CORRECTION: First of all, in my rush to write up the Snowden / Russian residence permit thing, I overlooked a key aspect of Snowden testifying in Germany, or anywhere else: Vlad the Putinator’s condition that he not do anything “aimed at harming our American partners, as strange as that sounds coming from my lips.” This […]
First of all, I’ve mentioned the Electrotherapy Museum before. It’s one machinist’s astonishingly expansive collection of vintage high-voltage machinery… the kind of gear Tesla and contemporaries played with. To get an idea of what this stuff looks like in person, see what may be the most goth-mad-science music video ever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRkqJCxXVdg) and then watch the […]
40% of people on the US government’s watchlists are not affiliated with “any known terrorist group.” This suggests (to me) that the NSA has started making heavy use of algorithms to identify potential “lone terrorists,” as covered here previously. What’s more, for the 700,000 people on the watchlist (the Terrorist Screending Database) being listed means […]
Everyone knows the “laser bug” principle, right? This is idea that, by bouncing a laser beam off a window, you pick up the vibrations from inside the room — and you can now hear what people inside the room are saying. Nowadays, of course, laser bugging doesn’t necessarily limit you to hearing speech. Any method […]
Glenn Greenwald is pissed. Since the beginning of the Gaza chaos, he’s been agitating for the Palestinian civilian population on Twitter. But as the saying goes, “don’t get mad — get some leaks and publish them.” (Wait, you thought I was going to say “…get even?” Nah, this is the Post Snowden Era, and Ceratotherium […]
Everyone remember Michael Hastings? Here’s a list of the new-model cars to avoid if you’d like your car to do what you tell it to, every time, guaranteed. WORST: 2014 Jeep Cherokee 2014 Infiniti Q50 2015 Escalade LEAST BAD: 2014 Dodge Viper 2014 Audi A8 2014 Honda Accord This based on a survey done by […]
The leak hopper’s fill indicator just went “ding,” so let’s have a look and see what we’ve got. Glenn Greenwald just cancelled his appearance before the German parliamentary commission to investigate the NSA [1] (not to be confused with the — at least so far — more effective “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI”). Greenwald […]
Ukrainian TSCM: Here’s how you deal with unwanted electronics if you live in the middle of a war zone (Luhansk)… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g91xkISmp2g (Also featured in that YouTube channel — a Marx generator… made with STICKS. That’s right, wooden sticks off a tree somewhere.) Anyway, news from the #badBIOS front. Karsten Nohl has successfully replicated another aspect […]
Here’s a scary thought: criminals using all that excessively over-engineered government spy software (the stuff you thought only other governments and Wikileaks had to worry about) to steal your cash and screw with your computer. This in fact appears to be happening. According to an “intelligence report” from Sentinel Labs, they detected some really high-end […]
A few years after MWT et al made mincemeat of those little in-room hotel safes, security firm G-Data decided to take a second swing. This time around, the piñatas proved no less resistant to the proverbial security-research bat. Poking at an anonymous Chinese-made unit, they found that the safe used a cruciform lock as an […]
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