Computers, Freedom, and Privacy CSISAC Techdirt. Collectif Liberté, Egalité, Justice (CLEJ) Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware Even before the German constitutional court ("Bundesverfassungsgericht") on February 27 2008 forbade the use of malware to manipulate German citizen's PCs, the German government introduced a less conspicuous newspeak variant of the term spy software: "Quellen-TKÜ" (the term means "source wiretapping" or lawful interception at the source). This Quellen-TKÜ can by definition only be used for wiretapping internet telephony. The court also said that this has to be enforced through technical and legal means. The CCC now published the extracted binary files [0] of the government malware that was used for "Quellen-TKÜ", together with a report about the functionality found and our conclusions about these findings [1]. During this analysis, the CCC wrote its own remote control software for the trojan. "This refutes the claim that an effective separation of just wiretapping internet telephony and a full-blown trojan is possible in practice – or even desired," commented a CCC speaker. Links:
Benetech It was at Caltech during the 1970s when the idea hit like lightning. An engineering student named Jim Fruchterman had just learned, in a modern optics class, about how pattern recognition technology could guide a missile to its target. “If you could use this technology to recognize tanks or bridges,” Jim thought, “perhaps you could also recognize letters and words. Then we could use software to read those words aloud to people who are blind.” Benetech’s founder and CEO, Jim Fruchterman, sharing our story. It was years later, after a stint as a rocket engineer, that Jim cofounded a venture capital–backed tech company called Calera Recognition Systems. When the machine was presented to Calera’s investors, they were impressed that it worked. In 1989, Benetech was born with a business model intended to keep costs low for users, and the organization quickly became the largest maker of affordable reading systems for the blind.
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