re near a cinema, it’ll present movie times and a link to the Fandango application for purchasing tickets. Another example Google provided is that Stanford students, who often search for the academic calendar in fall, will now receive that data automatically when the correct season arrives, provided they’ve informed Google of their student status previously in some way. These types of Cards will roll out in mid-November, Google says. Deep App Linking For Google Search Now when you Google things, results can link into apps directly – and not just to the app generally, but to specific content within the app. Some results will have “Open in App X” next to them, and those will take you directly to a relevant section within, like a recipe for example. Partners at launch include Expedia, Moviefone, OpenTable and more. This is a Nexus-only feature at launch, but Google says it will be available for all KitKat devices in time. Availability Android 4.4 KitKat is available today via the Android Open Source Project , and it’s available on Nexus 5 hardware immediately, which also goes on sale today in 10 countries. It will also be available on Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Google Play edition of both the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One in the coming weeks. It’s an OS update that Google says is focused on furthering their vision for software that will run across all levels of all kinds of devices, not just on phones, which has interesting connotations give everything we’ve been hearing lately about Google wearables .

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Android 4.4 KitKat Targets Google’s Next Billion Users, Adds Pervasive Search & Improves Google Now