Fontgate strikes again. Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif has stepped down following a Supreme Court order disqualifying him from holding office. The ruling also called for anti-corruption cases against Sharif and his family. After proving pivotal to the probe that led to today’s decision, Microsoft’s Calibri font could also make an appearance in the next stage of proceedings. The innocent typeset was dragged into the turmoil in Pakistan last month. Back then, Sharif’s daughter (and heir apparent) Maryam Nawaz was accused of submitting forged documents to the Supreme Court-instituted panel probing her family’s financial assets. In its report, the investigation team said the documents from 2006 were deemed fake because they were in the Calibri font — which wasn’t publicly available until 2007. Moments after the panel’s findings were released, the internet (being the internet) blew up with jokes about #Fontgate. The Pakistani Twitterverse latched on to the term, using it to lampoon Sharif and his aides. The media also got in on the act, even going so far as to interview Calibri’s creator Lucas De Groot. And, arguably, the best result to come from it all: a reference to the investigation made it on to the font’s Wikipedia page . Fast-forward to today’s historic decision. Alongside the PM’s dismissal, Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered the country’s anti-corruption body to file references against Sharif and others. The evidence collected by the original investigative panel (including that document) will be used in the subsequent cases in accountability courts. As it currently stands, Pakistan is left without a PM, and is also set to lose its finance minister (who was also disqualified in today’s order). Sharif’s ruling party, which holds the majority in parliament, will now choose his successor. Whoever takes over won’t be in for an easy ride. Not a single PM in Pakistan’s history has served a full term in office.
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Pakistan’s Prime Minister resigns following Fontgate scandal
An anonymous reader writes: “A team of researchers from French company P1 Security has detailed a long list of issues with the 4G VoLTE telephony, a protocol that has become quite popular all over the world in recent years and is currently in use in the US, Asia, and most European countries, ” reports Bleeping Computer. Researchers say they identified several flaws in the VoLTE protocol (a mixture of LTE and VoIP) that allow an attacker to spoof anyone’s phone number and place phone calls under new identities, and extract IMSI and geo-location data from pre-call message exchanges. These issues can be exploited by both altering some VoLTE packets and actively interacting with targets, but also by passively listening to VoLTE traffic on an Android device. Some of these flaws don’t even need a full call/connection to be established between the victim and the target for the data harvesting operation to take place. Additionally, another flaw allows users to make calls and use mobile data without being billed. The team’s research paper, entitled “Subscribers remote geolocation and tracking using 4G VoLTE enabled Android phone” was presented last week at SSTIC (Symposium sur la Securite des Technologies de l’Information et des Communications), a security conference held each year in Rennes, France. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Earlier this week, a post started on 4chan claimed a wealth of celebrity nudes- -a large cache in possession of a hacker who’d gained access to several celebrities’ alleged personal photos— would leak on Sunday . Well, Sunday’s here, the supposed leak has begun, and the internet is reacting accordingly. Read more… 
netbuzz (955038) writes “Three years ago today, software consultant Sohaib Athar was working on his laptop at home in Pakistan when he tweeted: ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’ And then: ‘A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it’s not the start of something nasty :-S.’ It was for Osama bin Laden. Today Athar says, ‘People do bring it up every now and then.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
New submitter mc10 points out a post on the CloudFlare blog about the circumstances behind Google’s services being inaccessible for a brief time earlier today. Quoting: “To understand what went wrong you need to understand a bit about how networking on the Internet works. The Internet is a collection of networks, known as “Autonomous Systems” (AS). Each network has a unique number to identify it known as AS number. CloudFlare’s AS number is 13335, Google’s is 15169. The networks are connected together by what is known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is the glue of the Internet — announcing what IP addresses belong to each network and establishing the routes from one AS to another. An Internet “route” is exactly what it sounds like: a path from the IP address on one AS to an IP address on another AS. … Unfortunately, if a network starts to send out an announcement of a particular IP address or network behind it, when in fact it is not, if that network is trusted by its upstreams and peers then packets can end up misrouted. That is what was happening here. I looked at the BGP Routes for a Google IP Address. The route traversed Moratel (23947), an Indonesian ISP. Given that I’m looking at the routing from California and Google is operating Data Centre’s not far from our office, packets should never be routed via Indonesia.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.