Monday, September 30, 2013

TechEye

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NSA maps your social connections

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 03:56 AM PDT

The latest Snowden leak shows that since 2010, the National Security Agency has been creating sophisticated graphs of Americans' social connections.

Using the shedloads of data it has collected, it can tell who a person's friends are, their locations at certain times, their travel companions and other personal information.

According to the New York Times, a slide from an NSA Powerpoint presentation shows one of the ways the agency uses e-mail and phone data to analyse the relationships of foreign intelligence targets.

Another NSA memorandum, dated January 2011, reveals the agency was told to conduct "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness" of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.

The agency was mix and matching communications data with public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data.

In fact, it is possible that the NSA knows more about foreign citizens than their own government does.

It is also possible that Americans have been caught up in the effort. After all, a lot of foreigners might know Americans and send them an email from time to time.

All this means that if you ever sell a stuffed toy to an American with dodgy connections, you could end up on a no-fly list or be strip searched when you take your family to Florida. 

iOS7 makes Apple customers sick

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 03:14 AM PDT

Apple's latest OS is making some of its fanboys so sick that their mothers are having to give them a dose of Pepto-Bismol and send them to bed.

While some trumpeted the wonderful world of fake zooms, parallax, sliding and other changes in iOS, it is apparently is causing people with vestibular disorders to re-enact a scene from the Exorcist.

According to the Guardian, some Apple users are reporting headaches and feelings associated with motion sickness every time they access an app.

This was not a problem under iOS 6 where zooming was minimal, parallax was absent, and there were no animation effects. 

Android and Windows Phone don't have this problem either because they are not under pressure to look cool, even at the expense of the contents of their users' stomachs.

A number of affected users have committed the heresy of switching iPhones that had already been upgraded to iOS 7 for models running iOS 6.

The vestibular system is what gives us our sense of balance and sense of spatial awareness. While we would have thought that your average Apple fanboy was off-balance to start with, it looks like the situation could be made worse when their vestibular systems and visual system come into conflict.

Of course, we are talking about a small number of iPhone users who might get sick. More than five percent of the population can get "visually induced motion sickness" but these symptoms manifest even more severely if a viewer already has a disorder of the vestibular system. An estimated 35 percent of all Americans experience vestibular system dysfunction.

Those with neurological conditions that cause central dizziness could also suffer using iOS7 due to animations being more pronounced.

Apple provides a "Reduce Motion" option within the iOS 7 Settings app, but it is poorly labelled and it disables the parallax effect, but doesn't stop zooming or sliding. 

Taiwanese ODMs lose grip on notebooks

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 03:12 AM PDT

The Taiwanese industry is loosening its traditionally strong grip on global notebook shipments, according to a report, as competitors from the USA and particularly China muscle in on its territory.

HP and Lenovo are tipped to ship as many as 28 million notebooks next year. But unusually for the latter, Lenovo will seek to outsource just 40 percent of its notebook orders compared to 75 percent in 2013, with in-house production accounting for 16.8 million units - or 60 percent - instead.

In 2013, the in-house figure is 25 percent of Lenovo's total production at 6.7 million units.

This is a significant switch of tactics as Lenovo overtook HP to become the top notebook brand vendor for the first half of 2013.

Lenovo won't be internally manufacturing all notebooks, because it's necessary for the company to keep alternative production lines open. However, Taiwan's ODMs are going to notice.

The report, put together by Digitimes Research, estimates Taiwanese share of global notebook shipments will fall to 82.9 percent in Q3, and further to 81.5 percent in Q4 of this year.

As Lenovo seeks to continue stealing the march on competition, it will look locally to Chinese companies - allowing the firm to cut costs and put even more pressure on rivals, including those in Taiwan. 

HP, meanwhile, is expected to pick up orders from enterprise and government sectors over the second half of 2013, which should boost its market share. The report maintains Lenovo still has a shot at keeping the largest vendor crown for the year if current trends continue.

Back in 1999, Taiwanese companies shipped just 31 percent of netbooks worldwide, but heavy investment into China and R&D saw market share swell above 90 percent in 2010. If only IBM hadn't sold its notebook businss, eh?

Free Software Foundation celebrates 30th birthday

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 03:04 AM PDT

Free software guru Richard Stallman has been looking into his navel as part of the Free Software Foundation's 30th birthday.

Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation and launched the development of the free software operating system GNU in 1984.

The GNU/Linux system is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman also founded the League for Programming Freedom, which campaigned against legal threats to programming.

Writing in Wired, Stallman said that it is now 30 years since he launched the campaign for freedom in computing. He said that since he started, the IT scene has changed a lot, with most people in advanced countries owning computers and phones which can be like computers.

It still worries him that non-free software makes users surrender control over their computing to someone else. In fact, the situation has become worse thanks to Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, which means letting someone else's server do your own computing activities.

This was all highlighted by the Snowden scandal which shows that non-free software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user.

He said that malware was common in services and proprietary software products because the users don't have control over them.

Meanwhile, free software is controlled by its users and freedom means having control over their own lives.

However, Service as a Software Substitute causes the same injustices as using a non-free program.

If a person uses a SaaSS translation service they send text to the server, and the server translates it and sends the translation back to the user.

This means that you are entrusting all the pertinent data to the server operator, which will be forced to show it to the state.

If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users, he warned.

The other difficulty is that non-free software forces others to use it as well. If you use the non-free Skype client, another person has to use it and surrender their freedoms along with yours, Stallman said. 

Britain plans offensive cyber war capability

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 02:55 AM PDT

The UK is to recruit hundreds of computer experts to form a cyber-army, defence secretary Philip Hammond announced over the weekend.

The unit will defend vital networks against cyber-attacks and launch high-tech assaults of its own, it is claimed at the Conservative party conference. Hammond proudly announced to the true blue loyalists that while there's no cash for anyone else, Britain is spending increasing amounts on defending the great unwashed from people they are unlikely to ever meet.

Hammond said that while the UK is broke, it has the fourth largest defence budget in the world and a big chunk of the cash is not being spent on cyber intelligence and surveillance.

He said last year, cyber defences blocked around 400,000 advanced malicious cyber threats against the government's secure internet alone, so the threat is real.

But he added that building cyber defence is not enough, as the UK also has to deter attacks. Hammond said Britain will build a dedicated capability to counterattack in cyberspace and, if necessary, to strike.

He told the Wail on Sunday that clinical "cyber strikes" could disable enemy communications, nuclear and chemical weapons, planes, ships and other hardware.

Hammond told the conference the government will recruit a new Joint Cyber Reserve.

The "reservists" will work alongside existing experts in various government agencies such as the Ministry of Defence and the extremely unpopular GCHQ surveillance agency.

His speech did not go that smoothly.

Hammond was heckled by former soldiers Colonel Ian Brazier and Captain Joe Eastwood who interrupted the minister's speech to complain about cuts to regimental size. Conservative party officials escorted him from the conference building to the library where he was given a revolver and told to do the decent thing. 

Siemens sacks 15,000 staff

Posted: 30 Sep 2013 02:42 AM PDT

More than 15,000 employees at Europe's biggest engineering firm, Siemens, will have to pick up their pink slips and p45s.

The company says it wants to carry out the $8.1 billion cost cutting programme designed by chief executive Peter Loescher. Ironically, Loescher, who designed the plan, was the first to go.

Siemens kicked him out two months ago and many hoped his cunning plan would have gone with him, but apparently not. According to Bloomberg, the plan is being pushed through by the new broom, CEO Joe Kaeser.

The company, which produces items from hearing aids to gas turbines, wants to close the gap with rivals such as General Electric and ABB.

Siemens and its unions have reached an agreement over about half of the job cuts and is still trying to sort out a deal on the other half.

The announcement came because Siemens wanted to end speculation in the market about the number of jobs that are about to be cut, a company spokesperson said.

No workers have been laid off so far and Siemens has said it does not intend to make enforced redundancies, relying instead on attrition and voluntary severance deals.

In Germany, roughly 2,000 jobs will be cut at the company's industrial unit and another 1,400 at its energy and infrastructure business, the spokesperson said.

Although 15,000 is a lot, it's a small percentage of the company's 370,000 workers. 370,000 is the same number of staff it had last year. 
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