A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge. [via Threat Level] …hooray for America?

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

[via Threat Level]


…hooray for America?

(Source: Wired)

  • January 28
  • , 2013
Even casual divers know that diving too deep, or surfacing too quickly, can cause a host of complications from sickness to seizures and even sudden death. Now the Pentagon’s scientists want to build gear that can turn commandos into Aquaman, allowing them to plunge into the deeps without having to worry as much about getting ill. (Orange and green tights sold separately.) According to a list of research proposals from the U.S. military’s blue-sky researchers at Darpa, the agency is seeking “integrated microsystems” to detect and control “warfighter physiology for military diver operations.” Essentially it comes down to hooking divers up to sensors that can read both their bio-physical signs and the presence of gases like nitric oxide, which help prevent decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends.” If those levels dip too low, the Darpa devices will send small amounts of the gases into divers’ lungs to help keep them swimming. More @ Danger Room!

Even casual divers know that diving too deep, or surfacing too quickly, can cause a host of complications from sickness to seizures and even sudden death. Now the Pentagon’s scientists want to build gear that can turn commandos into Aquaman, allowing them to plunge into the deeps without having to worry as much about getting ill. (Orange and green tights sold separately.)

According to a list of research proposals from the U.S. military’s blue-sky researchers at Darpa, the agency is seeking “integrated microsystems” to detect and control “warfighter physiology for military diver operations.” Essentially it comes down to hooking divers up to sensors that can read both their bio-physical signs and the presence of gases like nitric oxide, which help prevent decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends.” If those levels dip too low, the Darpa devices will send small amounts of the gases into divers’ lungs to help keep them swimming.

More @ Danger Room!

(Source: Wired)

  • January 5
  • , 2013
Top-secret janitor. Pollster to the spies. Classified comic book artist. Any organization sufficiently large is bound to have the odd job opening within it. But few organizations are as freakin’ colossal as the U.S. military intelligence industrial complex, with an estimated 4.9 million Americans holding security clearances today. Which means there are thousands of unconventional positions to fill at any given moment. Here are some of the wilder military and intelligence “help wanted” ads we found online. Some classifieds are for truly wacky jobs. Others are for slightly more standard positions — but presented in an odd way.

Top-secret janitor. Pollster to the spies. Classified comic book artist. Any organization sufficiently large is bound to have the odd job opening within it. But few organizations are as freakin’ colossal as the U.S. military intelligence industrial complex, with an estimated 4.9 million Americans holding security clearances today. Which means there are thousands of unconventional positions to fill at any given moment.

Here are some of the wilder military and intelligence “help wanted” ads we found online. Some classifieds are for truly wacky jobs. Others are for slightly more standard positions — but presented in an odd way.

(Source: Wired)

  • December 28
  • , 2012
It’s becoming the trademark move of failing regimes: silence your critics and cripple their communications by cutting off the internet. Libya did it. Egypt too. And last week, Syria pulled the plug on its own internet system. According to new research from network monitoring company Renesys, it could just as easily happen in many other countries too, including Greenland, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Sixty-one of the world’s countries have just one or two service providers connecting them to the rest of the internet.

It’s becoming the trademark move of failing regimes: silence your critics and cripple their communications by cutting off the internet. Libya did it. Egypt too. And last week, Syria pulled the plug on its own internet system.

According to new research from network monitoring company Renesys, it could just as easily happen in many other countries too, including Greenland, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Sixty-one of the world’s countries have just one or two service providers connecting them to the rest of the internet.

(Source: Wired)

  • December 6
  • , 2012
How a Google headhunter’s e-mail unraveled a massive net security hole.

How a Google headhunter’s e-mail unraveled a massive net security hole.

(Source: Wired)

  • October 25
  • , 2012
Business iPad users beware. Your halcyon days of loading whatever the heck you want onto your tablet may be coming to an end. Apple is set to introduce a couple of new features that will give corporate IT new ways to lock down the iOS 6 operating system, which powers the iPad and the iPhone, according to Zenprise, a mobile device management company that was briefed on the features by Apple. More @ Wired Enterprise.

Business iPad users beware. Your halcyon days of loading whatever the heck you want onto your tablet may be coming to an end.

Apple is set to introduce a couple of new features that will give corporate IT new ways to lock down the iOS 6 operating system, which powers the iPad and the iPhone, according to Zenprise, a mobile device management company that was briefed on the features by Apple.

More @ Wired Enterprise.

(Source: Wired)

  • September 13
  • , 2012
Cosmo is huge — 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he’s getting bigger, because Cosmo — also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft — is just 15 years old. He turns 16 next March, and he may very well do so inside a prison cell. Read more from Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth over @ Gadget Lab.

Cosmo is huge — 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he’s getting bigger, because Cosmo — also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft — is just 15 years old.

He turns 16 next March, and he may very well do so inside a prison cell.

Read more from Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth over @ Gadget Lab.

(Source: Wired)

  • September 11
  • , 2012
As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech. On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds. On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them. Last month, footage from NASA’s triumphant Curiosity rover landing was blocked numerous times on YouTube, despite being in the public domain, because several companies — such as Scripps Local News — claimed copyright on the material. Those incidents foretell an odd future for streaming video, as bandwidth and recording tools get cheaper, and the demand for instant video grows. Just in the last year, Google Hangouts, a feature of Google+ that allows multiple people to video conference, became a cult hit. Now it’s used by news sites, such as the Huffington Post, for live video interview segments. Ustream and Justin.tv have made it simple to livestream book readings, Meetups and the police siege of Julian Assange’s embassy sleepover. Copyright bots are being wired into that infrastructure, programmed as stern and unyielding censors with one hand ever poised at the off switch. What happens if the bot detects snippets of a copyrighted song or movie clip in the background? Say a ringtone from a phone not shut off at a PTA meeting? Or a short YouTube clip shown by a convention speaker to illustrate a funny point? Will the future of livestreaming be so fragile as to be unusable?

As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.

On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds.

On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them.

Last month, footage from NASA’s triumphant Curiosity rover landing was blocked numerous times on YouTube, despite being in the public domain, because several companies — such as Scripps Local News — claimed copyright on the material.

Those incidents foretell an odd future for streaming video, as bandwidth and recording tools get cheaper, and the demand for instant video grows. Just in the last year, Google Hangouts, a feature of Google+ that allows multiple people to video conference, became a cult hit. Now it’s used by news sites, such as the Huffington Post, for live video interview segments. Ustream and Justin.tv have made it simple to livestream book readings, Meetups and the police siege of Julian Assange’s embassy sleepover.

Copyright bots are being wired into that infrastructure, programmed as stern and unyielding censors with one hand ever poised at the off switch. What happens if the bot detects snippets of a copyrighted song or movie clip in the background? Say a ringtone from a phone not shut off at a PTA meeting? Or a short YouTube clip shown by a convention speaker to illustrate a funny point? Will the future of livestreaming be so fragile as to be unusable?

(Source: Wired)

  • September 6
  • , 2012
The disturbing, unchecked rise of the administrative subpoena. They don’t need no stinkin’ warrant.

The disturbing, unchecked rise of the administrative subpoena.

They don’t need no stinkin’ warrant.

(Source: Wired)

  • August 28
  • , 2012
“Imagine you live in a suburb, and there’s a stop sign on your way home. One day you say, ‘Wait a second, every time I arrive here, I have to slow down for no reason.’ And then one day you pass the stop sign without stopping. And then nothing happens. What happens when you do the same thing the next day? Nothing happens. And the third day? Nothing happens. Tenth day, 50th day, 100th day — nothing happens. “That’s what lulls people into complacency — this regularity of nothing happening. Your computer getting hacked, or your computer completely crashing, is what they call a ‘black swan incident.’ They only happen once in a while, but when they do everything comes crashing down.” - Stanford business professor Baba Shiv, who specializes in neuroeconomics, studying how the brain works as a way of understanding economic decisions. Read more about why it pays to submit to hackers, over @ Wired Business.

“Imagine you live in a suburb, and there’s a stop sign on your way home. One day you say, ‘Wait a second, every time I arrive here, I have to slow down for no reason.’ And then one day you pass the stop sign without stopping. And then nothing happens. What happens when you do the same thing the next day? Nothing happens. And the third day? Nothing happens. Tenth day, 50th day, 100th day — nothing happens.

“That’s what lulls people into complacency — this regularity of nothing happening. Your computer getting hacked, or your computer completely crashing, is what they call a ‘black swan incident.’ They only happen once in a while, but when they do everything comes crashing down.”

- Stanford business professor Baba Shiv, who specializes in neuroeconomics, studying how the brain works as a way of understanding economic decisions.

Read more about why it pays to submit to hackers, over @ Wired Business.

(Source: Wired)

  • August 10
  • , 2012