Supreme Court Rules In GPS Tracking Device Case. Washington DC police thought they had a good idea when they attached a global-positioning-system (GPS) device on the car of a suspected drug dealer in order to more effectively tail him and find his "safe house" stash. The police did, in fact, nail DC nightclub owner Antoine Jones. But the Supreme Court this week sided with the Appeals court that over-turned Jones's conviction on the grounds that police need to first obtain a search warrant before attaching such a device. The decision by the high court was unanimous, a relative rarity for this court that is usually politically divided. But the decision also opens up questions, legal scholars and some of the justices believe, about whether law enforcement will be allowed to track suspects by homing in on their cellphone with or without a warrant.
View Gallery: GPS Tracking Devices The decision should also open new questions about whether police can tap into GPS systems installed on cars, such as General Motors' OnStar system. Glype proxy.
Self-guided bullet could hit laser-marked targets from a mile away. A group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have built a prototype of a small-caliber bullet capable of steering itself towards a laser-marked target located approximately 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) away. The dart-like design has passed the initial testing stage, which included computer simulations as well as field-testing prototypes built from commercially available parts. The four-inch (10 cm) long projectile is to be used with smoothbore arms, meaning ones with non-rifled barrels. Rifling involves cutting helical grooves in the barrel to give the bullet a spin that, thanks to the gyroscopic effect, improves its aerodynamic stability and accuracy. In a self-guided projectile, however, such spinning movement would prevent the bullet from reliably turning towards the target when in flight.
For this reason, the group of researchers lead by Red Jones and Brian Kast decided to use a dart-like design that includes tiny fins to allow the projectile to fly straight, without a spin. S self-guided bullet prototype can hit target a mile away. Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex. Citation: Pasley BN, David SV, Mesgarani N, Flinker A, Shamma SA, Crone NE, et al. (2012) Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex. PLoS Biol 10(1): e1001251. Academic Editor: Robert Zatorre, McGill University, Canada Received: June 24, 2011; Accepted: December 13, 2011; Published: January 31, 2012 Copyright: © 2012 Pasley et al. Funding: This research was supported by NS21135 (RTK), PO4813 (RTK), NS40596 (NEC), and K99NS065120 (EFC).
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abbreviations: A1, primary auditory cortex; STG, superior temporal gyrus; STRF, spectro-temporal receptive field Results Words and sentences from different English speakers were presented aurally to 15 patients undergoing neurosurgical procedures for epilepsy or brain tumor. Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. A Brain Wave Worth a Thousand Words.
Clothes Hook Hidden Camera. How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement We all have an increasing number of sites and online services we’re members of, and sometimes it all gets a little overwhelming. At times, we just need to delete our memberships to some sites, either in an effort to simplify our lives or just because we’ve grown tired of a particular site or service.
What we often don’t realize when signing up for all these accounts, though, is how difficult it can be to permanently delete our accounts when we’ve had enough. Some require complicated, multi-step processes that can stretch over the course of days (or weeks). Others take less time, but still require multiple steps by the user. Below we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Facebook Difficulty (on a scale of 1-5, 5 being hardest): 5 Deleting a Facebook account is a bit more complicated than many other services. Then you can use the form found here to request deletion.
Twitter Difficulty: 2 MySpace. Microsoft Online Surveillance Guide - Cryptome Leak. Cryptome, a whistleblower site that regularly leaks sensitive documents from governments and corporations, is in hot water again: this time, for publishing Microsoft’s “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” a comprehensive, 22-page guide running down the surveillance services Microsoft will perform for law enforcement agencies on its various online platforms, which includes detailed instructions for IP address extraction.
You can find the guide here (warning: PDF). not anymore. Microsoft has demanded that Cryptome take down the guide — on the grounds that it constitutes a “copyrighted [work] published by Microsoft.” Yesterday, at 5pm, Cryptome editor John Young received a notice from his site’s host, Network Solutions, bearing a stiff ultimatum: citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Network Solutions told him that unless he takes the “copyrighted material” down, they will “disable [his] website” on Thursday, February 25, 2010. So far, Young refuses to budge. So, briefly: 1.
Using remote tracking software to find stolen laptop may have violated federal wiretap statute. Clements-Jeffrey v. City of Springfield, Ohio, 2011 WL 3678397 (S.D. Ohio August 22, 2011) [PDF copy of opinion] Services that help track down stolen laptops and other lost mobile hardware are indispensable. Consider, for example, the year-long saga of Jeff Blakeman who used MobileMe to help recover his MacBook Pro that a TSA agent stole from checked luggage. It is hard to not rejoice when one reads stories about laptop thieves being brought to justice. But what if the person being tracked did not steal the device, and did not know that it was stolen?
A recent case from Ohio shows how the privacy right of the innocent user can constrain the rightful owner from using all means of what we might call “remote self help.” Hot communications using hot property The facts of the case were salacious and embarassing. As it turns out, however, the student who sold plaintiff the laptop had stolen it. Absolute turned the information — including the X-rated screen shots — over to the police.
Can the NSA and CIA use your phone to track your location? July 26, 2011, 12:43 PM — There's no need to panic, or start shopping for aluminum-foil headwear, but the super-secret National Security Agency has apparently been thinking frequently enough about whether the NSA is allowed to intercept location data from cell phones to track U.S. citizens that the agency's chief lawyer was able to speak intelligently about it off the cuff while interviewing for a different job. "There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist," even if the NSA has no warrant to investigate a the person whose privacy it is invading or global permission to eavesdrop on everyone, according to Matthew Olsen, the NSA's general counsel.
He didn't come to talk about that particularly; he said it yesterday in response to a question from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was considering whether he'd be a good choice to run the National Counterterrorism Center. So far, though, no law. Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment. Browser-uniqueness.pdf (application/pdf Object) Breadcrumbs Tracker.
Bug 147777 – :visited support allows queries into global history. EFF Publishes Study On Browser Fingerprinting. ‘MegaSearch’ Aims to Index Fraud Site Wares. A new service aims to be the Google search of underground Web sites, connecting buyers to a vast sea of shops that offer an array of dodgy goods and services, from stolen credit card numbers to identity information and anonymity tools. MegaSearch results for BIN #423953 A glut of data breaches and stolen card numbers has spawned dozens of stores that sell the information. The trouble is that each shop requires users to create accounts and sign in before they can search for cards. Enter MegaSearch.cc, which lets potential buyers discover which fraud shops hold the cards they’re looking for without having to first create accounts at each store.
This free search engine aggregates data about compromised payment cards, and points searchers to various fraud shops selling them. According to its creator, the search engine does not store the compromised card numbers or any information about the card holders. I first read about this offering in a blog post by RSA Fraud Action Research Labs. New York Police Working on Technology to Detect Concealed Weapons. Video the FBI does not want you to see. The Free IT Desktop. Untitled. Operator Operator YAPO is a new incarnation of an award-winning portable Opera package. You can run Operator on any computer you want (company, library, your friend's computer) and without administration privileges as long as it's a Windows PC. Plus, unless you choose otherwise, no data will be stored at the host computer. Changes in the current release This initial release includes Opera 10.52. Subscribe to updates via the Operator RSS feed.
Download Operator YAPO 1.0 Operator weights 10 MB and is Windows only. Please do not link directly to the files. Troubleshooting and bugs If you seek support or want to report a bug, please use the Troubleshooting forum. Looking for the old OperaTor? Here is an archive page. Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake. On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” Christopher Soghoian. Shopping Centre Tracking System Faces Civil Rights Campaigners’ Wrath. Civil rights campaigners have spoken out against a technology used by several shopping centres in the UK to track consumers using their mobile signals.
The shopping centres claim that the technology helps them provide better services to consumers and retailers without compromising privacy. The system, called the Footpath, allows them to know how are people spending time in a shopping centre, which spots they visit the most and even the route they take while walking around in a shopping centre. Footpath has been developed by Hampshire based Path Intelligence. The system involves several trackers being installed in locations across the shopping centre and is capable of tracking consumers' position to up to 2 meters. According to The Guardian, several consumer and civil rights groups, including Big Brother Watch, have claimed that consumers must be given a choice on whether they want their movement tracked or not. DHS Monitors Social Media For 'Political Dissent' Stealth. EPIC Obtains New Documents on DHS Media Monitoring, Urges Congress to Suspend Program. Disk encryption software.
Disk encryption software is computer security software that protects the confidentiality of data stored on computer media (e.g., a hard disk, floppy disk, or USB device) by using disk encryption. Compared to access controls commonly enforced by an operating system (OS), encryption passively protects data confidentiality even when the OS is not active, for example, if data is read directly from the hardware or by a different OS. In addition crypto-shredding suppresses the need to erase the data at the end of the disk's lifecycle. Methods[edit] The disk's data is protected using symmetric cryptography with the key randomly generated when a disk's encryption is first established.
Done in software, disk encryption typically operates at a level between all applications and most system programs and the low-level device drivers by "transparently" (from a user's point of view) encrypting data after it is produced by a program but before it is physically written to the disk. Other Features[edit] Hardware-based full disk encryption. Hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) is available from many hard disk drive (HDD) vendors, including: Seagate Technology, Hitachi, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba and also solid-state drive vendors such as SanDisk, Samsung, Micron and Integral. The symmetric encryption key is maintained independently from the CPU, thus removing computer memory as a potential attack vector.
In relation to hard disk drives, the term 'Self-Encrypting Drive' (SED) is in more common usage. Hardware-FDE has 2 major components: the hardware encryptor and the data store. There are currently 3 varieties of hardware-FDE in common use: Hard Disk Drive (HDD) FDE (usually referred to as SED)Enclosed hard disk drive FDEBridge and Chipset (BC) FDE Hard disk drive FDE[edit] Hitachi, Micron, Seagate, Samsung, and Toshiba are the disk drive manufacturers offering TCG OPAL SATA drives.
Enclosed hard disk drive FDE[edit] For example ViaSat (formerly Stonewood Electronics) with their FlagStone and Eclypt[2] drives. Digital Investigation : The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics. Full disk encryption is too good, says US intelligence agency. FBI indirectly admits to using Carrier IQ, but Big Brother scare tactics are overblown. In the wake of the Carrier IQ blowup of the last few weeks, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was filed asking for “manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ.”
The FBI has since responded to Muckrock’s missive stating that such records existed but they were not currently available because their release could affect ongoing investigations. Here is an excerpt: The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure… the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings. This is being read in many circles as tacit confirmation that the FBI indeed uses Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ: Which phones are infected, and how to remove it.
Carrier IQ, the carrier-sanctioned keylogger and activity monitor that has been confirmed to exist on Android devices, on AT&T and Sprint networks, has been found in iOS. In our post yesterday, we wrongly assumed that Carrier IQ was something that carriers added to smartphones — but now it’s clear that Apple bakes Carrier IQ into its closed-source iOS for use by carriers. At this point it isn’t clear if Carrier IQ is snooping on your everyday iPhone use. It sounds like it’s only active when “Diagnostics & Usage” is turned on, and that should only be enabled if you clicked “Submit Logs to Apple” during the iOS 5 setup process.
There’s also no proof that this data is actually transmitted across the internet to Carrier IQ servers — but to be honest, if Apple has gone to the trouble of installing multiple third-party daemons on its infallible fondleslab, it’s fairly safe to assume that it’s being used. How to detect and remove Carrier IQ Preventative measures. Carrier IQ is the best reason yet to switch to the iPhone. EFF reverse engineers Carrier IQ. Don't Break the Internet. :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. Coders Are Already Finding Ways Around SOPA Censorship - Politics. Firefox Add-On Bypasses SOPA DNS Blocking. ‘The Pirate Bay Dancing’ Add-On Killls DNS and IP Blockades. Homeland Security Request to Take Down MafiaaFire Add-on « hja’s blog. Homeland Security Wants Mozilla to Pull “Domain Seizure” Add-On. Panopticlick. Microsoft's Web map exposes phone, PC locations | Privacy Inc. Lock It Down! How To Create A Simple Google Chrome App In Less Than 5 Minutes.
Who Owns Your PC? New Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update "Phones Home" to Microsoft Every 90 Days. Tools for rooting out Web plagiarism, copyright violations. What Every Writer Should Know About Web Technology. How a New Police Tool for Face Recognition Works - Digits. How to surf anonymously without a trace. Newly Declassified Files Detail Massive FBI Data-Mining Project | Threat Level. The Drone as Privacy Catalyst. Could Domestic Surveillance Drones Spur Tougher Privacy Laws? Xqgdc1.jpg (JPEG Image, 1550x1050 pixels) - Scaled (55%) 12 Free Products You Need to Protect Your Privacy. Remove DRM protection. How to hide files in JPEG pictures.
Privacy: Tools. Who Knows What Youhavedownloaded.com? GPS - The Complete Guide - Arduino based Global Positioning System. IP Geolocation & IP to Location Experts - Quova, Inc. Free Real-Time Visitor IP Geo Location API | IPLocationTools.com. The Freenet Project - /index. Government. Encryption. Telecom. Web tracking. Search privately. On line privacy.