For my Ethical Hackers. Would you make more money keeping this hack to yourself?
Can You Crack Monero? IRS Offers $625,000 Bounty for Anyone Who Can Break Privacy of Cryptocurrency
… Monero (XMR) is a famously privacy-centric cryptocurrency, with features built into it from its inception that claim to make transactions untraceable and completely private, hiding the details of movements of digital cash from prying eyes. Completely private by default, Monero is a lot more private than many other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
And that, of course, has not only made it a popular digital currency for criminals operating on the darknet, it’s also made it a focus of interest for law enforcement agencies and tax-enforcement authorities such as the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
… According to the IRS’s call for contractors they are looking to share a total of $625,000 to “one or more contractors” who assist them in their goal to break Monero, other anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrency, or Lightning or other Layer 2 off-chain cryptocurrency protocols.
The first part of the payment (a mere $500,000) will be paid if a successful proof-of-concept is delivered, demonstrating how Monero transactions can have their privacy stripped away from them.
An additional $125,000 will apparently be given to whoever the lucky person is after the technique has passed a full examination and has been successfully launched.
You will need this, the only question is when…
UK NCSC releases the Vulnerability Disclosure Toolkit
The British National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released a guideline, dubbed The Vulnerability Disclosure Toolkit, for the implementation of a vulnerability disclosure process.
… “The international standard for vulnerability disclosure (ISO/IEC 29147:2018 ) defines the techniques and policies that can be used to receive vulnerability reports and publish remediation information. The NCSC designed this toolkit for organisations that currently don’t have a disclosure process but are looking to create one.” reads the guideline.
Still want to be famous?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhua_database/
Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons
… The researcher alleges the purpose of the database is enabling influence operations to be conducted against prominent and influential people outside China.
… Security researcher Robert Potter and Balding co-authored a paper [PDF] claiming the trove is known as the “Overseas Key Information Database” (OKIDB) and that while most of it could have been scraped from social media or other publicly-accessible sources, 10 to 20 per cent of it appears not to have come from any public source of information. The co-authors do not rule out hacking as the source of that data, but also say they can find no evidence of such activity.
“A fundamental purpose appears to be information warfare,” the pair stated.
… In a second post Balding said the database matters because “what cannot be underestimated is the breadth and depth of the Chinese surveillance state and its extension around the world.
You don’t have to follow this rule, but be sure to follow that one.
FISA Court Approves Warrantless Surveillance but With Warning to FBI About Following Privacy Rules
The controversial warrantless surveillance program enacted under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act will go on for at least the remainder of this year, according to a recently-declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling from December 2019. A judge signed off on another year of the program but did so while admonishing the FBI over numerous violations of privacy rules.
… Certain privacy rules do govern this eavesdropping, but the declassified report makes clear that the FBI and other agencies have a tendency to disregard them while applying their queries in an overbroad manner and have potentially accessed the communications of tens of thousands of Americans who are not under investigation.
Another tech first for the justice system.
https://restofworld.org/2020/death-decreed-over-zoom/
Death decreed over Zoom
On May 4, a Nigerian man became the first known person in the world to be sentenced to death via a virtual court on Zoom. The session was brief — it began at 11 a.m. and ended before 2 p.m. — and in the screenshots people posted online, Olalekan Hameed, 35, who joined the call from prison, appeared to be alone. He looked calm, and the ruling was later reported to have gone off without a hitch. Two days before the sentencing, a link to the proceedings was shared on Twitter, but it largely went unnoticed; most Nigerians were preoccupied with the easing of a five-week-long lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Open trials hold some significance for Nigerians, particularly those who lived through the decades of military dictatorships that followed independence and disrupted early attempts at democratic rule. Back then, court hearings for dissenters and political opponents were replaced with Special Military Tribunals (SMTs), and public access to proceedings was granted or withheld on the whim of a dictator.
If you can’t blame the AI, you blame the safety driver? What will happen when there is no safety driver?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/technology/uber-autonomous-crash-driver-charged.html
Driver Charged in Uber’s Fatal 2018 Autonomous Car Crash
Investigators said the woman had been watching a video on her phone when the vehicle killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
A safety driver who was riding in an autonomous Uber vehicle when it struck and killed a pedestrian on a street in Tempe, Ariz., in 2018 has been charged with negligent homicide, the local authorities said on Tuesday.
The crash is believed to be the first pedestrian death caused by self-driving technology, and raised questions about who should be held responsible for such fatalities.
… A National Transportation Safety Board investigation attributed the crash mostly to human error, but also faulted an “inadequate safety culture” at Uber.
Don’t these “filters” also apply to individuals?
https://www.bespacific.com/jared-diamond-why-nations-fail-or-succeed-when-facing-a-crisis/
Jared Diamond: Why Nations Fail Or Succeed When Facing A Crisis
The following interview, between Noema Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels and author (previously of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”) Jared Diamond, has been edited for clarity and length.
“Nathan Gardels: In assessing how nations manage crises and successfully negotiate turning points — or don’t — you pass their experience through several filters. Some key filters you use are realistic self-appraisal, selective adoption of best practices from elsewhere, a capacity to learn from others while still preserving core values and flexibility that allows for social and political compromise.
How do you see the way various nations addressed the coronavirus pandemic through this lens?
Jared Diamond: Nations and entities doing well by the criteria of those outcome predictors include Singapore and Taiwan. Doing poorly initially were the government of Italy and now, worst of all, the federal government of the U.S…”
Resource
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3574935/oracle-open-sources-java-machine-learning-library.html
Oracle open-sources Java machine learning library
Oracle is making its Tribuo Java machine learning library available free under an open source license.
With Tribuo, Oracle aims to make it easier to build and deploy machine learning models in Java, similar to what already has happened with Python. Released under an Apache 2.0 license and developed by Oracle Labs, Tribuo is accessible from GitHub and Maven Central.
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