What can I say? When they're right
they're right.
"Huang
Chengqing, China's top internet security official, alleged that
cyberattacks
on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China
on the U.S. 'We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse
the U.S., but it's not helpful in solving the problem.' Huang,
however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government
just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington
should extend the same courtesy. 'They advocated cases that they
never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had
talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of
thought to solve problems.' In response to the recent theft of U.S.
military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is
worthy of Captain Hammer: 'Even following the
general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked
to the Internet.'"
A few experts think China's more
cooperative attitude has come about precisely
because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations.
They have got to be kidding, right?
What is the 'per PC' cost in the US?
Government
£6,000 per year per desktop spend a frightening insight into public
sector IT
The government has always faced
criticism that its IT is slow, unwieldy, inflexible, unnecessarily
complex and overpriced. It’s one thing when you face this
criticism from your rivals, the press or members of the public –
but you know you’ve reached a dire point when it’s your own chief
operating officer (COO) twisting the knife.
At a government spending review
attended earlier this week by V3, the government’s new COO
Stephen Kelly shed some light into the world of technology at
Whitehall and across the public sector.
“I came into the office and I pressed
my PC and it took me seven minutes to boot up,” he told attendees.
“That’s government in the old world, that’s three days of the
year I waste of my time booting up.”
… Aside from the huge waste in
productivity outlined by Kelly, the government seems to be throwing
huge amounts down the drain maintaining this outdated kit. The COO
said he thought the cost of a single desktop PC was around £6,000
per year – for which he could go and buy 10 Apple iPads.
… According to my estimations –
verified by a CIO – this figure should be less than £1,000 per
year taking into account the cost of the hardware, office suite, and
support and server costs over a three-year period, so it looks like
the government is getting completely swindled by their PC supplier –
or Kelly needs to go back and re-sit his maths GCSE.
What does this help them find? If they
are not looking for anything specific, they have to examine every
link as possibly hostile.
UK
Guardian – Verizon forced to hand over telephone data – full
court ruling
“The US government is collecting the
phone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top
secret court order. Read
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order.”
[From the Guardian:
Under the terms of the blanket order,
the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location
data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of
all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
(Related) Did anyone think they would
say, “Oops, we goofed!” There is a lot you can learn after the
event, but detecting threats before they occur is much more
difficult.
White
House defends collecting phone records
The White House on Thursday defended the National Security Agency's
need to collect telephone records of U.S.
citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in
protecting the nation from terrorist threats."
While defending the practice, a senior Obama administration official
did not confirm a newspaper report that the NSA has been collecting
the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under
a top secret court order.
What exactly does DHS expect to find
when they search a device at the boarder? Anyone too stupid to email
their files across the boarder probably deserves to be caught.
What records are kept of the results of
'intuition and hunch?' Are the results better than for searches
based on psychological “tells?” or random searches for that
matter... Does DHS even care what works best?
DHS
Watchdog: ‘Intuition and Hunch’ Are Enough to Search Your Gadgets
at Border
The Department of Homeland Security’s
civil rights watchdog has concluded that “intuition and hunch”
are among the primary reasons why it is “inadvisable” to
establish constitutional safeguards protecting travelers’
electronics from being searched for any reason along the U.S. border.
The DHS, which secures the nation’s
border, on Wednesday released a redacted report of its “Civil
Rights/Civil liberties Impact Assessment” (.pdf) pertaining to
border searches of electronic devices, including laptops and mobile
phones. In February, the DHS disclosed an executive summary of the
21-page report, concluding then that “imposing a requirement that
officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border
search of an electronic device would
be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil
liberties benefits.”
Perspective Has the next generation
(SmarterPhones) become available? And when will we get “Smarter
than their owner” phones?
Pew
– Smartphone Ownership 2013
Smartphone
Ownership 2013, by Aaron Smith, June 5, 2013
“For the first time since the Pew
Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project began
systematically tracking smartphone adoption, a majority of Americans
now own a smartphone of some kind. Our definition of a smartphone
owner includes anyone who says “yes” to one—or both—of the
following questions:
- 55% of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone.
- 58% of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market.”
Worth mentioning to my students?
"Did you
buy an Acer laptop with Vista and less than 1 GB of RAM? The company
has a thumb drive it would like to send you. Did you get an unwanted
text from Papa John's? The company would like to make it up with you
with $50 worth of free pizza. These and other little rewards are
available as a result of class action lawsuits that have wound their
ways through the court systems and now, years later, are paying
off for very large groups of tech users."
I wonder how many USB drives the
lawyers took as their share.
Some students may find this useful. I
seem to recall similar sites for teachers. Perhaps we could get a
full Computer Forensics site this way?
"Q. What do Chris
Brown and Steve Ballmer have in common? A. They both want you to
Beg for It.
GeekWire reports that Microsoft
is touting its new Chip In program, a crowdfunding platform that
allows students to 'beg' for select Windows 8 PCs and tablets that
they can't afford on their own. Blair Hanley Frank explains,
'Students go to the Chip In
website and choose one of the 20 computers and tablets that have
been pre-selected by Microsoft. Microsoft chips in 10% of the price
right off the bat, and then students are given a link to a "giving
page" to send out to anyone they think might give them money.
Once their computer is fully funded, Microsoft ships it to them.'
Hey, what
could go wrong?"
For my Ethical Hackers looking for that
perfect graduation gift.
"The Today Show had a piece
this morning showing video of thieves
apparently using a small device to open and enter cars equipped with
keyless entry. Electronic key fobs, which are supposed to be
secure, are replacing keys in more and more new cars, but the
evidence suggests that a device has been developed which effortlessly
bypasses this security (at least on certain makes and models).
'Adding to the mystery, police say the device works on some cars but
not others. Other surveillance videos show thieves trying to open a
Ford SUV and a Cadillac, with no luck. But an Acura SUV and sedan
pop right open. And they always seem to strike on the passenger
side. Investigators don't know why.' Police
and security experts say they are 'stumped.'"
[Never a good sign Bob]
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