SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Representatives from Google, Apple, and Vodafone have attended a high-level and closed-door meeting at a mansion in Oxfordshire. On the agenda: the state of government surveillance and what to do about it:

The attendee list is impressive. Key speakers included former acting CIA boss John McLaughlin; former White House deputy chief of staff Mona Sutphen, the current and former heads of the UK's GCHQ; the current or former heads of intelligence agencies in Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Germany; and the EU's counter terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove.

The tech industry also sent representatives, including Google's legal director Richard Salgado; Jane Horvath, Apple's senior director of global privacy; and Apple's product security and privacy manager Erik Neuenschwander, as well as Vodafone's external affairs director Matthew Kirk. Some members of the press were also included on the roster. Duncan Campbell, who publishes hard-hitting exposés of government spying (including for The Register), David Ignatius from the Washington Post, the BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera, and the historian Professor Timothy Garton Ash.

All participants were bound by Chatham House rules; an agreement not to publicly attribute comments to particular participants. The three-day meeting was held in an English country house, and no public minutes of the conversations will ever be published.

[...] Duncan Campbell told Snowden newsletter The Intercept that the meeting is a very positive sign and, while not going into too much detail, said that the conversations were very encouraging – perhaps the revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden are having a positive effect. "Away from the fetid heat of political posturing and populist headlines, I heard some unexpected and surprising comments from senior intelligence voices, including that 'cold winds of transparency' had arrived and were here to stay," he said. "Perhaps to many participants' surprise, there was general agreement across broad divides of opinion that Snowden – love him or hate him – had changed the landscape; and that change towards transparency, or at least 'translucency' and providing more information about intelligence activities affecting privacy, was both overdue and necessary."

"gewg_" writes with news of a story appearing in The Register: Viagra makes it HARD for malaria, bug-boffins discover:

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has been buying Viagra, in a good cause: it seems to help beat one of the common malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum.

The mechanism is even analogous to Viagra's better-known effect: it makes infected red blood cells stiffer, which marks them down to be cleaned out by the spleen.

The full journal article is available at PLOS Pathogens: cAMP-Signalling Regulates Gametocyte-Infected Erythrocyte Deformability Required for Malaria Parasite Transmission.

takyon writes:

American and Israeli academics have created Astoria, a new Tor client designed to defeat the latest traffic analysis techniques used to surveil the network:

Astoria all-but decimates the number of vulnerable connections on the Tor network, bringing the figure from 58 per cent of total users to 5.8 per cent, the researchers claim. Astoria hopes to utilise a new relay-selection algorithm which would prevent the asymmetric connections which make traffic analysis possible.

Due to the large amounts of processing power needed to analyse the data passing through the Tor network, traffic analysis is only conceivable as a de-anonymising attack when it is launched by state actors, such as those in the Five Eyes surveillance alliance. Steven J. Murdoch, who along with George Danezis published a paper on the Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor [PDF] back in 2005, told The Register that "Traffic-analysis is quite a sophisticated surveillance technique, but one which intelligence agencies have extensive experience in. With enough computation power, access to communication links and expertise, traffic analysis will be able to de-anonymize the user of any low-latency anonymous communication system, including Tor."

The new work by the researchers' explains how the traffic-analysis attacks may be implemented by any autonomous system (AS) that lies on both the path from the Tor client to the entry relay and the path from the exit relay to the destination. "Previous studies have demonstrated the potential for this type of attack and have proposed relay selection strategies to avoid common ASes (potential attackers) that may perform them. However, recent work has shown that these strategies perform poorly in practice," said the paper [PDF].

Observing that "vanilla" Tor will often select paths that may be subject to an adversary that exploits asymmetric network paths for the sake of analysis, the researchers have said that they "seek to design a relay selection algorithm to mitigate the opportunities for such attackers".

"We design our relay selection system, Astoria, based on the idea of stochastic relay selection. This works by having the Tor client generate a probability distribution that minimizes the chance of attack over all possible relay selection choices, and selecting an entry and exit-relay based on this distribution."

Astoria is not available for download... yet. Discussion at Hacker News.

Janrinok writes:

Apology To Microsoft

On Friday, we published a story, submitted by sigma, alleging that Microsoft had attempted to blackmail the UK Government in order to prevent the adoption of UK policy supporting open document standards. Having looked more closely at the linked material provided, the word blackmail is not used but appears only in the submission that we received. As the editor of that particular story I am personally responsible for not having checked the sources sufficiently well and for subsequently releasing the story. I wish to apologise, publicly and unreservedly, for any suggestion that Microsoft attempted to blackmail the UK government. They did not, nor does the accusation stand up to any scrutiny. We have edited the title to prevent any further misunderstanding by our community or others and I hope that this action and my apology to Microsoft is sufficient to atone for my mistake.

Apology to sigma

The editor's role includes that of trying to look at each story from both sides to provide a balanced approach. We are not here to support one particular view in preference to another but to provide material that will inspire discussion between members of our community. I published the story that sigma submitted, but attempted to balance it with the alternative view that suggested it was not specifically a Microsoft trait to defend one's business and that it could be argued that they were also attempting to protect their British workforce. However, I did not make it clear where sigma's comments ended and where my editing began, although I did add an Editor's Comment explaining that the story had been edited and that not all comments were those of the submitter. sigma has, quite justifiably, objected to this action and I must, therefore, apologise to him personally. I do apologise to sigma, again publicly and unreservedly, for any changes that I made to the submission that he feels reflect badly upon him.

Our Role

This was most certainly not my best piece of work and, of course, I must also apologise to the community. The editors do, however, have to edit stories; members of the community should not expect their submissions to be a platform for their personal views. Some stories require more editing than others to be suitable for the front page. In this instance, I made a mistake. We will always try to find a balanced approach to any story that needs it, as described in the Editing Process.

As I have already said, I take full responsibility for the stories that I release, including the one arising from sigma's submission. We value each and every submission, even those that do not make it to publication however, we do ask that submitters do not suggest events or actions that are not backed up by the source material, or are not easily verifiable by other means.

janrinok
Editor

janrinok writes:

A story from ArsTechnica:

It wouldn't be a Grand Theft Auto-related movie without some controversy, but the BBC's upcoming dramatic, 90-minute retelling of the series' genesis has come under fire not from Jack Thompson but from the game's parent company. A Thursday announcement confirmed that Take Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has filed a lawsuit against the BBC over its still-in-production TV movie Game Changer.

Rockstar representatives offered a statement to Ars Technica—the same one that was originally reported by IGN. It described Take Two's filing against the BBC as a "trademark infringement" lawsuit over the Grand Theft Auto franchise and insisted that neither Take Two nor Rockstar had anything to do with the film's creation. "Our goal is to ensure that our trademarks are not misused in the BBC's pursuit of an unofficial depiction of purported events related to Rockstar Games," the statement said. "We have attempted multiple times to resolve this matter with the BBC without any meaningful resolution. It is our obligation to protect our intellectual property, and unfortunately in this case litigation was necessary."

The statement did not clarify where the suit was filed, nor what specific trademarks may have been violated to make the British TV movie production worth filing suit against. A Rockstar representative confirmed that the suit had been filed this morning in London but declined to comment on our other questions.

oaklandwatch writes:

Amazon is featuring an animated game of Pac-man on their front page to honor the 35th anniversary of the classic video game, and Google has also revived their interactive Pac-Man doodle from five years ago, making it their top result for searches on "Pacman". A free Android version of the game is available in both the Google and Amazon app stores, and Amazon is also discounting newer versions like "Championship Edition" and "Pac-Man Museum" games. The original Pac-Man game was created by 24-year-old programmer Toru Iwatani in 1979, and today CBS News marked the anniversary by joking that now "Pac-Man is 35. And he's still hungry."

AnonTechie writes with an article from Hopes&Fears :

The concept of AI—specifically of the foxy, sexualized persuasion—has permeated pop culture for a very long time, most recently exemplified with Alex Garland's Ex Machina.

Technology, as it is wont to do, continues surging forward, simultaneously beckoning or threatening (depending on personal outlook) the potential of true artificial intelligence. And should these AI rise up, what kind of role would sexuality and sexual identity play in their existence—if at all? Hopes&Fears corralled a group of varied experts to weigh in through a group panel discussion to see what the future holds for us, the AI... and our respective crotch parts.

What does the SoylentNews community think about this?

janrinok writes:

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has surprised the internet community by announcing he will step down from the job after just three years in the post.

In an announcement on the domain name overlord's website, the organization said that Chehade has "informed the Board he will be concluding his tenure in March 2016 to move into a new career in the private sector (outside the domain name industry)".

The timing is unusual in two respects. Firstly, it means there are 10 months between now and when he will leave. Most executive contracts had a one-year or nine-month leaving clause, so Chehade either informed the Board of his intent two months ago, or the Board has decided to announce the decision immediately. Secondly, the March 2016 leaving date means that Chehade will, most likely, no longer be CEO when ICANN takes over the critical IANA contract from the US government for the first time.

That contract is due to expire in September but everyone expects the handover to take longer and the US government itself asked the internet community earlier this month to give it a realistic deadline for when they will be ready. It is possible that the internet community will be ready by March 2016 — and ICANN has a meeting scheduled for 6-11 March in Marrakech — but at the moment it looks more likely that a 30 June date will be the final one, meaning Chehade will miss out on being able to claim the transition as a legacy of his time as CEO.

janrinok writes:

John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome's iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its 2,000-year-old walls until its gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it.

But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 20 inches high, and it's made of 492 3-D-printed blocks. It's designed from laser scans of the real building. A gaggle of MIT engineering students will place it on a table with a sliding base and pull the walls apart, then put it back together and tilt it until it crumbles.

It's hard to see how razing a doll-sized Roman monument will help protect the real thing. But Ochsendorf, whose easy smile and self-effacing humor belie confidence and determination, has a serious goal: to prove that historical structures like the Pantheon are more stable than we give them credit for. "By every measure of success of a building—from an architectural, from an artistic, and from an engineering standpoint—I would argue that the Pantheon is the greatest that was ever built," Ochsendorf says. "There's no greater definition of success for a building than it's been standing for 20 centuries."

It also represents a masterwork of engineering and a repository of ancient technical knowledge—the structural equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Ochsendorf is working to halt what he sees as unnecessary interventions in historical buildings, in which engineers try to fix cracked or slumping walls with steel bars and supports. "We see a crack in a structure and we do a major intervention, but that's akin to dipping the Mona Lisa in epoxy because one section of the painting has faded a bit," he says.

ticho writes:

It started as an experiment. Steve Colley had just figured out how to rotate a cube on the screen when Howard Palmer suggested they could make a three-dimensional maze.

The year was 1973. They were high school seniors in a work-study program with NASA, tasked with testing the limits of the Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers. Their maze program flickered into life with simple wireframe graphics and few of the trappings of modern games. You could walk around in first person, looking for a way out of the maze, and that's about it. There were no objects or virtual people. Just a maze.

But Maze would evolve over the summer and the years that followed. Soon two people could occupy the maze together, connected over separate computers. Then they could shoot each other and even peek around corners. Before long, up to eight people could play in the same maze, blasting their friends across the ARPANET — a forebear to the internet. Two decades before id Software changed the game industry with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Colley, Palmer and MIT students Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling invented the first-person shooter.

This is the story of Maze, the video game that lays claim to perhaps more "firsts" than any other — the first first-person shooter, the first multiplayer networked game, the first game with both overhead and first-person view modes, the first game with modding tools and more.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-first-person-shooter

janrinok writes:

Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation Policy recently issued by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) of South Africa is such a regulation. It's as if the fabled prude Mrs. Grundy had been brought forward from the 18th century, stumbled across hustler.com on her first excursion online, and promptly cobbled together a law to shut the Internet down. Yes, it's that bad.

But don't just take our word for it—read some of its provisions for yourself. First, the regulation applies, in the first instance, to films and games (regardless of subject matter), as well as to publications containing certain loosely-described forms of sex, violence and hate speech.

What kind of content might we be talking about here? Much of the preamble of the document talks about sex. Indeed, sex sells, and it sells censorship legislation as well as it sells cigarettes and soft drinks. However the regulation, even on its face, goes much further. Its background section gives an example of non-sexual videos that, even under the current law, were issued a classification by the FPB—videos depicting a Pretorian pastor "ordering members of his congregation, some of whom were minors, to graze like cattle and drink petrol to prove that humans can eat anything provided by God". Under the new proposed regulation, the FPB could simply order such videos—which are obviously newsworthy—to be removed from the Internet.

Of course, there is much more - so read and be grateful that, unless you live in South Africa, things are never quite as bad as they might seem...

sigma wrote to tell us of a story that appeared in The Enquirer:

When the UK government announced plans to shift to the .odf Open Document Format, and away from Microsoft's proprietary .doc and .docx formats, Microsoft threatened to move its research facilities out of the UK.

The prime minister's director of strategy at the time, Steve Hilton, said that "Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said we will close them down in your constituencies if this goes through" "We just resisted. You have to be brave," Hilton said.

Although I am not a great lover of Microsoft, I'm not sure that this is any different than many other companies who will try to protect their profits - and, arguably, the jobs of their employees - when they can see the potential for the loss of business. But perhaps other companies are a little more subtle - especially when it is obvious that official papers will one day become public knowledge.

[Editor's Comment: This submission has been significantly edited - comment is not attributable to sigma]

[Editor's Comment: Please see public apology regarding this story.]

kaszz writes:

According to Daniel Mathews a lecturer in mathematics and founding member of Wikileaks, new laws passed in Australia (but not yet in effect) could criminalize the teaching of encryption. He explains how a ridiculously broad law could effectively make any encryption stronger than 512 bits criminal if your client is not Australian.

From the article:

The story begins with the Australian government's Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL). This list specifies goods considered important to national defence and security, and which are therefore tightly controlled.

Regulation of military weapons is not a particularly controversial idea. But the DSGL covers much more than munitions. It also includes many "dual-use" goods, which are goods with both military and civilian uses. This includes substantial sections on chemicals, electronics and telecommunications, among other things.

Disturbingly, the DSGL risks veering wildly in the direction of over-classification, covering activities that are completely unrelated to military or intelligence applications.

He says, "In short, the DSGL casts an extremely wide net, potentially catching open source privacy software, information security research and education, and the entire computer security industry in its snare. Most ridiculous, though, are some badly flawed technicalities. As I have argued before, the specifications are so imprecise that they potentially include a little algorithm you learned at primary school called division. If so, then division has become a potential weapon, and your calculator (or smartphone, computer, or any electronic device) is a potential delivery system for it."

HughPickens.com writes:

ABC News reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a list of English-language material recovered during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011 including one document dubbed "Instructions to Applicants," that would not be entirely out of place for an entry-level position at any American company – except for questions like the one about the applicant's willingness to blow themselves up. The questionnaire includes basic personal details, family history, marital status, and education level. It asks that applicants "answer the required information accurately and truthfully" and, "Please write clearly and legibly." Questions include: Is the applicant expert in chemistry, communications or any other field? Do they have a family member in the government who would cooperate with al Qaeda? Have they received any military training? Finally, it asks what the would-be jihadist would like to accomplish and, "Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?" For the final question, the application asks would-be killers that if they were to become martyrs, who should al Qaeda contact?

The corporate tone of the application is jarringly amusing, writes Amanda Taub, but it also hints at a larger truth: a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda is a large bureaucratic organization, albeit one in the "business" of mass-murdering innocent people. Jon Sopel, the North American editor from BBC News, joked that the application "looks like it has been written by someone who has spent too long working for Deloitte or Accenture, but bureaucracy exists in every walk of life – so why not on the path to violent jihad?"

Adamsjas writes:

The Times of India website carried coverage of the net neutrality fight in India.

It seems that the telecom authority stirred up a hornets nest by suggesting that net neutrality could come to an end in India:

Currently, India has a defacto net neutrality policy (which is to say no explicit policy at all). The major carriers are arguing for the right to charge content providers for carrying their content (big surprise).

Last month one of the big web shopping sites in India, Flipkart, pulled out of Airtel Zero's program of offering free services to Airtel customers in return for payment by Flipkart directly to Airtel. (Similar to Netflix pays Comcast). Indian net neutrality fans were dancing in the streets for Flipkart's refusal to play along.

But apparently the carriers were less than pleased and started lobbying the regulators. This resulted in other (elected) government officials to rushing to net neutrality's defense. The dust has not yet settled on that debate.

The first linked page has a rather entertaining video name Save the Internet that explains the situation in India.