Phone company is watching…, Feds Wait Until…, p*rn
movie pirate counter-sues…, bring down powerful people…, AC/DC
virus…, Eavesdrop on Your Conversations…, Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get
faster…, Samsung: Apple…, RIP Andre Hedrick…, Gaming Catastrophe…
1. Your phone company is watching (TED Talk with Standing Ovations)
While
Senator Wyden has been banging the drum about privacy violations
committed by the federal government under the FISA Amendments Act for
quite some time, the rest of Congress seems perfectly content to stay
ignorant and pretend that there’s no possible way that the feds might be
abusing the powers that let them spy on nearly anyone without much (if
any) oversight. So it’s interesting that Wyden was finally able to
squeeze out of the Director of National Intelligence an admission that,
oh yeah, the feds violated the 4th Amendment. As covered by the always
awesome reporting by Spencer Ackerman at Wired:
One of the many alleged BitTorrent users to
fall victim to copyright trolls in recent years has launched an
impressive counterattack against a plaintiff who accused him of
downloading an adult movie. Jeff Fantalis of Louisville wants millions
of dollars in damages for defamation, emotional distress and invasion of
privacy, plus a prominent retraction in a local newspaper. Fantalis
further asks the court to rule that p*rn can’t be copyrighted as it is
not a “useful art.”
Twenty-one-year-old
college student Nadim Kobeissi is from Canada, Lebanon and the
internet. He is the creator of Cryptocat, a project “to combine my love
of cryptography and cats,” he explained to an overflowing audience
of hackers at the HOPE conference on Saturday, July 14. The site,
crypto.cat, has a chunky, 8-bit sensibility, with a big-eyed binary cat
in the corner. The visitor has the option to name, then enter a chat.
There’s some explanatory text, but little else. It’s deceptively simple
for a web app that can save lives, subvert governments and frustrate
marketers. But as little as two years ago such a site was considered to
be likely impossible to code.
Iranian
nuclear facilities have reportedly been attacked by a “music” virus,
turning on lab PCs at night and blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Mikko
Hypponen, Chief Researcher at Finnish digital security firm F-secure,
publicly released a letter he received from an unnamed Iranian
scientist. The researcher, who claimed to work for the Atomic Energy
Organization of Iran (AEOI), said that another virus has struck the
Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran and a secret
underground research facility at Fordo, southwest of Tehran.
New
surveillance laws being proposed in countries from the United
States to Australia would force makers of online chat software to build
in backdoors for wiretapping. For years, the popular video chat service
Skype has resisted taking part in online surveillance—but that may have
changed. And if it has, Skype’s not telling.
A new
study from the New America Foundation suggests that the United States
is lagging in the broadband speed race. The study compared high-speed
Internet service in major cities around the world, and found that
high-speed broadband service was dramatically more expensive and slower
in the United States than in leading countries outside the United
States. The authors blame these disappointing results on bad public
policy.
Another
day, another Apple (AAPL) vs. Samsung (005930) trial. The two consumer
electronics companies are preparing to do battle in San Jose, California
next week, and now-public court documents shed light on the positions
each firm is taking. On Tuesday, Apple told Samsung exactly what it
thinks its technology patents are worth (spoiler: barely anything at
all), and subsequent filings from Samsung reveal that the South
Korea-based company has a few choice words for Apple as well.
Obit Andre
Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco
Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a
wife, four young children and many friends. Andre made a significant
contribution to personal computing history in a way few people fully
realise.
Valve
head—and one-time Microsoft employee—Gabe Newell has branded Windows 8
“a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space” at videogame conference
Casual Connect in Seattle. The Valve boss continued, saying that in the
fallout from Windows 8, “we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who
will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of
people.” Newell criticised Windows 8 while talking about the future of
the gaming industry, and you can read everything he said at VentureBeat.
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