Daily Archives: March 26, 2021

Data Broker Looking To Sell Global Real-Time Vehicle Location Data To Government Agencies, Including The Military

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[…]

utting a couple of middle men between the app data and the purchase of data helps agencies steer clear of Constitutional issues related to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which introduced a warrant mandate for engaging in proxy tracking of people via cell service providers.

But phones aren’t the only objects that generate a wealth of location data. Cars go almost as many places as phones do, providing data brokers with yet another source of possibly useful location data that government agencies might be interested in obtaining access to. Here’s Joseph Cox of Vice with more details:

A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.

“Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis,” the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. “Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month,” the document adds.

Historical data is cool. But what’s even cooler is real-time tracking of vehicle movements. Of course the DoD would be interested in this. It has a drone strike program that’s thirsty for location data and has relied on even more questionable data in the past to make extrajudicial “death from above” decisions in the past.

Phones are reliable snitches. So are cars — a fact that may come as a surprise to car owners who haven’t been paying attention to tech developments over the past several years. Plenty of data is constantly captured by internal “black boxes,” but tends to only be retained when there’s a collision. But the interconnectedness of cars and people’s phones provides new data-gathering opportunities.

Then there are the car manufacturers themselves, which apparently feel driver data is theirs for the taking and are willing to sell it to third parties who are (also apparently) willing to sell all of this to government agencies.

“Vehicle telematics is data transmitted from the vehicle to the automaker or OEM through embedded communications systems in the car,” the Ulysses document continues. “Among the thousands of other data points, vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real time basis while the vehicle is operating.”

This document wasn’t obtained from FOIA requests. It actually couldn’t be — not if Ulysses isn’t currently selling to government agencies. It was actually obtained by Senator Ron Wyden, who shared it with Vice’s tech-related offshoot, Motherboard. As Wyden noted while handing it over, very little is known about these under-the-radar suppliers of location data and their government customers. This company may have no (acknowledged) government customers at this point, but real-time access to vehicle movement is something plenty of government agencies would be willing to pay for.

[…]

Source: Data Broker Looking To Sell Real-Time Vehicle Location Data To Government Agencies, Including The Military | Techdirt

Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone’s broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details… Don’t tell anyone

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British clothes retailer Fatface has infuriated some customers by telling them “an unauthorised third party” gained access to systems holding their data earlier this year, and then asking them to keep news of the blunder to themselves.

Several people wrote into The Register to let us know about the personal data leak, with reader Terry saying: “You will notice the Fatface email is marked as confidential. This annoyed me.”

Chief exec Liz Evans wrote in an email titled “Strictly private and confidential – Notice of security incident” sent to users yesterday:

—–

Please do keep this email and the information included within it strictly private and confidential.

What happened?

On 17 January 2021, FatFace identified some suspicious activity within its IT systems. We immediately launched an investigation… [and] determined that an unauthorised third party had gained access to certain systems operated by us during a limited period of time earlier the same month….

Some of your personal data may have been involved in the incident. This could include some or all of the below listed categories of information relating to you.

  • First name and surname.
  • Email address.
  • Address details.
  • Partial payment card information by way of the last 4 digits and expiry date.

Please rest assured that full payment card information was not compromised. We have been working with the relevant authorities and external security experts to ensure a comprehensive response to the incident. In addition, we have notified the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK and other law enforcement authorities of this incident.

We have taken various additional steps to further strengthen the security of our systems. Please rest assured that our systems are secure, our website remains fully operational and FatFace is a safe place to shop, both in store (when we can reopen our shops) and online.

—-

Quite reasonably, customers quickly took to social media to ask where they could find “a public statement on your data breach,” why it had waited so long to inform customers, why the mail was marked “confidential” and whether it was genuine. All were directed to kindly “DM” the firm’s social media handler.

It also noted that it would be giving recipients “access to a complimentary Experian Identity Plus membership… purely out of an abundance of caution and not because we consider your data specifically to be at risk.”

It did not detail how many people had been affected. The firm has “200 stores across the UK and Ireland” – doing particularly well in seaside areas – and offers international shipping, although its website currently says this is unavailable.

[…]

Source: Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone’s broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details… Don’t tell anyone • The Register

I guess they don’t have to notify anyone now that the UK is out of the EU and doesn’t have to conform to GDPR rules…

Guns.Com Got Hacked – personal data available on forum

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Watch out, firearm lovers. The subtly-named guns.com, a place where Americans can go to pick out whatever stylish boomstick they like and have it shipped straight to their neck of the woods, seems to have a pretty awful data breach on its hands.

Back in January, a hacker temporarily disabled the company’s website, interfering with the site’s retail operations and forcing the weapons peddler to apologize to its confused customers for the whole debacle.

Guns.com has claimed that this attack was meant to prevent the “business from operating”—and that there is “no indication” of any attempt to steal data. However, this assessment may be wrong.

This week a large cache of files allegedly taken from the site appeared on the popular dark web site Raid Forums. In fact, an anonymous user offered Guns.com’s entire kit and caboodle—allegedly everything from troves of consumer and administrative data to the site’s stolen source code—free to all comers.

The data dump shows substantial gun buyer information, including user IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, hashed passwords, and, most alarmingly, physical addresses—including city, state, and zip code information. The site data has been viewed by Gizmodo and it was originally reported on by Hackread.

The dump also seems to show access to information about many of the firearms providers that sell through the platform (the site acts as a location for sellers as much as for buyers), and Hackread reports that an excel file within the data tranche shows “sensitive login details of Guns.com including its administrator’s WordPress, MYSQL, and Cloud (Azure) credentials,” though it’s unclear if this is recent information. We also found back-end code for a Laravel-powered version of the site although it isn’t clear what platform the retailer is currently using.

[…]

Source: Guns.Com Got Hacked

Big Tech CEOs Waffle on Banning the 12 Major Anti-Vaxxers that cause 73% of misinformation

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After a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Anti-Vax Watch found that a huge percentage of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines can be traced back to just a dozen people, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter told Congress they weren’t sure they would ban them.

The CCDH/Anti-Vax Watch report found that some 73 percent of misinformation on Facebook, and 17 percent on Twitter, is linked to a group of 12 accounts including prominent anti-vaxxers Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ty & Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, and Rizza Islam. The report also identified what it concluded were clear violations of platform policies on the spread of disinformation about the novel coronavirus pandemic and vaccines in general. The report was prominently cited in a letter by 12 state attorneys general to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding they do more to fight coronavirus-related misinformation; according to the Washington Post, this mirrors internal Facebook research showing relatively tiny groups of users are primarily responsible for flooding the site with anti-vaccine content.

“Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen,” the report states. “Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.”

“Research conducted by CCDH last year has shown that platforms fail to act on 95 percent of the Covid and vaccine misinformation reported to them, and we have uncovered evidence that Instagram’s algorithm actively recommends similar misinformation,” they added. “Tracking of 425 anti-vaccine accounts by CCDH shows that their total following across platforms now stands at 59.2 million as a result of these failures.”

[…]

Source: Big Tech CEOs Waffle on Banning the 12 Major Anti-Vaxxers

Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain

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[…]

a group of mavericks out of Switzerland have detected a magnetic signal in a plant. Using a highly sensitive magnetometer, an interdisciplinary team of researchers have measured signals from a Venus flytrap of up to .5 picotesla. To make matters even more mind-blowing, this signal is roughly equivalent to the biomagnetic field strength of the human brain. The full report is here.

The findings shine a light on a whole new world of plant communications we never knew was there and paves the path for new approaches to diagnose and treat plant diseases. It’s a parade-worthy “I told you so” for champions of plant intelligence, and a new dawn for how we live in harmony with the green kingdom.

[…]

So, why does it matter that a plant has a detectable biomagnetic signal? Well,  bioelectromagnetism is the amount of magnetic signal given off by a living thing,

[…]

The Venus flytrap boasts three trigger hairs that serve as mechanosensors. When a prey insect touches a trigger hair, an Action Potential is generated and travels along both trap lobes. If a second touch-induced Action Potential is fired within 30 seconds, the energy stored in the open trap is released and the capture organ closes. This is the plant-insect equivalent of a repeat offender. Imprisonment ensues.

Crucial to making these findings was the fact that this electrical activity doesn’t carry into the stalk of traps, which allowed the researchers to isolate the lobe by slicing it from the rest of the plant. Biologically intact, it was then placed on to a sensor.

Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain

 

[…]

The readings returned pretty much identical results four times in a row.

Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain

The discovery is as huge for biomagnetism in plants as it is for electro-physiology in general. We now have proof of a pathway for long-distance signal propagation between plant cells. Talk amongst your cells.

Both signal a new era of understanding plant systems we are only just coming to grips with.

https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_186597a2-8314-4f7d-8901-cbd3c80dbcce_1000x483.jpg

A 2017 study published in ‘Frontiers in Plant Science’ looked at the photosynthetic properties of pale green leaf rice. Image: Gu, et. al.

Now what?

The report’s introduction ponders, “in the future, magnetometry may be used to study long-distance electrical signaling in a variety of plant species, and to develop noninvasive diagnostics of plant stress and disease.”

With the help of this current research, crops could be scanned for temperature shifts, chemical changes, or pests without having to damage the plants themselves.

[…]

Perhaps our best next step is looking at how other species interact with these magnetic fields. Since these fields exist, they may serve some practical purpose. “Plants and insects have co-evolved for millions of years,” explained Crutsinger. “The trap is getting prey. But insects could leverage that to their own benefit as well. They’re super sensitive and they have antennas. How might they cue in on the magn

[…]

Source: Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain

Scientists discover how humans develop larger brains than other apes

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[…]

The study, published in the journal Cell, compared ‘brain organoids’ – 3-D tissues grown from stem which model early brain development—that were grown from human, gorilla and chimpanzee stem cells.

Similar to actual brains, the human brain organoids grew a lot larger than the organoids from other apes.

[…]

During the early stages of brain development, neurons are made by called neural progenitors. These initially have a cylindrical shape that makes it easy for them to split into identical daughter cells with the same shape.

The more times the neural cells multiply at this stage, the more neurons there will be later.

As the cells mature and slow their multiplication, they elongate, forming a shape like a stretched ice-cream cone.

Previously, research in mice had shown that their mature into a conical shape and slow their multiplication within hours.

Now, brain organoids have allowed researchers to uncover how this development happens in humans, gorillas and chimpanzees.

They found that in and chimpanzees this transition takes a long time, occurring over approximately five days.

After only 5 days, gorilla neural progenitor cells have matured into a conical shape (right), while human cells (left) remain cylindrical. Credit: S.Benito-Kwiecinski/MRC LMB/Cell

Human progenitors were even more delayed in this transition, taking around seven days. The human progenitor cells maintained their cylinder-like shape for longer than other apes and during this time they split more frequently, producing more cells.

This difference in the speed of transition from neural progenitors to neurons means that the human cells have more time to multiply. This could be largely responsible for the approximately three-fold greater number of neurons in compared with gorilla or chimpanzee brains.

[…]

To uncover the genetic mechanism driving these differences, the researchers compared —which genes are turned on and off—in the human brain organoids versus the other apes.

They identified differences in a gene called ‘ZEB2’, which was turned on sooner in gorilla brain organoids than in the human organoids.

To test the effects of the gene in gorilla progenitor cells, they delayed the effects of ZEB2. This slowed the maturation of the progenitor cells, making the gorilla brain organoids develop more similarly to human—slower and larger.

Conversely, turning on the ZEB2 gene sooner in human progenitor cells promoted premature transition in human organoids, so that they developed more like ape organoids.

The researchers note that organoids are a model and, like all models, do not to fully replicate real brains, especially mature brain function. But for fundamental questions about our evolution, these brain tissues in a dish provide an unprecedented view into key stages of development that would be impossible to study otherwise.

Dr. Lancaster was part of the team that created the first brain organoids in 2013.

Source: Scientists discover how humans develop larger brains than other apes

Rabble Rousing Mob who can’t Read Seek Removal of Richard Stallman and Entire FSF Board

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Richard Stallman’s return to the Free Software Foundation’s board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF’s entire board to resign. Letter signers include Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation executive director and former Debian Project Leader; Deb Nicholson, general manager of the Open Source Initiative; Matthew Garrett, a former member of the FSF board of directors; seven of the eight members of the X.org Foundation board of directors; Elana Hashman of the Debian Technical Committee, Open Source Initiative, and Kubernetes project; Molly de Blanc of the Debian Project and GNOME Foundation; and more than 300 others. That number has been rising quickly today: the open letter contains instructions for signing it.

The letter said all members of the FSF board should be removed because they ‘have enabled and empowered RMS for years. They demonstrate this again by permitting him to rejoin the FSF Board. It is time for RMS to step back from the free software, tech ethics, digital rights, and tech communities, for he cannot provide the leadership we need.’ The letter also called for Stallman to be removed from his position leading the GNU Project. “We urge those in a position to do so to stop supporting the Free Software Foundation,” they wrote. “Refuse to contribute to projects related to the FSF and RMS. Do not speak at or attend FSF events, or events that welcome RMS and his brand of intolerance. We ask for contributors to free software projects to take a stand against bigotry and hate within their projects. While doing these things, tell these communities and the FSF why.” UPDATE: For a quick summary of the controversy, long-time Slashdot reader Jogar the Barbarian recommends this article from It’s Foss.

Source: Free Software Advocates Seek Removal of Richard Stallman and Entire FSF Board – Slashdot

From the comments:

Your misleading quoting is mendacious, wrong, and sickening from someone on Slashdot who ought to know better. Here is the RMS quote, as quoted by the MIT cancellor (I’ve bolded the parts that you tried to hide):

RMS:

The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. … Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).

The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.

We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18535476&cid=61195002 / Moridineas

This really frightens me. Moridineas, you have provided the precise quote, and it is absolutely clear that you are right. Stallman did not speak in vague metaphors or with sloppy grammar. What was written is clear as crystal, and easily objectively verified by absolutely anyone who bothers to read the quote.

The objective truth here is Stallman DID NOT say that these girls were entirely willing. If he had said that, we would all be having a very different conversation here. But he did not, and that is that. He speculated that they presented as entirely willing. This is a completely different statement, and it is not the moral sin that Stallman is being accused of committing.

And yet, there is an army of angry people adamantly insisting that he said they were entirely willing. People who seem to be otherwise intelligent and capable of understanding English. Every one of these people can read the quote just like you did, and see that he did not say what they insist he said.

So what is motivating this? How can so many otherwise-normal people insist on an obvious lie to the point of insisting that so many people resign? What is wrong with these people? Don’t they care about the truth? Doesn’t that matter?

What good is speaking precisely when people will just change what you say and then crucify you for it?

https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18535476&cid=61195246 / Brain-Fu