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anubi writes:

PC World is reporting that families of Sony employees are now being threatened, or at least being subjected to implied threats.

Hackers said to threaten Sony employees

The hack against Sony Pictures appeared to enter new territory on Friday when employees reportedly received messages threatening them and their families.

The message, reported by Variety, warned that “not only you but your family will be in danger.”

Sony’s computer system was attacked in late November and gigabytes of data, including unreleased movies, were stolen and leaked online. Embarrassing hacks have hit other companies in recent years, but threatening employees is highly unusual and will put extra pressure on law enforcement to find those responsible.

The message purports to be from the Guardians of Peace, the group that has claimed responsibility for the Sony hack. It’s written in patchy English and opens with further threats against Sony.

“Removing Sony Pictures on earth is a very tiny work for our group which is a worldwide organization. And what we have done so far is only a small part of our further plan,” the message reads in part, according to Variety, which says it obtained a copy.

It then turns to Sony employees.

“Many things beyond imagination will happen at many places of the world. ... Please sign your name to object the false [sic] of the company at the email address below if you dont want to suffer damage. If you dont, not only you but your family will be in danger,” the message reads.

This incident is precisely why I am so worked up about trustworthy computing and leery of having others aggregating personal information on me. Its not that I am trying to hide anything I am doing, but leaving all my personal information laying around is just an invite for someone to come in and make a mess in my life.

darkfeline writes:

A WSJ story details how Apple, in 2007-2009, deleted music from users' iPods if it hadn't been downloaded from their own service

Apple deleted music that some iPod owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009 without telling users, attorneys for consumers told jurors in a class-action antitrust suit against Apple Wednesday.

“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up a user’s music library", attorney Patrick Coughlin said in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif. When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user’s iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings, Coughlin said. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear, he said.

Apple directed the system “not to tell users the problem,” Coughlin said.

To plaintiffs in the case, the move showed how Apple had stifled competition for music players and downloads. They are seeking $350 million in damages in the decade-old suit, claiming Apple’s actions forced them to pay more for iPods. The damages could be tripled under antitrust laws.

Apple contends the moves were legitimate security measures. Apple security director Augustin Farrugia testified that Apple did not offer a more detailed explanation because, “We don’t need to give users too much information,” and “We don’t want to confuse users.”

Ting Model writes:

Andrew Higgins reports in the NYT that Romanian officials including the prime minister point to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protests over fracking in Europe and are pointing their fingers at Russia's Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, that has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas from developing their own alternative supplies of energy and preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy tool for the Kremlin.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” says NATO’s former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

A wave of protest against fracking began three years ago in Bulgaria, a country highly dependent on Russian energy. Faced with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license issued earlier to Chevron.

Russia itself has generally shown scant concern for environmental protection and has a long record of harassing and even jailing environmentalists who stage protests. On fracking, however, Russian authorities have turned enthusiastically green, with Putin declaring last year that fracking “poses a huge environmental problem.” Places that have allowed it, he said, “no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime.” For their part Green groups have been swift to attack Rasmussen’s views, saying that they were not involved in any alleged Russian attempts to discredit the technology, and were instead opposed to it on the grounds of environmental sustainability. “The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at Nato HQ,” says Greenpeace, which has a history of antagonism with the Russian government, which arrested several of its activists on a protest in the Arctic last year.

tt0081455 writes:

A government surplus vendor has Rapiscan Backscatter Body scanners listed for sale on ebay. The price - just $8K. Brand new they were $160K. These are the same units that were affectionately dubbed "porno scanners" before the TSA bowed to public pressure and yanked them out of commission. You might remember Rapiscan as the company that hired former Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff as a way to guarantee their place at the trough full of sweet, sweet tax dollars.

Pav writes:

The fifth NSA whistleblower, or the second Snowden if you prefer, has disappeared without trace as far as my limited Google-fu can tell. The raid reported in the link was conducted by the FBI in late October, but there has been no reporting since of what they found or any subsequent arrests. Is anyone in Soylent-world more aware of what's going on in this case?

juggs writes:

In the dying hours of 3rd Dec (UTC) into the early hours of 4th Dec something significant occurred in the vicinity of the SoylentNews PBC boardroom. One witness is reported to have said "it was as though a light zephyr appeared unexpectedly, brushed by a pile of watermelons before shooting up into the sky as a vivid light", this has not been confirmed as an accurate portrayal of events and quite honestly we're not sure they weren't just making it up.

Moving to a more formal note. The timeline above is correct. In what seemed like a few brief moments of discussion and accord, NCommander stepped out of the position of CEO and yours truly (juggs) stepped in as interim CEO.

To quickly dispel any doubts or concerns, this was not some hostile power play within the board, more an amicable and pragmatic changing of the guard. It was notably lacking in any form of drama whatsoever.

Firstly, I'd like to thank NCommander for bringing us to where we are today - a thriving, growing community with a stable foundation from which to grow and many tomes of vision for what the road ahead may lead us on to build. I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping he sticks around and makes a reprise - I have a strong feeling he will.

As much as I'd like to mark my entrance with some grand vision - in the very short term I'll have to mostly concentrate on some very mundane but very necessary corporation affairs.

Longer term, I have a few nascent ideas in the back of my mind that need kicking into shape - but given the whole transition was out of the blue, I'm more at the sort the desk out and find the nearest coffee dispensary stage than the grand visionary stage. I do however fully intend to revisit NCommander's SN vision statements and go from there as an immediate starting point at the very least.

Feel free to use the Comments for questions, concerns or suggestions, I'll be sure to reply.

juggs

Ting Model writes:

Ju-Min Park and James Pearson report at Reuters that despite its poverty and isolation, North Korea has poured resources into a sophisticated cyber-warfare cell called Bureau 121, staffed by some of the most talented, and rewarded, people in North Korea, handpicked and trained from as young as 17. "They are hand-picked," says Kim Heung-kwang, a former computer science professor in North Korea who defected to the South in 2004. "It is a great honor for them. It is a white-collar job there and people have fantasies about it." The hackers in Bureau 121 were among the 100 students who graduate from the University of Automation each year after five years of study. Over 2,500 apply for places at the university, which has a campus in Pyongyang, behind barbed wire.

According to Jang Se-yul, who studied with them at North Korea's military college for computer science, Bureau 121 unit comprises about 1,800 cyber-warriors, and is considered the elite of the military. North Korea's ‘cyber-warriors’ are very honored in the country. As well as their salaries which are far above the country’s average, they are often gifted with good food, luxuries and even apartments. According to John Griasafi, this kind of treatment could be expected for those working in the elite Bureau. “You’d have to be pretty special and well trusted to even be allowed on email in North Korea so I have no doubt that they are treated well too.”

Pyongyang has active cyber-warfare capabilities, military and software security experts have said. In 2013 tens of thousands of computers were made to malfunction, disrupting work at banks and television broadcasters in South Korea. "For them, the strongest weapon is cyber. In North Korea, it’s called the Secret War," says Jang.

joshuajon writes:

From Wired:

Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company's workforce.

It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies "several positions" have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled.

sudo rm -rf writes:

The Telegraph reports

As more cities in America legalise the drug, attention has switched to the pungent smell that wafts from the joint itself.

Denver has passed a new “odour ordinance” with a potential $2,000 (£1,247) fine for anyone found guilty of polluting the atmosphere.

The need to draw up standards emerged because of the confusion over the legal position of whether somebody smoking marijuana in their own home could be committing an environmental offence when the smell seeps into the street.

- Link to manufacturer Nasal Ranger

- Random link to a video of the device in action

sigma writes:

Big telecom companies want more flexible options for their massive networks and are looking to bare-bones computing equipment controlled by open-source software for answers. Red Hat, which already made an agreement with Cisco earlier this year, will be working with Huawei to make Open Stack more relevant to demanding network situations, including telecommunications.

According to the WSJ article:

Telecom companies are among the world’s biggest spenders on technology hardware, software and services. AT&T, for example, recently said it plans $18 billion in capital spending next year on facilities like its telecom network and computing equipment — nearly double Google GOOGL +1.04%’s capital spending this year. Such flush budgets mean that telcos’ technology choices have major ramifications for IT vendors.

sudo rm -rf writes:

The names might sound as if they were from some unpublished short story by Douglas Adams, but after having to abandon its plans to build the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope" the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, ESO, curbed its visions and is going to build the "Extremely Large Telescope" instead.

From ESO's website

At a recent meeting ESO’s main governing body, the Council, gave the green light for the construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in two phases. Spending of around one billion euros has been authorised for the first phase, which will cover the construction costs of a fully working telescope with a suite of powerful instruments and first light targeted in ten years time. It will enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the fields of exoplanets, the stellar composition of nearby galaxies and the deep Universe. The largest ESO contract ever, for the telescope dome and main structure, will be placed within the next year.
The E-ELT will be a 39-metre aperture optical and infrared telescope sited on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama Desert, 20 kilometres from ESO’s Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal. It will be the world’s largest “eye on the sky”.

Serp Kannella and the Fuzzy Filters writes:

Seals certifying the security of many websites have long been suspected of not being worth the bits they're made of—much less the hundreds or thousands of dollars they cost in yearly fees. Computer scientists have recently presented evidence that not only supports those doubts but also shows how such seals can actually make sites more vulnerable to hacks:

The so-called trust marks are sold for less than $100 to well over $2,000 per year by almost a dozen companies including Symantec, McAfee, Trust-Guard, and Qualys. The marks are designed to instil trust in users of the site by certifying it's free of the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit to steal credit card numbers and other data.

In one of the experiments conducted by the researchers, even the best-performing service missed more than half of the known vulnerabilities. They uncovered flaws in certified sites that would take a typical criminal hacker less than one day to maliciously discover, and the researchers also developed exploits that are enabled by a site's use of security seals.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports:

Visit this page, click the "For Business" tab and then select the "Support for Small and Medium Business" option and you'll see that Redmond now charges US$499 for a single professional support incident, or US$1,999 for a five-pack.

But if you visit archive.org and explore the same page from October 25th, up comes a price of US$259 for one support incident and a five-pack price of US$1,289.

ticho writes:

CentOS Project has announced release of "rolling builds" for CentOS Linux.

CentOS Linux rolling builds are point in time snapshot media rebuild from original release time, to include all updates pushed to mirror.centos.org's repositories. This includes all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates for CentOS Linux. Machines installed from this media will have all these updates pre-included and will look no different when compared with machines installed with older media that have been "yum updated" to the same point in time.

This includes iso-based install media, as well as generic cloud images.

tonyPick writes:

The MIT Technology Review has an article on the fight over the patents for CRISPR, a new form of DNA editing.

There is some additional background on CRISPR on wikipedia.