I don’t have Flash, so I haven’t actually been able to watch the episode. But it sounds like the Simpsons’ writers got it right on: “Homer and all of the feeble-minded power plant employees unsurprisingly become addicted to wearing Oogle Goggles, because the devices give them effortless command of a huge amount of information. But […]

One of the hackers who previously wrote about nation-state level attacks being used against hacker conference attendees has a short guide to spotting certain kinds of very advanced attacks on mobile phones and regular computer BIOSes. It seems he’s isolated some fingerprints of “anomalous behavior” caused by the imperfect programming of some of the attack […]

Cold war story time. Somewhere in the literature there’s a most illuminating story about Bill Clinton and the KGB, from an interview with a former KGB officer and a journalist. As the KGB man puts it, Clinton toured Moscow when he was 23. Was the KGB watching at the time? Most certainly. What did they […]

The NSA’s “Golden Nugget” perfect scenario: “Target uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device.” What can they get? “a “possible image”, email selector, phone, buddy lists, and “a host of other social working data as well as location”.” Also: “Anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support […]

“The only way the NSA discovers abuses [by people with access to the mass surveillance system data] is from self reporting.” — Edward Snowden i.e., self-reporting by the abusers. “Whoops, boss, I couldn’t control myself and had to look up my ex.” Yeah. You think — just maybe — the NSA’s data is available to […]

An article in the German-language press makes a good point: for all of you switching to DuckDuckGo to avoid the NSA, no dice. The (Russian) Yandex-affiliated site is hosted on Amazon S3 in the US, Amazon being a CIA contractor. DuckDuckGo is also a US company and subject to the PATRIOT Act, FISA court orders, […]

According to two new studies, people who used a smartphone after 8pm slept more poorly and had much less energy the following day. The smartphone-users simply couldn’t focus as well. The studies compared smartphones to tablets, laptops, and TVs, and found that smartphones had a bigger negative effect than any of those. Forget “personal tracking […]

Here’s a nasty bugger. This malware doesn’t produce any network traffic. Nor does this malware appear in any file on disk. In fact, it barely does anything at all. All the malware does is watch the Windows clipboard. Whenever you “copy” a number of a certain format, it replaces that number… with another number. Why […]

SNOWDEN LIVE Q&A in circa 4 hours: http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/ “The [US intelligence] black budget contains wording that seems to suggest that they are onto something in terms of cryptanalysis. Bruces guesses: elliptic curve cryptography (weaknesses in certain curves), general factoring or discrete log, or RC4.” Jaap-Henk Hoepman has posted his notes on the 2014 Real World […]

First, IMSI catchers are being used against the demonstrators: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv/mobile-phone-providers-deny-sending-text-messages-to-euromaidan-participants-335349.html Second, best live stream of the heavy front-line action — looks like the police lines have advanced a hundred meters or so from this morning, with protest forces holding their positions using burning tire barricades during the day that have since been overrun. As the […]