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Daily Archives: August 18, 2020

Zoombomber crashes court hearing on Twitter hack with Pornhub video, Judge obviously not qualified for this case

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Zoombombers today disrupted a court hearing involving the Florida teen accused of masterminding a takeover of high-profile Twitter accounts, forcing the judge to stop the hearing. “During the hearing, the judge and attorneys were interrupted several times with people shouting racial slurs, playing music, and showing pornographic images,” ABC Action News in Tampa Bay wrote. A Pornhub video forced the judge to temporarily shut down the hearing.

The Zoombombing occurred today when the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida in Tampa held a bail hearing for Graham Clark, who previously pleaded not guilty and is reportedly being held on $725,000 bail. Clark faces 30 felony charges related to the July 15 Twitter attack in which accounts of famous people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden were hijacked and used to push cryptocurrency scams. Hackers also accessed direct messages for 36 high-profile account holders.

Today, Judge Christopher Nash ruled against a request to lower Clark’s bail amount. But before that, the judge “shut down the hearing for a short time” when arguments were interrupted by “pornography… foul language and rap music,” Fox 13 reporter Gloria Gomez wrote on Twitter.

“I’m removing people as quickly as I can whenever a disruption happens,” Nash said after one Zoombomber interrupted a lawyer. A not-safe-for-work portion of the hearing was posted by a Twitter user here. The first 47 seconds are safe to watch and include Nash’s comment about removing Zoombombers, but the rest of the video includes the Pornhub clip that caused Nash to shut down the hearing.

There were still problems after the hearing resumed, the Tampa Bay Times wrote:

Hoping a brief pause would filter out the interrupters, Nash reopened the meeting. But users who disguised their names as CNN and BBC News resumed their interruptions.

Nash was ultimately able to rule, declining to lower the bail amount. He did, however, remove a requirement that Clark prove the legitimacy of his assets. Lawyers have said he has $3 million in Bitcoin under his control.

“Predictably, the Zoom hearing for the 17-year-old alleged Twitter hacker in Fla. was bombed multiple times, with the final bombing of a pornhub clip ending the zoom portion of the proceedings,” security reporter Brian Krebs wrote on Twitter. “How the judge in charge of the proceeding didn’t think to enable settings that would prevent people from taking over the screen is beyond me. My guess is he didn’t know he could.”

Nash said that he’ll require a password next time, according to WFLA reporter Ryan Hughes.

Source: Zoombomber crashes court hearing on Twitter hack with Pornhub video | Ars Technica

Epic Games asks court to stop Apple pulling its developer tools next week, as Apple shows exactly how monopolies operate

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Epic Games has filed yet another lawsuit against Apple. The Fortnite developer is now suing the Cupertino-based company for allegedly retaliating against it for its other lawsuit last week. Apple has not only removed the game from the App Store but has told Epic that it will “terminate” all its developer accounts and “cut Epic off from iOS and Mac development tools” on August 28th.

According to the filing, Epic claims that Fortnite’s removal from the App Store in conjunction with the termination of the developer accounts will likely result in “irreparable harm” to Epic. The company adds that cutting off access to development tools also affects software like Unreal Engine Epic, which it offers to third-party developers and which Apple itself has never claimed to have violated any policy. Without access to the tools, the company states that it can’t develop future versions of Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS.

“Not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple is attacking Epic’s entire business in unrelated areas,” the lawsuit states. “Left unchecked, Apple’s actions will irreparably damage Epic’s reputation among Fortnite users and be catastrophic for the future of the separate Unreal Engine business.”

The lawsuit mentions that Apple sent Epic a letter that threatened to stop “engineering efforts to improve hardware and software performance of Unreal Engine on Mac and iOS hardware […] and adoption and support of ARKit features and future VR features into Unreal Engine by their XR team.” The latter could be alluding to future Apple AR and VR projects.

Epic says that the preliminary injunctive relief is necessary to prevent its business from being crushed before the case even goes to judgement. The proposed preliminary injunction would restrain Apple from removing and de-listing Fortnite (which the company has already done) and would prevent it from taking actions against Epic’s other titles as well as Unreal Engine.

The conflict erupted last week when Epic began offering Fortnite discounts to users who bypassed Android and iOS app stores, thus working around the 30 percent cut. Apple then removed the game from its store for violating its policies, which then prompted Epic to file a lawsuit against it. The same thing occurred with Google — Android pulled the game from its app store and Epic filed suit against Google. Epic has also posted a parody of Apple’s 1984 ad which ends with a #FreeFortnite hashtag.

Source: Epic Games asks court to stop Apple pulling its developer tools next week | Engadget

US Secret Service Bought Access to Bable Street’s Locate X Spy Tool for warrantless surveillance

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Babel Street is a shadowy organization that offers a product called Locate X that is reportedly used to gather anonymized location data from a host of popular apps that users have unwittingly installed on their phones. When we say “unwittingly,” we mean that not everyone is aware that random innocuous apps are often bundling and anonymizing their data to be sold off to the highest bidder.

Back in March, Protocol reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had a contract to use Locate X and that sources inside the secretive company described the system’s capabilities as allowing a user “to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months.”

Protocol’s sources also said that the Secret Service had used the Locate X system in the course of investing a large credit card skimming operation. On Monday, Motherboard confirmed the investigation when it published an internal Secret Service document it acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. (You can view the full document here.)

The document covers a relationship between Secret Service and Babel Street from September 28, 2017, to September 27, 2018. In the past, the Secret Service has reportedly used a seperate social media surveillance product from Babel Street, and the newly-released document totals fees paid after the addition of the Locate X license as $1,999,394.

[…]

Based on Fourth Amendment protections, law enforcement typically has to get a warrant or court order to seek to obtain Americans’ location data. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that cops still need a warrant to gather cellphone location data from network providers. And while law enforcement can obtain a warrant for specific cases as it seeks to view location data from a specific region of interest at a specific time, the Locate X system saves government agencies the time of going through judicial review with a next-best-thing approach.

The data brokerage industry benefits from the confusion that the public has about what information is collected and shared by various private companies that are perfectly within their legal rights. You can debate whether it’s acceptable for private companies to sell this data to each other for the purpose of making profits. But when this kind of sale is made to the U.S. government, it’s hard to argue that these practices aren’t, at least, violating the spirit of our constitutional rights.

Source: Secret Service Bought Access to Bable Street’s Locate X Spy Tool

Ed Snowden has raked in $1m+ from speeches – and Uncle Sam wants its cut, specifically, absolutely all of it

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Edward Snowden has brought in a health $1.25m in speaking fees ever since he jumped on a plane to Hong Kong with a treasure trove of NSA secrets, a new court filing [PDF] has revealed.

The whistleblower, who exposed mass surveillance of American citizens and foreigners by the US government by handing over top-secret documents to journalists before escaping to Moscow, earns an average of $18,745 per engagement. And Uncle Sam wants it – all of it.

The Feds subpoenaed Snowden’s booking agent, American Program Bureau, based in Massachusetts, insisting on a full rundown of engagements it had booked him for. The prosecution has added the list of 67 speeches, complete with fees and clients, to its lawsuit seeking to strip Snowden of any money earned through his actions.

[…]

With the monetary value of Snowden’s speaking tours now laid out of the table, it’s hard not to imagine that Donald Trump doesn’t have a figure in mind.

The US government has already won the right to claim all royalties from Snowden’s book and speeches after a district court awarded it all proceeds. The lawyers are now trying to figure out what those sums are.

Snowden has refused formal requests to provide all relevant information about his earnings, resulting in a magistrate deciding that the government can effectively decide what he had earned. His publisher agreed to hand over royalties from his book, although not the advance it paid him to write it.

Source: Ed Snowden has raked in $1m+ from speeches – and Uncle Sam wants its cut, specifically, absolutely all of it • The Register

Amazingly though having revoked his passport you’d think they also revoked his tax paying requirements with it

Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality

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Nearly 60 years ago, the Nobel prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner captured one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics in a thought experiment. He imagined a friend of his, sealed in a lab, measuring a particle such as an atom while Wigner stood outside. Quantum mechanics famously allows particles to occupy many locations at once—a so-called superposition—but the friend’s observation “collapses” the particle to just one spot. Yet for Wigner, the superposition remains: The collapse occurs only when he makes a measurement sometime later. Worse, Wigner also sees the friend in a superposition. Their experiences directly conflict.

Now, researchers in Australia and Taiwan offer perhaps the sharpest demonstration that Wigner’s paradox is real. In a study published this week in Nature Physics, they transform the thought experiment into a mathematical theorem that confirms the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the scenario. The team also tests the theorem with an experiment, using photons as proxies for the humans. Whereas Wigner believed resolving the paradox requires quantum mechanics to break down for large systems such as human observers, some of the new study’s authors believe something just as fundamental is on thin ice: objectivity. It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact, one that is as true for me as it is for you.

[…]

in 2018, Richard Healey, a philosopher of physics at the University of Arizona, pointed out a loophole in Brukner’s thought experiment, which Tischer and her colleagues have now closed. In their new scenario they make four assumptions. One is that the results the friends obtain are real: They can be combined with other measurements to form a shared corpus of knowledge. They also assume quantum mechanics is universal, and as valid for observers as for particles; that the choices the observers make are free of peculiar biases induced by a godlike superdeterminism; and that physics is local, free of all but the most limited form of “spooky action” at a distance.

Yet their analysis shows the contradictions of Wigner’s paradox persist. The team’s tabletop experiment, in which they created entangled photons, also backs up the paradox. Optical elements steered each photon onto a path that depended on its polarization: the equivalent of the friends’ observations. The photon then entered a second set of elements and detectors that played the role of the Wigners. The team found, again, an irreconcilable mismatch between the friends and the Wigners. What is more, they varied exactly how entangled the particles were and showed that the mismatch occurs for different conditions than in Brukner’s scenario. “That shows that we really have something new here,” Tischler says.

It also indicates that one of the four assumptions has to give. Few physicists believe superdeterminism could be to blame. Some see locality as the weak point, but its failure would be stark: One observer’s actions would affect another’s results even across great distances—a stronger kind of nonlocality than the type quantum theorists often consider. So some are questioning the tenet that observers can pool their measurements empirically. “There are facts for one observer, and facts for another; they need not mesh,” suggests study co-author and Griffith physicist Howard Wiseman. It is a radical relativism, still jarring to many. “From a classical perspective, what everyone sees is considered objective, independent of what anyone else sees,” says Olimpia Lombardi, a philosopher of physics at the University of Buenos Aires.

And then there is Wigner’s conclusion that quantum mechanics itself breaks down. Of the assumptions, it is the most directly testable, by experiments that are probing quantum mechanics on ever larger scales.

Source: Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality | Science | AAAS

New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour, send your data to others too

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Toyota already operates a “Mobility Services Platform” that it says helps it to “develop, deploy, and manage the next generation of data-driven mobility services for driver and passenger safety, security, comfort, and convenience”.

That data comes from a device called the “Data Communication Module” (DCM) that Toyota fits into many models in Japan, the USA and China.

Toyota reckons the data could turn into “new contextual services such as car share, rideshare, full-service lease, and new corporate and consumer services such as proactive vehicle maintenance notifications and driving behavior-based insurance.”

Toyota's connected car vision

Toyota’s connected car vision. Click to enlarge

The company has touted that vision since at least the year 2016, but precious little evidence of it turning into products is available.

Which may be why Toyota has signed with AWS for not just cloud tech but also professional services.

The two companies say their joint efforts “will help build a foundation for streamlined and secure data sharing throughout the company and accelerate its move toward CASE (Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared and Electric) mobility technologies.”

Neither party has specified just which bits of the AWS cloud Toyota will take for a spin but it seems sensible to suggest the auto-maker is going to need lots of storage and analytics capabilities, making AWS S3 and Kinesis likely candidates for a test drive.

Whatever Toyota uses, prepare for privacy ponderings because while cheaper car insurance sounds lovely, having an insurer source driving data from a manufacturer has plenty of potential pitfalls.

Source: Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour • The Register

No, this isn’t a good thing and I hope there’s an opt out