FBI director James Comey is concerned that Apple and Google are making phones that cannot be searched by the government.
Let me join with the Founding Fathers in telling the Director to Bite me! If he wants to know what I’m doing with my phone, he can get a warrant, just like the Constitution provides.
FBI: new Apple, Google phones too secure, could put users ‘beyond the law’ – Yahoo News.
When you’re talking, things in the same room vibrate from the sound waves. Film the vibrating object — e.g., a bag of chips — run it through some software and Bingo! you can turn it back into speech.
Both the police and your neighborhood peeping tom will love this.
[Scientists reconstruct speech through soundproof glass by watching a bag of potato chips http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-vibrations-back-into-speech-and-music via DuckDuckGo for Android]
Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has revealed that personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones by Apple Inc employees, through previously unpublicized techniques. Now that Zdziarski has let the cat out of the bag, Apple has admitted that he’s right.
Apparently Wikipedia administrators recently blocked computers at the U.S. House of Representatives from editing the cybercyclopedia because House employees were engaging in “disruptive editing.”
For example, someone changed the biography of former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to describe him as an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies.” What part is not accurate? That he’s an alien? That he’s a lizard? Or that he eats Mexican babies?
Inquiring minds want to know.
via Wikipedia Blocks U.S. House Computers Over ‘Disruptive Editing’.
The Bitemaster was surfing around the Web when he came across this article from 2010:
Ukrainian Carding King ‘Maksik’ Was Lured to Arrest | Threat Level | WIRED.
In short, Maksym Yastremskiy, a Ukrainian who is alleged to have sold millions of dollars worth of stolen credit and debit card information, was caught following a “sneak-and-peek” search of his laptop while he was traveling through Dubai.
Fans of BITEME well know that we don’t like government — or Google, for that matter — snooping through people’s stuff. But how the hell do we catch the big time thieves without some serious privacy invasion?
On another note, the article notes that 143 million credit and debit card records were stolen in 2009. With numbers that high, how will the credit card companies survive? Perhaps by getting us to switch to debit cards, which have less protection against loss or fraud.
Apparently, German photographer Peter Kaaden had a picture of a naked statue from the Louvre yanked from Facebook, so he’s now created a whole series of pictures of nude statues, each with their erogenous zones carefully redacted. Click the link to see. Don’t worry — they’re Safe for Work!
Artist Hilariously Censors The Louvre’s Nude Statues For Facebook (SFW!).
What’s the opposite of privacy? Publicity? Unprivacy?
Leicestershire Police are now using NEC’s NeoFace face recognition software, in the hope that it will be able to compare images from CCTV and police body cameras against the 90,000 photos in the Leicestershire Police database.
Manual searches could take hours but NeoFace can do the search in seconds.
The same tech is already in use in the US, where the Chicago Police Department recently used it to sort through 4.5 million booking photos to help convict an armed robber.
UK police begin trialling the world’s fastest face recognition tech.
As someone on Slashdot said, since the NSA intercepts and stores our e-mails forever, why not use it as a backup service? It just lacks the API to restore files, therefore this guy called the NSA to ask for a backup restoration. Guess what? It did not work.
After all, why should we have to pay twice for services already performed with tax dollars?
The case is part of the ongoing Apple v. Samsung saga. In spite of signs on the door and repeated warnings by the judge and her courtroom deputy, the attorneys, reporters, experts, executives, staffers and spectators have been unable to restrain themselves from keeping their mobile devices turned on during court.
Judge Lucy Koh has even gone so far as to make offenders stand up when their devices ring out.
“It’s a case of connection addiction,” Columbia University religious studies professor Robert A.F. Thurman said when he was told about the drama. “They’re afraid to be on their own, without some sort of artificial assistance. It needs to be treated by some kind of contemplative therapy.”
The article in the Daily News is no big deal — kids are still getting drunk on Long Island. But I couldn’t resist blogging about it so I could write my own headline.
And I will note that, unlike the old days, these scenes of drunken revelry are now photographed and posted on the Internet. Next thing you know, Mark Zuckerberg will run the pix through his new facial recognition software and match each of these kids to their Facebook page.