Because this has the potential to
impact US infrastructure, shouldn't this be investigated as a
potential act of war? At least preparation for a terrorist attack.
(Or just to avoid me telling the world, “I told you so!”)
Maker
of Smart-Grid Control Software Hacked
The maker of an industrial control
system designed to be used with so-called smart grid networks
disclosed to customers last week that hackers had breached its
network and accessed project files related to a control system used
in portions of the electrical grid.
Telvent, which is owned by Schneider
Electric, told customers in a letter that on Sept. 10 it learned of
the breach into its network. The attackers installed malicious
software on the network and also accessed
project files for its OASyS SCADA system, according to
KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported the breach.
According to Telvent, its OASyS
DNA system is designed to integrate a utility’s
corporate network with the network of control systems that manage the
distribution of electricity and to allow legacy systems and
applications to communicate with new smart grid technologies. [And
vice versa? Bob]
… The breach raises
concerns that hackers could embed malware in project files to infect
the machines of program developers or other key people involved in a
project. One of the ways that Stuxnet spread — the worm
that was designed to target Iran’s uranium enrichment program —
was to infect project files in an industrial control system made by
Siemens, with the aim of passing the malware to the computers of
developers.
Peterson says this
would also be a good way to infect customers, since
vendors pass project files to customers and have full rights to
modify anything in a customer’s system through the project files.
(Related) I think...
September 26, 2012
US:
CFIUS Review
US:
CFIUS Review - Robert Schlossberg and Christine Laciak,
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer US LLP
- "The national security review process in the United States – often referred to as the Exon–Florio or CFIUS review process, after the relevant authorising statute and enforcement agency, respectively – has existed for decades. It originally focused, at least in practice, on the acquisition by foreign companies of US businesses directly or indirectly supplying the US Department of Defense, but especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the concept of national security – and therefore the types of transactions subject to review under the regime – was broadened by statute and in practice. Today, the national security review process can be an important part of many transactions, even though it remains voluntary. Examples of industries in which notifications have been made include computers, network security, cyber systems, energy (development and transport), semiconductors, aerospace, telecommunications, optics, robotics, mining and natural resources, plastics and rubber, automotive, financial services, coatings and adhesives, chemicals, and steel."
Because everyone needs a “Personal
Surveillance Tool” I think a helicopter would be most useful,
since I could mount a shotgun for hunting and then swoop down to
retrieve my kill. Duck soup anyone?
Everyone
Who Wants a Drone Will Have One Soon
… Drones are not like the atomic
bomb. There won't be a day when suddenly we realize that a horrible
new weapon has changed the world forever. Instead, one day
we'll wake up and there'll have been a terrorist attack by a swarm of
drones launched by hand from a park across the Potomac from
Washington, DC, and no one will know where they came from or who sent
them. We'll wake up one day to a drone peering in our window as
preparation for a common burglary.
The price of these unmanned aerial
vehicles is plummeting from two sides. On the one hand, you've got
the toys like the $70 iHelicopter you control with an iPhone. This
little guy even has two plastic missiles you can fire!
There are already pretty good
surveillance drones, too. Like this $300 Parrot
AR.Drone.2.0, which can shoot HD video. You control it with an
iPad.
Does this automatically make him a
drone target?
"The U.S. military has
designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies
of the United States — the same legal category as the al-Qaeda
terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified US Air
Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US
freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who
contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being
charged with 'communicating with the enemy.'"
How they do it?
September 26, 2012
EFF:
Facebook and Datalogix - What's Actually Getting Shared and How You
Can Opt Out
EFF:
"We’ve been seeing a range
of reports
about Facebook partnering up with marketing company Datalogix to
assess whether users go to stores in the physical world and buy the
products they saw in Facebook advertisements. A lot of the reports
aren’t getting into the nitty gritty of what data is actually
shared between Facebook and Datalogix, so the goal of this blog post
is to dive into the details. We’re glad to see that Facebook is
taking a number of steps to avoid sharing sensitive data with
Datalogix, but users who are uncomfortable with the program should
opt out (directions).
Hopefully, reporting on this issue will make more people aware of
how our shopping data is being used for a lot more than offering us
discounts on tomato soup. Datalogix is an advertising metrics
company that describes its data
set as including “almost every U.S. household and more than $1
trillion in consumer transactions.” It specifically relies on
loyalty card data – cards anyone can get by filling out a form at a
participating grocery store."
“Oops, we're sorry (for getting
caught).”
"In the
latest installment of the megaupload saga, an official study has
determined that New Zealand's Government Communications and Security
Bureau broke
NZ law by spying on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. NZ Prime
Minister John Key has apologised to Dotcom and all New Zealanders for
this, saying they were entitled to be protected by the law but it had
failed them. Link is to writeup in The Guardian."
Lots of outlets are reporting this,
based on TorrentFreak's
report.
[From the article:
The illegal surveillance
may deal another blow to the US extradition
case after a New Zealand court ruled in June that search warrants
used in the raid on Dotcom's home were illegal.
… Dotcom maintains that the
Megaupload site was merely an online storage facility, and has
accused Hollywood of lobbying the US government to prosecute him.
American authorities are appealing
against a New Zealand court decision that Dotcom should be allowed to
see the evidence on which the extradition hearing will be based.
This is what happens when entry-level
employees are in charge...
Microsoft is
facing the unpleasant end of the European Commission antitrust
blunderbuss, with the company now in line for a potentially huge fine
over browser choice missteps. The EC confirmed it was investigating
the software firm back
in July, after an agreed-upon browser choice page
failed
to be shown to 28m PC users; now, Reuters
reports, the EC will open a formal proceeding that will decide the
extent of the penalty.
Perspective Remember, the US is around
#39 on the list of Internet connection speeds. It's going to be hard
to compete if we don't jump ahead a few generations of technology.
"Sorry, everybody: terabit
Ethernet looks like it will have to wait a while longer. The
IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group
met this week in Geneva, Switzerland, with attendees
concluding—almost to a man—that 400 Gbits/s should be the next
step in the evolution of Ethernet. A straw poll at its conclusion
found that 61 of the 62 attendees that voted supported 400 Gbits/s as
the basis for the near term 'call for interest,' or CFI. The
bandwidth call to arms was sounded by a July report by the IEEE,
which concluded that, if current trends continue, networks will need
to support capacity requirements of 1 terabit per second in 2015 and
10 terabits per second by 2020. In 2015 there will
be nearly 15 billion fixed and mobile-networked devices and
machine-to-machine connections."
(Related) Virtual networks for virtual
servers. Tools for the Cloud...
Ex-Amazon
Genius Joins Battle for the Future of Networking
Giuseppe de Candia is the first name
listed on a document that remade the internet. And now he wants to
remake it all over again.
Known as “Pino” among friends and
colleagues, de Candia was part of a small team of computer scientists
at Amazon.com who created Dynamo, a means of storing vast amounts of
data across a sea of computer servers. The team originally built
Dynamo to power the Amazon shopping cart, but after publishing a
research
paper describing the technology in
2007, they helped spawn a new breed of database that was soon
running many of the net’s largest sites, including Facebook,
Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit.
Together with a handful
of engineers at Google — who published a paper on an equally
massive database called BigTable — de Candia is one of the founding
fathers of the
NoSQL movement, whose influence now extends well beyond the
big-name websites, stretching into the data center that underpin all
sorts of businesses.
“If you look at every NoSQL solution
out there, everyone goes back to the Amazon Dynamo paper or the
Google BigTable paper,” says
Jason Hoffman, the chief technology officer at the San
Francisco-based cloud computing outfit Joyent.
“What would the world be like if no one at Google
or Amazon ever wrote an academic paper?”
A tool is just a tool. I have no
further comment (I'm too busy with extensive testing)
"The company behind the .xxx
top-level domain plans
to launch a search engine in an effort to drive more traffic to
.xxx websites and give pornography fans a more satisfying search
experience. ICM Registry, which operates the 9-month-old .xxx TLD,
is scheduled to launch Search.xxx this week, said Stuart Lawley,
ICM's CEO. The new search engine will give users a more streamlined
searching process, help protect them from viruses and malware and
help guard their privacy, he said. The search
engine has cataloged 21 million webpages from .xxx sites,
he said. ' It's porn, only porn, all porn,' he said. 'There's as
much porn there as anyone would need, I'd imagine.'"
A 'heads up!' for your Help Desk...
LibreOffice is free
"Google
today announced a huge change for Google Apps, including its
Business, Education, and Government editions. As of October 1, users
will no longer have the ability to download
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in old Microsoft Office
formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt)."
The perils of cloud computing;
LibreOffice will probably be the best conversion
utility at that point. Apropos: Reader akumpf
writes with an essay about the dangers of letting
our data and our tools be hosted by the same provider.
Perspective Perhaps driving is not
stimulating enough without Texting? My Math classes need to be
augmented with “Angry Birds” and “Bad Piggies?”
"Doug Gross writes that thanks
to technology, there's been a recent sea change in how people today
kill time. 'Those dog-eared magazines in your doctor's office are
going unread. Your fellow customers in line at the deli counter are
being ignored. And simply gazing around at one's surroundings?
Forget about it.' With their games, music, videos, social media and
texting, smartphones
'superstimulate,' a desire humans have to play when things get dull,
says anthropologist Christopher Lynn and he believes that modern
society may be making that desire even stronger. 'When you're
habituated
to constant stimulation, when you lack it, you sort of don't know
what to do with yourself ...,' says Lynn. 'When
we aren't used to having down time, it results in anxiety.
Oh my god, I should be doing something.' And we reach for the
smartphone. It's our omnipresent relief from that.' Researchers say
this all makes sense. Fiddling with our phones, they say, addresses
a basic human need to cure boredom by any means necessary. But they
also fear that by filling almost every second of down time by peering
at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially
rewarding ways we've dealt with boredom in days past. 'Informational
overload from all quarters means that there can often be very
little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning
out,'" researchers write. 'With a mobile (phone) that is
constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to
distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it
difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety,
introspective kind of way.'"
(Related)
Bad
Piggies Is A Hit, Taking Just 3 Hours To Hit The Top Spot In The U.S.
App Store
(Related)
For my Geeks...
… By heading to the Try
Office Preview website you can download the software to your
computer.
… After clicking Try and
selecting your country, you’ll be prompted to sign in. I
nstallation will require you to have a Microsoft account – namely,
one ending in @msn.com, @live.com or @hotmail.com (local variants
such as .co.uk are also included). If you don’t have a Microsoft
account, click the Sign up button and follow the steps to
set one up.
… Microsoft Office 2013 Preview is
a good upgrade to the previous releases, ideal for use on either a
Windows 7 or a Windows 8 computer. The installation procedure is
frustratingly streamlined, however, resulting in an inability to
specify your preferred installation location. Similarly, removing
the software relies on an Internet connection to deactivate. Given
that Windows 8 also features an online activation and heavy use of
the cloud, it is likely that this arrangement is here to stay.
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