Friday, June 6, 2014

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US claims Snowden stole millions more documents

Posted: 06 Jun 2014 03:00 AM PDT

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has  admitted Edward Snowden shared fewer top secret NSA documents than previously estimated.

The US intelligence community now thinks that the former systems administrator gave only 200,000 documents to journalists and had "probably downloaded" up to 1.5 million documents more.

It has previously thought he had stolen 1.77 million.

However, it is still not clear what Snowden nicked. Officially the US government said the overwhelming majority of information Snowden took pertained to the US military capabilities. However other experts do not think it likely that Snowden "compromised the communications networks that make up the military's command and control system."

But it is certain that a huge chunk of documents are unaccounted for.

Snowden said that said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies. However Snowden told the South China Morning Post he had access to more documents to leak. However last month he said he destroyed information he was holding to prevent the Russians from getting it. 

Piracy is legal in the EU sometimes

Posted: 06 Jun 2014 02:59 AM PDT

A court in the European Union has decided that Europeans are allowed to pirate content if they do so in a particular way.

Apparently if an internet user is streaming copyrighted content online, it's legal for the user, who isn't willfully making a copy of said content to view it. The pirate can only watch it directly through a web browser, streaming it from a website that hosts it, but it will be perfectly legal.

The ruling comes as part of a legal battle between a European media service Meltwater that used to include headlines from various news stories in daily digests sent to readers via email. Copyright holders including the Associated Press sued the company.

But in Europe the case crossed into strange territory. The group suing Meltwater argued that recipients of Meltwater's emails had to pay license fees for the content they received, and the court basically ruled that Internet users who see content online, without actually willingly making a copy of it, should not be held accountable for any resulting copyright infringement.

Meltwater is not off the hook, but its clients certainly are. It also means that if someone streams content from their website they can't be done for piracy. It does mean that viewers cannot be prosecuted.

This should be good news for all those German unternet users who received fines at home for streaming certain porn videos from a site last year. 

Vodafone does a Snowden

Posted: 06 Jun 2014 02:58 AM PDT

British mobile phone outfit Vodafone has lifted the lid on the extent of state surveillance and said that the government is snooping on people just because it can.

Vodafone has issued a statement where it calls on authorities to submit to "regular scrutiny by an independent authority", and to "amend legislation which enables agencies and authorities to access an operator's communications infrastructure without the knowledge and direct control of the operator".

It said that in some countries, governments have "direct" and "permanent access" to Vodafone's infrastructure and does not have to make an interception request.

"In our view, it is governments - not communications operators - who hold the primary duty to provide greater transparency on the number of agency and authority demands issued to operators," Vodafone said.

Vodafone said that it will continue to comply with the requests, rather than cease its operations in a country. It said that it was in a bind because if it did not comply with a lawful demand for assistance, governments can remove its license to operate, preventing it from providing services.

It looks like the UK government is particularly keen on snooping. It has made 2,760 interception requests and 514, 608 communications data requests to all mobile phone operators in 2013.

Italy made 139.962 interception requests in total and 605,601 communications requests to Vodafone alone. In the US, Verizon said it received 321,545 requests for customer information.

The report pointed out that metadata, which the spooks claim does not tell them too much about a person, can be extremely revealing.

"It is possible to learn a great deal about an individual's movements, interest and relationships from an analysis of metadata ... In many countries, agencies and authorities therefore have legal powers to order operators to disclose large volumes of this kind of communications data," the report said. 

Intel's fanless chip gets a fan

Posted: 06 Jun 2014 02:57 AM PDT

While Chipzilla is marketing its anorexic fanless Core M reference designs at Computex this week, it seems that that the company does think that the designs will actually run better with a fan.

Cnet said that Intel showed off a design for a docking station that includes a set of fans to add some airflow into the Core M.

The reason is that to allow for greater performance while using such a system at your desk. It works by targeting airflow over the front and rear surfaces of the tablet. CNet tells us that the dock was switched on at the demonstration, making very little noise and the airflow was hard to notice. However it does defeat the purpose of having a fanless computer an awful lot.

It is a bit like offering a punter a hybrid car but telling them that it will go faster if you put petrol in. The performance gain is not small either. Intel's testing indicates that running a Core M system with the dock would boost performance by around 30 percent.

Still if Intel does hold to its promise to have all wireless systems including docking, charging and displays, in 2016 the idea will be toast, unless it tells us that the way to improve wireless performance by 30 per cent is by connecting it with a wire. 

Google shows off new Tegra based tablet

Posted: 06 Jun 2014 02:56 AM PDT

Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group has released details of a new Protect Tango tablet based around an Nvidia Tegra K1.

The seven inch tablet comes with 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4G LTE.

The Tegra K1 was announced at CES and is a next generation mobile processor that is based on the Kepler architecture found on the company's PC GeForce graphics cards. The K1 has 192-cores and has the power to run desktop grade software and graphics on a mobile device.

Google said that the tablet has a front facing camera with a 120-degree viewing angle, a 4MP rear camera, motion tracking camera, and an integrated depth sensor. The combination of these sensors plus NVIDIA's K1 allows the device to perform detailed tracking to create amazing three-dimensional environments.

Before anyone gets too excited, Google has not ever released a concrete objective for its Project Tango devices. They are more or less built so that the ATAP team has a vision of creating something that could one day impact the way we use and think about devices.

That said, the tablet will be available as a development kit later this year and will cost $1,024. These units are intended for developers and will be available in limited quantities. Have a look at it in action below.

World+dog fails on security front

Posted: 05 Jun 2014 11:25 AM PDT

A farcical situation arose in the UK on Monday this week when the National Crime Agency gave advice to people to wake up to security and referred them to its web site – which crashed under the strain.

Coincidentally, we were on our way to a Dell security conference in Budapest, where folk were warning of dire consequences for everyone from end users to corporations if they didn’t put locks that work on their internet front doors.

The tech jargon for this is a “firewall”, but Dell security personnel – many of whom worked for SonicWALL before it was bought by the company – work night and day to react to ever present security threats.

Dell logs millions of malware attacks every day and it’s evident that while the security problems are omnipresent and apply from government networks to your own home LAN, no-one is really listening to the essential message.

You would probably never leave your front door open but it seems that now we’re locked into using the interweb, many of us do just that – whether we’re using a smarty pants phone, a tablet, or a Windows PC or a Macintosh for that matter.

Patrick Sweeney, executive director of product management at Dell Software told me that part of the problem is people don’t understand the risks they run.  That’s as true for individuals as it is for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and obviously for corporations too.

And if you think you’re safe with an Android operating system, well you’d better think again – especially if you charge your smarty phone from your Windows PC.

Sweeney says there is no coordinated strategy worldwide for what he terms criminal-to-criminal networks.  Reading between the words he said, I got the firm impression that any kind of strategy is as far away as reality as Arcturus is from our sun.  His colleagues tell me that there is no coordinated strategy even within the European Union – Brussells doesn’t have much of a clue about security.  

But as we’re all linked together by the internet of thongs, it surely is about time that the United Nations started knock knock knocking on countries’ doors?  Or even the European Union. Or even North America. Or even the United Kingdom.

Sweeney said you are comparatively safe if you’re not connected to the internet but as many of us now all are, and are being encouraged to buy stuff even on our smarty phones and tablets, perhaps we had better start bugging our politicians to get a bit smart themselves.

* You can find ChannelEye's coverage of the channel conference by clicking here.
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