“Hey,
it's lots cheaper than bombing their facilities...”
Report:
US and Israel Behind Flame Espionage Tool
The United States and Israel are
responsible for developing the sophisticated espionage rootkit known
as Flame, according to anonymous Western sources quoted in a news
report.
The malware was designed to provide
intelligence about Iran’s computer networks and spy on Iranian
officials through their computers as part of an ongoing cyberwarfare
campaign, according
to the Washington Post.
The program was a joint effort of the
National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, which also
produced the Stuxnet worm that is believed to have sabotaged
centrifuges used for Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2009 and
2010.
“This is about
preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action,”
a former high-ranking US intelligence official told the Post.
“Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down
the road than this.”
Try
your hand at intelligence? What did we know and when did we know it?
June 19, 2012
National
Security Archive: Top Secret CIA Documents on Osama bin Laden
Declassified
News
release: "The National Security Archive today is posting
over 100 recently released CIA documents relating to September 11,
Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The
newly-declassified records, which the Archive obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act, are referred to in footnotes to the 9/11
Commission Report and present an unprecedented public resource for
information about September 11. The collection includes rarely
released CIA emails, raw intelligence cables, analytical summaries,
high-level briefing materials, and comprehensive counterterrorism
reports that are usually withheld from the public because of their
sensitivity. Today's posting covers a variety of topics of major
public interest, including background to al-Qaeda's planning for the
attacks; the origins of the Predator program now in heavy use over
Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Iran; al-Qaeda's relationship with Pakistan; CIA
attempts to warn about the impending threat; and the impact of budget
constraints on the U.S. government's hunt for bin Laden. Today's
posting is the result of a series of FOIA requests by National
Security Archive staff based on a painstaking review of references in
the 9/11
Commission Report."
Busy
little beavers...
June 19, 2012
Report
- Applications Made to FISA Court During Calendar Year 2011
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Legislative Affairs, Applications
Made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court During Calendar
Year 2011, submitted pursuant to sections 107 and 502 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended, 50 U.S.C.
Sec. 1801 et seq., and section 118 of USA PATRIOT
Improvement Act and Reauthorization Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 109-177
(2006)
Change
is the most difficult thing an organization can do.
"In his essay 'Capitalists
Who Fear Change,' author Jeffrey Tucker takes on 'wimps who don't
want to improve.' From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the
constant refrain that every new form of music recording will 'kill
music,' Mr. Tucker observes, 'Through our long history of
improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired
panic. The biggest panic typically comes from
the producers themselves who resent the way the market process
destabilizes their business model.' He analyzes
how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes
on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched
interests in general, with guarded optimism: 'The promise of the
future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who
lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way.'"
I am
amused... Still, it is an interesting argument.
Free
Speech for Computers?
DO machines speak? If so, do they have
a constitutional right to free speech?
… In today’s world, we have
delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to
work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft
Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new
friends. In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that
when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and enjoy
the protections of the First Amendment.
This is a bad idea that threatens the
government’s ability to oversee companies and protect consumers.
For
my Business Continuity class: Remember that “highly improbable”
is not “impossible.”
Annals
of bad luck: when primary, backup, and second backup power fail
A new root
cause analysis describes an Amazon outage that
occurred last week in Amazon's East Coast data centers. The report
shows a series of problems resulted in virtual machines and storage
volumes losing primary, backup, and secondary backup power. A cable
fault took down the main service, a defective cooling fan messed up a
backup generator, and finally an incorrectly configured circuit
breaker caused secondary backup to fail.
For my Website design class. A
supplement to W3schools.com
The project is completely web-based,
and it is designed to help users with writing basic code in both HTML
and CSS. Thimble is
part of Mozilla’s Webmaker Project, which is designed to encourage
people to create their own content on the web.
Just
in time for my statistics class...
June 19, 2012
Early
beta version of Zanran - search for 'semi-structured' data on the web
"Zanran
helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the
numerical data that people have presented as graphs
and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a
graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a
barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of
information can be difficult to find using conventional search
engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than
graphs, tables and bar charts... Zanran doesn't work by spotting
wording in the text and looking for images – it's the other way
round. The system examines millions of images and decides for each
one whether it's a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical
content. The core technology is patented computer vision algorithms
that decide whether an image is numerical – and they're accurate
(about 98%). But the huge majority of images on the internet are not
graphs etc. So even though the accuracy is high, you will still get
some non-numerical images. In comparison, looking for tables is
relatively simple. Once we've found a table we then have to decide
whether it's essentially numerical - and we have algorithms for
that."
(Related) Finding those on the left of
the curve (because sometimes you don't want the 'best and the
brightest.'
"'Nigerian scams' (also known
as '419 scams' but more accurately called 'advance fee fraud')
continue to clog up inboxes with tales of fantastic wealth for the
recipient. The raises the question: Do people still fall for this
rubbish? The emails often outline ridiculous scenarios but promise
millions if a person offers to help get money out of a country. The
reason for the ridiculous scenarios seems obvious in retrospect:
According to research by Cormac Herley at Microsoft, scammers
are looking for the most gullible people, and
their crazy emails can help weed out people who are savvy enough to
know better. Contrary to what people believe, the
scams aren't 'free' for the scammers (PDF): sending an email
might have close to zero cost attached, but the process of getting
money out of someone can be quite complicated and incurs costs (for
example, recruiting other parties to participate in the scam). So at
the end of the day, the scammer wants to find
people who will almost certainly fall for the scam and offer a good
return."
Research
for free!
June 19, 2012
Beta
version Directory of Open access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB
is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic
publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books
to DOAB. [Currently there are 1098 Academic
peer-reviewed books from 27 publishers.] Metadata will be
harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and
impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial
services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online
catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The
directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer
reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as
possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and
meet academic standards."
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