We find that 84\% of paths originating in Brazil traverse the United States, but when relays are used for country avoidance, only 37\% of Brazilian paths traverse the United States. Using the open DNS resolver infrastructure allows Kenyan clients to avoid the United States on 17\% more paths. Unfortunately, we find that some of the more prominent surveillance states (e.g., the U.S.) are also some of the least avoidable countries.
Perfect anonymization of data sets that contain personal information has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the best way to move data release policy past the alleged failures of anonymization is to focus on the process of minimizing risk of reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure, not preventing harm. Process-based data release policy, which resembles the law of data security, will help us move past the limitations of focusing on whether data sets have been “anonymized.” It draws upon different tactics to protect the privacy of data subjects, including accurate deidentification rhetoric, contracts prohibiting reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure, data enclaves, and query-based strategies to match required protections with the level of risk. By focusing on process, data release policy can better balance privacy and utility where nearly all data exchanges carry some risk.
paper here
These nodes — ordinary nodes, not exit nodes — sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over.
The researchers used “honeypot” .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions’ existence. They didn’t advertise the honions’ existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits.
These nodes — ordinary nodes, not exit nodes — sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over.
The researchers used “honeypot” .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions’ existence. They didn’t advertise the honions’ existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits.
Unfortunately, it seems our service has to come to an untimely end. After being previously told we were in 100% compliance with the rules, our Amazon affiliate account was closed a few months ago. Amazon claimed we were violating their rules against showing product and price information that was more than 24 hours old. Obviously, this is something ALL price history trackers do, not just PriceZombie. Overnight, we lost over 90% of our income but we kept going, hoping to resolve any issues and return to compliance. However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely
Source: Important Announcement – PriceZombie will be shutting down unless..
Wtf?
Unfortunately, it seems our service has to come to an untimely end. After being previously told we were in 100% compliance with the rules, our Amazon affiliate account was closed a few months ago. Amazon claimed we were violating their rules against showing product and price information that was more than 24 hours old. Obviously, this is something ALL price history trackers do, not just PriceZombie. Overnight, we lost over 90% of our income but we kept going, hoping to resolve any issues and return to compliance. However, our appeals to Amazon affiliate program administrators (associates@amazon.com) and even Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com) were either ignored or answered incompletely
Source: Important Announcement – PriceZombie will be shutting down unless..
Wtf?
Everyone has been there. So in 2010, London-based UX designer Harry Brignull decided he’d document it. Brignull’s website, darkpatterns.org, offers plenty of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces. These dark patterns trick unsuspecting users into a gamut of actions: setting up recurring payments, purchasing items surreptitiously added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through prechecked forms on Facebook games.
Dark patterns aren’t limited to the Web, either. The Columbia House mail-order music club of the ’80s and ’90s famously charged users exorbitant rates for music they didn’t choose if they forgot to specify what they wanted. In fact, negative-option billing began as early as 1927, when a book club decided to bill members in advance and ship a book to anyone who didn’t specifically decline. Another common offline example? Some credit card statements boast a 0 percent balance transfer but don’t make it clear that the percentage will shoot up to a ridiculously high number unless a reader navigates a long agreement in tiny print.
“The way that companies implement the deceptive practices has gotten more sophisticated over time,” said UX designer Jeremy Rosenberg, a contributor to the Dark Patterns site. “Today, things are more likely to be presented as a benefit or obscured as a benefit even if they’re not.”
When you combine the interactive nature of the Web, increasingly savvy businesses, and the sheer amount of time users spend online, it’s a recipe for dark pattern disaster. And after gaining an awareness for this kind of deception, you’ll recognize it’s nearly ubiquitous.
Source: Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web)
According to the complaint, the aggrieved customers say that their AppleCare service plans should allow them to have their devices replaced with new units. The class seeks to represent customers who purchased Apple hardware with the AppleCare replacement plan and then received replacement devices from Apple when their old devices broke.
The claim centers around the plaintiffs’ own definition of “new,” alleging that the only replacements they should have received under their AppleCare replacement plans were in fact brand new hardware, not units that were factory refurbished by Apple.
“The Apple Plans purport to provide consumers with devices that are ‘equivalent to new in performance and reliability.’ What that phrase means is ‘new,’ as refurbished devices can never be the equivalent to new in performance and reliability,” the filing reads.
Source: Tight-wad Apple repair techs swapped our damaged iGear with used kit – lawsuit
The popular streaming service is now the latest platform that is opening its data to targeted advertising. Everything from your age and gender, to the music genres you like to listen will be available to various third-party companies.
Spotify is calling it programmatic buying and has already enabled it. Advertisers will have access to the 70 million people that use Spotify’s free, ad-supported streaming across 59 countries. By viewing your song picks, these buyers will be able to look for specific users who might be the best matches for the products they’re selling.
Source: Spotify is now selling your information to advertisers
Now a fast, simple, no-contact gesture yields the most precise temperature possible, and automatic sync with the dedicated app also allows you to track temperature readings, get reminders, and input related symptoms/medications right on your smartphone.
Source: Thermo
Polish security consultancy Exatel warns [PDF] that Maxthon is phoning home information such as the computer’s operating system and version number, the screen resolution, the CPU type and speed, the amount of memory installed, the location of the browser’s executable, whether ad-block is running, and the start page URL.
Source: Maxthon web browser blabs about your PC all the way back to Beijing
Scan to search
To search a document, simply scan the page using your device’s camera.The app then analyses the document and you’ll be able to search within it after a few seconds, just like you would with a digital document and CTRL-F on a PC!
Source: CTRL-F – Search, for the real world
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have made an object disappear by using a composite material with nano-size particles that can enhance specific properties on the object’s surface.
Researchers from QMUL’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, worked with UK industry to demonstrate for the first time a practical cloaking device that allows curved surfaces to appear flat to electromagnetic waves.
[…]
“Previous research has shown this technique working at one frequency. However, we can demonstrate that it works at a greater range of frequencies making it more useful for other engineering applications, such as nano-antennas and the aerospace industry.”
Source: Scientists move one step closer to creating an invisibility cloak
In comparing how well people read a square pie chart, a circular pie chart, a donut shaped pie chart or a bar chart, it turns out that people do worst on the bar and best on the square pie charts.
Source: A Reanalysis of A Study About (Square) Pie Charts from 2009 – eagereyes
Microsoft is cutting its free 15GB OneDrive cloud storage space down to 5GB, and eliminating the 15GB free camera roll for many users. Files will be deleted by Redmond until your account is under the free limit.
Clouds turn to rain to hide your tears
Source: Empty your free 30GB OneDrive space today – before Microsoft deletes your files for you
Goes to show – the cloud’s promises are not worth very much…
The current service is provided by Cobham Aviation with its Dassault Falcon 20s and Fleet Air Arm-operated BAE Systems Hawk T1s flown by 736 NAS from RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall and RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset. The unit’s Hawks will be retired in 2020.
A phased plan of introducing other capabilities will continue throughout the next decade, with the Royal Air Force’s 100 Sqn and its Hawk T1s to give up their current aggressor training role in 2027.
“We need to make sure it is replaced by a very open architecture [way of working], to simulate, network and integrate the training capabilities around us,” Murray says of the existing model.
The concept phase was co-run by DE&S and the Nightworx organisation for the initial industry engagement activity, when more than 10 companies showed interest. The scope of the current work on ASDOT has not been disclosed, but a competition will be launched during 2017, in order to meet the deadlines set by the armed services.
Source: FARNBOROUGH: MoD outlines scope of ASDOT aggressor project
I’ve been trying to convince people this is a good idea for some time, but for some reason they look at me like I’m mad!
Using a small quantum system consisting of three superconducting qubits, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Google have uncovered a link between aspects of classical and quantum physics thought to be unrelated: classical chaos and quantum entanglement. Their findings suggest that it would be possible to use controllable quantum systems to investigate certain fundamental aspects of nature.
“It’s kind of surprising because chaos is this totally classical concept—there’s no idea of chaos in a quantum system,” Charles Neill, a researcher in the UCSB Department of Physics and lead author of a paper that appears in Nature Physics. “Similarly, there’s no concept of entanglement within classical systems. And yet it turns out that chaos and entanglement are really very strongly and clearly related.”
[…]
“There’s a very clear connection between entanglement and chaos in these two pictures,” said Neill. “And, it turns out that thermalization is the thing that connects chaos and entanglement. It turns out that they are actually the driving forces behind thermalization.
“What we realize is that in almost any quantum system, including on quantum computers, if you just let it evolve and you start to study what happens as a function of time, it’s going to thermalize,” added Neill, referring to the quantum-level equilibration. “And this really ties together the intuition between classical thermalization and chaos and how it occurs in quantum systems that entangle.”
Source: Researchers blur the line between classical and quantum physics by connecting chaos and entanglement
In a proof-of-concept video the boffins place a phone in an empty conference room three metres (10 feet) from a speaker. Commands are issued that sound to like a drowning dalek to Vulture South’s ears. That garbling makes the commands difficult for humans to understand but passable for Siri and her ilk.
The attackers activate airplane mode (a denial of service attack), and open website xkcd.com which they write in the paper could be substituted for a phishing or malware download site.
Source: Drowning Dalek commands Siri in voice-rec hack attack
D-PLACE – the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment – is an expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1,400 human societies. It comprises information mainly on pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The team’s paper on D-PLACE is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Human cultural diversity is expressed in numerous ways: from the foods we eat and the houses we build, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we marry and the types of games we teach our children,” said Kathryn Kirby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Geography at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Cultural practices vary across space and time, but the factors and processes that drive cultural change and shape patterns of diversity remain largely unknown.
Source: Massive open-access database on human cultures created
The cells are fabricated onto a flexible substrate that is just a micrometer thick — one-half to one-quarter the thickness of other “thin” solar cells and hundreds of times thinner than conventional cells. A human hair, by comparison, is about 100 micrometers.
The team at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea managed to reduce the thickness by directly attaching the cells to the substrate without the use of an adhesive.
They were stamped onto the substrate and then cold welded, a process that binds two materials together through pressure, not heat.
The scientists tested the cells and discovered they can almost be folded in half — wrapped around a radius as small as 1.4 millimeters.
Source: These ultra-thin solar cells can be bent around a pencil
the new legislation — which Edward Snowden has called “Russia’s new Big Brother law” — is not only severe against those involved in “international terrorism,” its financing, and its non-denunciation. Law enforcement agencies will also be granted access to any user’s messages without any judicial oversight.
Several key provisions will directly affect the internet and telecom industry. In particular, telecom operators and internet resources will need to store the recordings of all phone calls and the content of all text messages for a period of six months. They will be required to cooperate with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to make their users’ communications fully accessible to this organization.
Source: Russian leader Putin signs controversial ‘Big Brother’ law
Wendy’s said hackers were able to steal customers’ credit and debit card information at 1,025 of its U.S. restaurants, far more than it originally thought.
The hamburger chain said Thursday hackers were able to obtain card numbers, names, expiration dates and codes on the card, beginning in late fall. Some customers’ cards were used to make fraudulent purchases at other stores.
Wendy’s Co. urged customers to check their accounts for any fraudulent purchases.
The Dublin, Ohio, company first announced it was investigating a possible hack in January. In May, it said malware was found in fewer than 300 restaurants. About a month later, it said two types of malware were found and the number of restaurants affected was “considerably higher.”
There are more than 5,700 Wendy’s restaurants in the U.S.
Customers can see which locations were affected through the Wendy’s website . The company said it is offering free one-year credit monitoring to people who paid with a card at any of those restaurants.
Source: Wendy’s Says More Than 1,000 Restaurants Affected by Hack
In the first of the two studies, the researchers sought to determine which genes out of about a thousand might still be functioning in zebrafish and mice in the immediate days following death. To their surprise, the researchers found that hundreds of genes sprung back to life. Not only that, the activity of some of these genes actually increased. Most of these genes eventually gave up after about 24 hours, but some remained active for as much as four days after death. That’s surprising, to say the least.
The majority of these zombie genes were not random in terms of function. Each of them play an important role when an animal experiences some kind of trauma or illness. For example, some genes that were ramped up are responsible for stimulating inflammation and the immune system as well as for countering stress. Some genetic activity, like a gene that’s responsible for embryonic development, baffled the scientists. Noble suspects that this gene becomes active because the cellular environment in dead bodies must somehow resemble those found in embryos.
They found that there were six main ones:
Fall-rise-fall, like Oedipus Rex
Rise and then a fall, like what happens to most villains
Fall and then a rise, like what happens to most superheroes
Steady fall, like in Romeo and Juliet
Steady rise, like in a rags-to-riches story
Rise-fall-rise, like in Cinderella
More than 800 UK police staff inappropriately accessed personal information between June 2011 and December 2015, according to a report from activist group Big Brother Watch.
The report says some police staff used their access to a growing trove of police data, which includes personal information on civilians, for entertainment and personal and financial gain.
ot only was some information not needed for official police work, according to the report, but was shared with third parties outside the police, including some organized crime groups, 877 times.
In total, 2,315 incidents of inappropriate access or distribution of data were reported.
The majority of incidents, 1,283, ended up with no disciplinary action taking place, while 297 ended in a resignation or dismissal, 258 resulted in a written or verbal warning, and 70 led to a criminal conviction or caution.
