Bankocracy

Banish the trolls, but web debate still needs anonymity

"So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site. It seems like common sense [that people will behave better]. Whether it is supported by evidence is uncertain. The most striking study I’ve come across is the experiment conducted by the (South) Korea Communications Commission from July 2007. From that month onwards, anyone wanting to comment on any of the 146 Korean websites with more than 100,000 members was required by law to submit resident registration or credit card details. The hypothesis behind the requirement was that people would behave better online if they were easily identifiable. But it didn’t turn out that way. Continue reading →

Continue ReadingBanish the trolls, but web debate still needs anonymity

NSA broke encryption on UN communications: report

"The move provided the agency with 'a dramatic improvement of data from video teleconferences and the ability to decrypt this data traffic.' The NSA, on one occasion, also allegedly caught the Chinese secret services eavesdropping on the UN in 2011, it added, quoting an internal report. Der Spiegel also claims that the US agency kept tabs on the European Union after it moved into new offices in New York in September 2012. Earlier reports in Der Spiegel and Britain’s the Guardian newspaper had detailed alleged widespread covert surveillance by the NSA of EU offices, including diplomatic missions in Washington and at the United Nations in New York, as well as Brussels." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingNSA broke encryption on UN communications: report

Russia closes 700 schools amid dramatic drop in birth rates

"Russia saw birth rates drop dramatically in the turbulent 1990s and its demographic situation has remained negative, with more deaths than births, ever since. President Vladimir Putin last year urged Russians to have at least three children. 'We plan to close 733 schools this year,' said the outspoken public health official Gennady Onishchenko, quoted by the Interfax news agency. 'You understand the reason: there aren’t enough children.' 'For some reason we have forgotten why we came into the world and we came with only one aim: to create new life, to continue our line,' said Onishchenko, who has three children. A recent uptick in births is partly driven by a wave of immigrants." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingRussia closes 700 schools amid dramatic drop in birth rates

Drone crashes into crowd at American ‘Running of the Bulls’

"The inaugural installment of an American adaptation of the famous Spanish 'Running of the Bulls' ended up with an unintended sideshow when a drone filming the action crashed into the audience. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that five people suffered minor injuries during the incident at the first 'Great Bull Run' in Virginia on Saturday, when the drone, operated by event organizers, went down, leading an unidentified person filming it to yell, 'It just hit that dude in the face!'" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingDrone crashes into crowd at American ‘Running of the Bulls’

NSA Officers Spy on Love Interests

"National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said. The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT. Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of 'INT,' such as 'SIGINT' for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and 'HUMINT' for human intelligence, or spying. The LOVEINT violations involved overseas communications, officials said, such as spying on a partner or spouse." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingNSA Officers Spy on Love Interests

UK’s secret Mid-East internet surveillance base is revealed in Edward Snowden leaks

"Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies, The Independent has learnt. The station is able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region. The information is then processed for intelligence and passed to GCHQ in Cheltenham and shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States. The Government claims the station is a key element in the West’s 'war on terror' and provides a vital 'early warning' system for potential attacks around the world." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingUK’s secret Mid-East internet surveillance base is revealed in Edward Snowden leaks

NSA; The Not Secure Agency

"It's not a 'sophisticated' bypass, the NSA didn't protect databases from Database and Systems Administrators. Here's a blog article by a database security product vendor's research group about this widely known problem from January of last year. Even then, the information in the blog article was long in the tooth. This implies that everything the NSA has said about the careful auditing they do to prevent unauthorized access by employees and contractors is a joke - it's not possible when you don't take these basic precautions." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingNSA; The Not Secure Agency

Guardian teams up with New York Times over Snowden documents

"In a brief story posted on its website, the Guardian said it 'struck a partnership' with the Times after the British government threatened the Guardian with legal action unless it either surrendered or destroyed files it received from Snowden about Government Communications Headquarters - Britain's equivalent of NSA. 'In a climate of intense pressure from the UK government, the Guardian decided to bring in a US partner to work on the GCHQ documents provided by Edward Snowden. We are working in partnership with the NYT and others to continue reporting these stories,' the British newspaper said in a statement." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingGuardian teams up with New York Times over Snowden documents

Snowden leaks: the real take-home

"To Gen X, a job for life with the NSA was a probably-impossible dream — it's what their parents told them to expect, but few of their number achieved. To Gen Y the idea of a job for life is ludicrous and/or impossible. This means the NSA and their fellow swimmers in the acronym soup of the intelligence-industrial complex are increasingly reliant on nomadic contractor employees, and increasingly subject to staff churn. There is an emerging need to security-clear vast numbers of temporary/transient workers ... and workers with no intrinsic sense of loyalty to the organization. Edward Snowden is 30: he was born in 1983. Generation Y started in 1980-82. I think he's a sign of things to come." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingSnowden leaks: the real take-home

Edward Snowden’s not the story. The fate of the internet is

"First, the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty. Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, 'the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib.'" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingEdward Snowden’s not the story. The fate of the internet is