itwbennett (1594911) writes “Cisco Systems said Monday it plans to invest over $1 billion to expand its cloud business over the next two years, including building a global, OpenStack-based ‘network of clouds’ that it has dubbed the ‘intercloud’. The Intercloud will support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud, both private and public, according to Cisco.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Cisco Plans $1B Investment In Cloud
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.
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L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation
Good news, security lovers! Google just announced that Gmail will be all encrypted all the time. More specifically, every single email you send or receive will use an encrypted HTTPS connection, regardless of which device you’re using and which network. Even public Wi-Fi is okay. Read more…
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Every Single Gmail Message You Send Will Now Be Encrypted
darthcamaro writes “Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. ‘It’s a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java, ‘ James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. ‘In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Java 8 Officially Released
Remember all that business about the NSA saying it only collects phone metadata ? Yeah, that’s not true. Not only can the NSA listen in on foreigners’ phone calls. It can record “every single” conversation in an entire country and store the recordings for 30 days at a time, according to a new Washington Post report . Read more…
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NSA System Can Record Entire Countries’ Calls for 30 Days at a Time
sandbagger writes “The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the ‘remarkably dysfunctional’ federal bureaucracy. Officials at the Office of Scientific Integrity spent ‘exorbitant amounts of time’ in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, David Wright writes. He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI ‘the very worst job I have ever had.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits In Frustration With Bureaucracy
Developers from the Replicant project (a free Android offshoot) have documented a serious software back-door in Samsung’s Android phones , which “provides remote access to the data stored on the device.” They believe it is “likely” that the backdoor could provide “over-the-air remote control” to “access the phone’s file system.” At issue is Samsung’s proprietary IPC protocol, used in its modems. This protocol implements a set of commands called “RFS commands.” The Replicant team says that it can’t find “any particular legitimacy nor relevant use-case” for adding these commands, but adds that “it is possible that these were added for legitimate purposes, without the intent of doing harm by providing a back-door. Nevertheless, the result is the same and it allows the modem to access the phone’s storage.” The Replicant site includes proof-of-concept sourcecode for a program that will access the file-system over the modem. Replicant has created a replacement for the relevant Samsung software that does not allow for back-door access. Samsung Galaxy devices running proprietary Android versions come with a back-door that provides remote access to the data stored on the device. In particular, the proprietary software that is in charge of handling the communications with the modem, using the Samsung IPC protocol, implements a class of requests known as RFS commands, that allows the modem to perform remote I/O operations on the phone’s storage. As the modem is running proprietary software, it is likely that it offers over-the-air remote control, that could then be used to issue the incriminated RFS messages and access the phone’s file system. …The incriminated RFS messages of the Samsung IPC protocol were not found to have any particular legitimacy nor relevant use-case. However, it is possible that these were added for legitimate purposes, without the intent of doing harm by providing a back-door. Nevertheless, the result is the same and it allows the modem to access the phone’s storage. However, some RFS messages of the Samsung IPC protocol are legitimate (IPC_RFS_NV_READ_ITEM and IPC_RFS_NV_WRITE_ITEM) as they target a very precise file, known as the modem’s NV data. There should be no particular security concern about these as both the proprietary implementation and its free software replacement strictly limit actions to that particular file. Samsung Galaxy Back-door
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Samsung Galaxy back-door allows for over-the-air filesystem access
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
sciencehabit writes “Most magnets shrug off tiny temperature tweaks. But now physicists have created a new nanomaterial–an ultrathin 10-nanometer layer of nickel grafted onto a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide–that dramatically changes how easily it flips its magnetic orientation when heated or cooled only slightly. The effect, never before seen in any material, could eventually lead to new types of computer memory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives
If you don’t want to always look around for a measuring cup, a Redditor shared a neat trick to make permanent markings on your metal pot. Most of the items needed should be in your house, or you can pick them up for very little. Here’s what you’ll need: Read more…
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Add DIY Permanent Volume Markings on a Metal Pot