MadSc13ntist

Digital rights group takes down Pawn Storm base

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been awarded control of its namesake domain, which was being used to install malware on people's computers.…

U.S. state and federal law enforcement officials appear poised to tap into public concern over the terror attacks in France last week to garner support for proposals that would fundamentally weaken the security of encryption technology used by U.S. corporations and citizens. Here’s a closer look at what’s going on, and why readers should be tuned in and asking questions.

Despite early and widely repeated media reports that the terrorists who killed at least 128 people in Paris used strong encryption to disguise their communications, the evidence of this has failed to materialize. An initial report on Nov. 14 from Forbes titled “Why the Paris ISIS Terrorists Used PlayStation4 to Plan Attacks” was later backpedalled to “How Paris ISIS Terrorists May Have Used PlayStation 4 to Discuss and Plan.” Turns out there was actually nothing to indicate the attackers used gaming consoles to hide their communications; only that they could do that if they wanted to.

Politico ran a piece on Sunday that quoted a Belgian government official saying French authorities had confiscated at least one PlayStation 4 gaming console from one of the attacker’s belongings (hat tip to Insidesources.com).

“It’s unclear if the suspects in the attacks used PlayStation as a means of communication,” the Politico story explained. “But the sophistication of the attacks raises questions about the ability of law enforcement to detect plots as extremists use new and different forms of technology to elude investigators.”

Also on Sunday, The New York Times published a story that included this bit:

“The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials who had been briefed on the investigation but were not authorized to speak publicly. It was not clear whether the encryption was part of widely used communications tools, like WhatsApp, which the authorities have a hard time monitoring, or something more elaborate. Intelligence officials have been pressing for more leeway to counter the growing use of encryption.”

After heavy criticism of the story on Twitter, The Times later removed the story from the site (it is archived here). That paragraph was softened into the following text, which was included in a different Times story later in the day: “European officials said they believed the Paris attackers had used some kind of encrypted communication, but offered no evidence.” To its credit, the Times today published a more detailed look at the encryption debate.

The media may be unwittingly playing into the hands of folks that former NBC reporter Bob Sullivan lovingly calls the “anti-encryption opportunists,” i.e., those who support weakening data encryption standards to make it easier for law enforcement officials to lawfully monitor people suspected of terrorist activity.

The directors of the FBI , Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency have repeated warned Congress and the technology community that they’re facing a yawning intelligence gap from smart phone and internet communication technologies that use encryption which investigators cannot crack — even after being granted the authority to do so by the U.S. courts.

For its part, the Obama administration has reportedly backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices.

“While the administration said it would continue to try to persuade companies like Apple and Google to assist in criminal and national security investigations, it determined that the government should not force them to breach the security of their products,” wrote Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger for The New York Times in October. “In essence, investigators will have to hope they find other ways to get what they need, from data stored in the cloud in unencrypted form or transmitted over phone lines, which are covered by a law that affects telecommunications providers but not the technology giants.”

But this hasn’t stopped proponents of weakening encryption from identifying opportunities to advance their cause. In a memo obtained in August by The Washington Post, Robert Litt, a lawyer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote that the public support for weakening encryption “could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

To that apparent end, law enforcement officials from Manhattan and the City of London are expected on Wednesday to release a “white paper on smartphone encryption,” during an annual financial crimes and cybersecurity symposium at The Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A media notice (PDF) about the event was sent out by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., one of the speakers at the event and a vocal proponent of building special access for law enforcement into encrypted communications. Here’s Vance in a recent New York Times op-ed on the need for the expanded surveillance powers.

Critics say any plans designed to build in secret “backdoors” that allow court-ordered access to encrypted communications ultimately would backfire once those backdoors were discovered by crooks and nation states. In her column titled “After Paris Attacks, Here’s What the CIA Director Gets Wrong About Encryption,” Wired.com’s Kim Zetter examines security holes in the arguments for weakening encryption.

The aforementioned Bob Sullivan reminds us that weakening domestic encryption laws would simply ensure that the criminals we wish to monitor use non-US encryption technology:

“For starters, U.S. firms that sell products using encryption would create backdoors, if forced by law.  But products created outside the U.S.?  They’d create backdoors only if their governments required it.  You see where I’m going. There will be no global master key law that all corporations adhere to.  By now I’m sure you’ve realized that such laws would only work to the extent that they are obeyed.  Plenty of companies would create rogue encryption products, now that the market for them would explode.  And of course, terrorists are hard at work creating their own encryption schemes.”

“There’s also the problem of existing products, created before such a law. These have no backdoors and could still be used. You might think of this as the genie out of the bottle problem, which is real. It’s very,  very hard to undo a technological advance.”

“Meanwhile, creation of backdoors would make us all less safe.  Would you trust governments to store and protect such a master key?  Managing defense of such a universal secret-killer is the stuff of movie plots.  No, the master key would most likely get out, or the backdoor would be hacked.  That would mean illegal actors would still have encryption that worked, but the rest of us would not. We would be fighting with one hand behind out backs.”

“In the end, it’s a familiar argument: disabling encryption would only stop people from using it legally. Criminals and terrorists would still use it illegally.”

Where do you come down on this debate, dear readers? Are you taking advantage of the kinds of technologies and services — like Signal, Telegram and Wickr — that use encryption the government says it can’t crack? Sound off in the comments below.

With more than 120 people killed in Paris, US government officials are already touting the City of Light as the case against encryption.

The post After Paris Attacks, Here’s What the CIA Director Gets Wrong About Encryption appeared first on WIRED.

Well, that didn't take long:

As Paris reels from terrorist attacks that have claimed at least 128 lives, fierce blame for the carnage is being directed toward American whistleblower Edward Snowden and the spread of strong encryption catalyzed by his actions.

Now the Paris attacks are being used an excuse to demand back doors.

CIA Director John Brennan chimed in, too.

Of course, this was planned all along. From September:

Privately, law enforcement officials have acknowledged that prospects for congressional action this year are remote. Although "the legislative environment is very hostile today," the intelligence community's top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, said to colleagues in an August e-mail, which was obtained by The Post, "it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement."

There is value, he said, in "keeping our options open for such a situation."

I was going to write a definitive refutation to the meme that it's all Snowden's fault, but Glenn Greenwald beat me to it.

EDITED TO ADD: It wasn't fair for me to characterize Ben Wittes's Lawfare post as agitating for back doors. I apologize.

Better links are these two New York Times stories.

EDITED TO ADD (11/17): These two essays are also good.

EDITED TO ADD (11/18): The New York Times published a powerful editorial against mass surveillance.

EDITED TO ADD (11/19): The New York Times deleted a story claiming the attackers used encryption. Because it turns out they didn't use encryption.

KeeFarce allows you to extract KeePass passwords (2.x) by using DLL injection to execute code and retrieve the database information from memory. The cleartext information, including usernames, passwords, notes and url’s are dumped into a CSV file in %AppData%. KeeFarce uses DLL injection to execute code within the context of a running...

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

Tantan, a Chinese clone of dating app Tinder, sends passwords, phone numbers, location data and more in plain text, Larry Salibra, founder and CEO of Pay4Bugs, a crowdsourced bug software testing program, has found.

In an age when anyone can sit in a Wi-Fi cafe and intercept communications, sending sensitive data such as locations and passwords unencrypted is regarded by the information security community as totally irresponsible. Encrypting private information during transit is a basic step of customer security.

Tantan is an app available for free on both iOS and Android platforms. It works in the same way as Tinder: users cycle through profiles of potential partners who are physically located nearby, swiping when they like someone. When both parties are interested in each other, they can start chatting.

“Much to my surprise, the information sent between my phone and Tantan’s server somewhere on the other side of the Great Firewall deep in Mainland China was completely readable,” Salibra wrote on his blog. “I could see the password I had just entered, my phone number and all the people I was being matched with. And if I could read it, that means any number of other people could as well.”

This data could easily be entered into Google Maps to track someone’s movements, he said

In other words, pretty much any communication between the app and the Tantan server in China is being sent unencrypted. This means that anyone intercepting those messages, such as someone sitting in a Wi-Fi cafe, can read them: this is one of the reasons other apps typically encrypt data to protect the privacy of their customers.

When Salibra set up a test account on the service, he was also asked for his gender, sexual orientation, partner age preferences, interests and hobbies. One can imagine that location and sexual preferences might be data that a user would want to keep relatively discreet. “All of this information was sent in cleartext, unencrypted, across the Internet,” he wrote.

The Tantan app also sends unencrypted location data to the server, “which could be several times a minute.” Salibra said this data could easily be entered into Google Maps to track someone’s movements.

Tantan has said it is working on a solution to the problems, namely, adding HTTPS encryption to its apps’ data. However, in an email to Salibra, Tantan CEO Yu Wang did not mention whether the company has informed its users.

In a similar case, several apps certified by the UK’s National Health Service were recently found to be sending sensitive details across the internet in plain text.

It is not clear how many users are on Tantan. In February, the company raised $5 million in funding.

All of us are probably guilty of a photobomb or two, but some of us take this art to the next level. This subreddit captures that really awkward moment that people realize they’ve been caught on live TV.

The gif that started it all features a policeman brusquely strolling toward the camera, realizing he’s live on air and freezing like a rabbit caught in the headlights before crab walking out of the frame:

This young kid was so desperate to get something off of mom that she didn’t give a second thought to dashing out in front of the cameras as her mom was broadcasting some serious news nuggets to the nation:

This man sauntered onto the set before some mysterious magnetic force field sucked him back out of the frame:

Some people just wished they’d invested in a session at the local sun tanning jaunt before appearing on camera:

This ‘r/arewerolling’ subreddit got started ten months ago by a reddit user called JustReminiscing, but started trending at breakneck speed yesterday. Looks like we suddenly can’t get enough of those candid camera moments.

The hacktivist group that breached the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan isn’t done yet.

The group, which calls itself “Crackas With Attitude” or CWA, published a list of almost 1,500 names, emails and phone numbers of government employees on Monday. Some of the names and other details appear to be legitimate, although Motherboard wasn’t able to verify them all.

The group reemerged after more than days days of virtual radio silence. One of its members, only known as Cracka, had not tweeted for more than a week. Cracka went AWOL just a few days after the group had released the contact details of almost 2,400 government members, potentially exposing sensitive information.

Cracka told Motherboard that this new list is part of the same breach.

“Just got back from my seven day nap,” Cracka told Motherboard in a Twitter direct message, adding that he did not post this new information before because he was “working on other stuff” and was “also locked out” of his Twitter account.

It’s still unclear where the hackers found this information. The hackers, who are allegedly teenagers, have previously claimed to have breached a portal that gave them access to several law enforcement tools, including JABS, a database of arrested people; IC3, an FBI crime-reporting tool; and VCC, a sharing tool for law enforcement agencies.

Another member of the group, nicknamed Cubed, told Motherboard at the time that they had “a lot more names,” so it’s no surprise they have now released more. And this might still be just a portion of the database they have, given that the list appears to contain only last names that start with the letter A.

The FBI declined to comment.

On Friday evening, a group of terrorists launched a string of simultaneous attacks in Paris, killing at least 129 people, according to media reports.

Very little information is known about how the terrorists, who allegedly had links to ISIS, planned the attacks. Yet, that hasn’t stopped commentators and the media from speculating the group likely avoided surveillance by using messaging apps that use encryption, and even by communicating over PlayStation 4.

Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon ignited the speculation over the weekend when he complained that communications over PlayStation 4 are extremely hard to spy on. His comments were not related to the Paris attacks, however; in fact, they came three days before they even happened, during a talk at a POLITICO event.

The author of the viral Forbes article that started the speculation over the weekend also posited that terrorists might very well be communicating “without speaking a word,” perhaps spelling out attack plans in Super Mario Maker’s coins, or writing messages to each other by firing bullets on a wall in Call of Duty.

The height of the media frenzy over the unsubstantiated possibility that ISIS is using PlayStation 4 to plot attacks or communicate was probably this inadvertently hilarious segment on the Today show on Monday, where correspondents sent each other chat messages while playing video games.

“And remember this doesn’t go through your phone company,” a Today show producer said.

Yet, no one has presented any evidence to support the claims that the Paris attackers were using any of these methods.

No one has presented any evidence to support the claims that the Paris attackers were using encryption or the PlayStation 4

Matt Suiche, a French security researcher who lives in San Francisco, said that obviously it’s possible that ISIS is using video game consoles to recruit or communicate, but that in this case, it’s more likely they “they planned it physically, to avoid leaving any traces.” Many of the suspects involved in the attack were reportedly all living in the same Belgian town.

“You may as well use a homing pigeon and write in slang to coordinate a meeting, and nobody would be able to do anything,” Suiche told Motherboard in an online chat. “When it comes to planning we are talking about people who live in the same area, within a few miles radius. They can also definitely pop up to the apartment of one other, like before cellphones existed.”

A spokesperson for Sony, which owns Playstation, declined to answer a series of specific questions regarding how Sony collaborates with law enforcement authorities to investigate potential crimes.

“We are dedicated to checking behavior and we urge our users and partners to report activities that may be offensive, suspicious or illegal,” the spokesperson said in the statement, sent via email. “When we identify or are notified of such conduct and verify it, we are committed to reviewing it and taking appropriate actions.”

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an expert on surveillance, said that as far as he knows, “there’s no end to end encryption of user communication” on the PlayStation 4.

Sanchez, who noted that he owns and uses a PlayStation 4, also added that it’s possible to access a user account from any device, something that’d be “very hard” to do if there was strong encryption. Moreover, he added, if Sony has mechanism in place to report users being abusive, the company probably has the capability to intercept and review users’ communications for other reasons. In fact, Sony clearly says it can monitor the PlayStation network in its software usage legal terms.

Obviously, there are some theoretical advantages to using a non-traditional means of communication that’s less likely to be monitored by authorities. But thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden we know that’s not the case. Spies from the NSA and the British intelligence agency GCHQ have been so worried about this in the past that they’ve sent undercover agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life, and monitored users of Xbox Live.

“It’s just going to be inherently very difficult to catch every single suspicious person who’s having a conversation [online].”

Jay Kaplan, who used to work at the NSA, told Motherboard that while non-traditional platforms are more challenging than widely used ones, ”at this point there is very much a ’whatever it takes’ mentality.”

”It is possible that these networks have simply been overlooked or difficult to sort through the troves as data,” Kaplan said in an email. ”Impenetrable? That word doesn't exist in the [intelligence community's] vernacular.”

It’s not even clear ISIS tolerates the use of video gaming consoles. The group, which has very strict religious rules, has apparently banned its members from even playing billiards, according to documents retrieved from Syria, and published by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East forum think tank.

“It is not proper for the mujahideen servants of God to occupy their leisure time with these sorts of things that render no benefit on them but rather constitute a waste of time,” reads a translated ISIS legal document, or “fatwa.”

Moreover, given that ISIS members can use, and have been reported to use, encryption apps on their phones, why use the less-portable PlayStation? On Sunday, a New York Times article reported that the attackers used encryption to communicate, namechecking the popular chat program WhatsApp. The article was based on quotes of unnamed European officials, and has since mysteriously disappeared.

It’s worth noting that despite the fact that WhatsApp has enabled encryption between Android users, the platform doesn’t appear to be spy-proof. Earlier this year, in fact, a group of alleged terrorists were arrested in Belgium after authorities intercepted their WhatsApp messages. Moreover, even if the messages over WhatsApp are encrypted, authorities likely can still see who’s talking to whom—in other words, metadata.

Europol declined to comment for this article.

It’s possible that the Paris attackers used encryption apps, and even the PlayStation 4, to communicate. But so far, no one has presented any evidence supporting this claim.

The mayor of Vilvoorde, a Brussels suburb where many jihadists who have travelled to Syria reportedly originate from, said on Monday that the country’s intelligence agencies lack of Arabic speakers is “without doubt one of the biggest challenges” to investigating jihadists, according to a Belgian newspaper. Also on Monday, Turkish authorities said they had alerted France months ago about one of the attackers involved in the massacre on Friday, to no avail.

The reality might very well be that intelligence and law enforcement simply missed the clues that would have led to the suspects.

“It’s just going to be inherently very difficult to catch every single suspicious person who’s having a conversation [online],” Sanchez told Motherboard. “Totally independent of the technical obstacle, it’s always going to be tough.”

Image: Code.org

The Hour of Code is an annual campaign designed to get kids across the globe interested in coding, and this year, Microsoft and Minecraft developer Mojang (which Microsoft acquired in 2014) have joined the initiative by designing a fun Minecraft tutorial that helps teach children the fundamentals of coding. It says it’s for ages “6 and up,” but I confess: I’m 27, and I had a lot of fun with it.

The tutorial, which is already up and running, is broken down into 14 increasingly complicated “puzzles.” You drag and drop blocks representing commands into your workspace, and press “Run” to see your Minecraft character navigate its world—chopping down trees and shearing sheep. After you complete a puzzle, you can view the code you wrote by seeing the blocks translated into Javascript.

Image: Code.org

Full disclosure: I have never played Minecraft, nor have I ever written in Javascript, so the novelty it had for a newbie like myself probably played a part in my enjoyment. But it was still bizarrely satisfying to solve these puzzles, even if they were designed for a child. And by showing kids how basic typed commands can translate into on-screen actions, I’d wager that the appeal will be pretty universal.

The Hour of Code campaign doesn’t officially kick off until Computer Science Education week, which begins December 7, but the tool is already up and ready for use by kids and educators. Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi believes Minecraft’s simple, universal appeal will reach a broad range of children, saying "Minecraft is a special game that girls and boys alike often can't be pried away from. This year's Minecraft tutorial will empower millions of learners around the world...and will inspire them to impact the world by creating their own technology or apps."

If we really want a more diverse workforce in the tech sphere, we need to reach a broader range of students at a young age, so coding becomes just another way for them to build, play, and create. So initiatives like the Hour of Code are worth paying attention to and supporting—plus, I had a lot of fun shearing sheep.

Hallie Siegel writes: According to the non-profit Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Applications Center, there are over 250 different configurations of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) in service today. That number is likely to grow in the coming years as the technology improves — note that the US Navy has made UUVs a priority and is planning to launch a whole squadron of them by 2020. Dan Gettinger from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College gives an overview of this technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: Intel announced a new version of their Xeon Phi line-up today, otherwise known as Knight's Landing. Whatever you want to call it, the pre-production chip is a 72-core coprocessor solution manufactured on a 14nm process with 3D Tri-Gate transistors. The family of coprocessors is built around Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture which itself is part of a larger PCI-E add-in card solution for supercomputing applications. Knight's Landing succeeds the current version of Xeon Phi, codenamed Knight's Corner, which has up to 61 cores. The new Knight's Landing chip ups the ante with double-precision performance exceeding 3 teraflops and over 8 teraflops of single-precision performance. It also has 16GB of on-package MCDRAM memory, which Intel says is five times more power efficient as GDDR5 and three times as dense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

szczys writes: Hedy Lamarr is a household name for the wrong reason. Her name is known as a Hollywood actress, but her legacy is in your pocket and reaches far more people than her movies. She was a brilliant thinker who plied her skills during World War II, developing technology that could help to win the war. Her patent wasn't used at the time, but is a foundation of spread-spectrum which is used in the radio modules of your cellphone: WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and others. This frequency hopping concept sat unused for decades before being added to the most ubiquitous of wireless connectivity methods.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HughPickens.com writes: Fast Coexist reports on the Edible Insect Desktop Hive, a kitchen gadget designed to raise mealworms (beetle larva), a food that has the protein content of beef without the environmental footprint. The hive can grow between 200 and 500 grams of mealworms a week, enough to replace traditional meat in four or five dishes. The hive comes with a starter kit of "microlivestock," and controls the climate inside so the bugs have the right amount of fresh air and the right temperature to thrive. If you push a button, the mealworms pop out in a harvest drawer that chills them. You're supposed to pop them in the freezer, then fry them up or mix them into soup, smoothies, or bug-filled burgers. "Insects give us the opportunity to grow on small spaces, with few resources," says designer Katharina Unger, founder of Livin Farms, the company making the new home farming gadget. "A pig cannot easily be raised on your balcony, insects can. With their benefits, insects are one part of the solution to make currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat obsolete." Of course, that assumes people will be willing to eat them. Unger thinks bugs just need a little rebranding to succeed, and points out that other foods have overcome bad reputations in the past. "Even the potato, that is now a staple food, was once considered ugly and was given to pigs," says Unger adding that sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products. "Food is about perception and cultural associations. Within only a short time and the right measures, it can be rebranded. . . . Growing insects in our hive at home is our first measure to make insects a healthy and sustainable food for everyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The healthcare sector gets a hand from Microsoft, who will release a new encryption algorithm which will allow developers to handle genomic data in encrypted format, without the need of decryption, and by doing so, minimizing security risks. The new algorithm is dubbed SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) and is based on homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical operations to be ran on encrytped data, yielding the same results as if it would run on the cleartext version. Microsoft will create a new tool and offer it as a free download. They've also published the theoretical research. For now, the algorithm can handle only genomic data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

George Maschke writes: AntiPolygraph.org has published a document (14 MB PDF) on polygraph countermeasures that is allegedly derived from classified information. The document suggests techniques that polygraph operators might use in an attempt to detect efforts to beat the polygraph, but fails to offer any coherent strategy for detecting sophisticated countermeasures such as those outlined in AntiPolygraph.org's The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 MB PDF) or Doug Williams' How to Sting the Polygraph. Ominously, the leaked document avers that an examinee's stated lack of belief in polygraphy is a marker of deception. AntiPolygraph.org has also published an older U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations polygraph countermeasure handbook (3.2 MB PDF) that similarly offers no methodology for detecting sophisticated countermeasures (such as any actual spy, saboteur, or terrorist might be expected to use).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has long argued that evidence of BitTorrent is evidence of piracy, and ISPs have generally gone along with them. But now, ISP Cox Communications is pushing back against that claim. They have been sued by publishers for failing to halt service for users alleged to have pirated music. Not only has Cox argued that the piracy evidence is invalid, they're also contesting the idea that BitTorrent is only used for piracy (PDF). "Instead of generalizing BitTorrent traffic as copyright infringement, the music companies should offer direct proof that Cox subscribers pirated their work. Any other allegations are inappropriate and misleading according to Cox." The company says, "the Court should preclude Plaintiffs from relying on mere innuendo that BitTorrent inherently allows individuals to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: In an interview with Reuters, the head of China's Tsinghua Unigroup has revealed they will invest 300 billion yuan ($47bn) over the next five years with the ambition of becoming the world's third largest chip-maker. The state-backed company, also the technological investment arm of Tsinghua University, is in talks with an unnamed U.S. company (most likely Micron) though Zhao discounts the possibility of buying a controlling share as politically insensitive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whether you have anything to hide or not , privacy, and the laws regarding your privacy, are important. This interactive chart tells you what each state’s current laws say about law enforcement’s capability to access cell phone information.

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You’ve probably heard the phrase “strike while the iron is hot,” but when emotions are running high, it’s often better to not strike at all. By waiting for the “iron” to go cold, you’ll avoid making heated situations any worse.

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The Car-Freshner Corporation prides itself in its Little Trees, those flimsy albeit potent diffusers of suffocating fragrance. In fact, Little Trees have freshness so on lock that OutKast might have to relinquish their title. But even more urgent is an ongoing legal battle between the Car-Freshner Corporation and their rival in car scent, Exotica Fresheners Company. Should the latter prevail, the Car-Freshner Corporation fears the dilution of its brand, their badge of freshness thrown into jeopardy.

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For years, the OED went at least somewhat dignified with their new “words of the year” selections. In 2014 they selected “vape”; in 2013 it was “selfie”—two words we’d all dutifully added to our daily lives. But times are hard. So hard that the Dictionary’s celebrated addition this year is just... a picture.

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Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have both released statements claiming that their shitty states will not welcome Syrian refugees following the mid-November ISIS attacks on Paris, France. (Neither governor noted similar concern over the similar terrorist attacks in Beirut .)

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Did you know that two Georgetown University presidents sold Jesuit-owned slaves in the 1830s to pay down the school’s debt? Now the institution is renaming two buildings memorializing these men because of their slavery ties.

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For something we try so hard to lose, fat cells make a very pretty picture when stained with red dye. And a new study has found that the nutrients they consume as they mature changes in a significant way.

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Oxford Dictionaries has declared 2015 the year of the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji. It beat out competition like Dark Web, on fleek, lumbersexual, and the pronoun “they.”

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We don’t know the specifics of how the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday were carried out. That hasn’t stopped the law enforcement community from shamelessly blaming encryption for helping terrorists, or from seizing the attack as an opportunity to defend surveillance.

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Last Friday, Islamic State terrorists attacked several locations in Paris, France, killing more than 120 people and injuring hundreds more. Over the weekend, as more information emerged, reporters and analysts began to speculate that the terrorists used an unlikely tool for coordination: the PlayStation 4. As it turns out, that was all based on a reporting mistake.

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Security pros urged to drop the crap, get into the scrap

Black Hat Europe  Haroon Meer, founder of applied research company Thinkst, opened the Black Hat Europe conference last week with a keynote attacking the fashionable obsessions of the security businesses, including blind faith in Big Data and an obsession with zero-day vulnerabilities.…