Tag Archives: tech

Now There’s A Zombie Drone That Hunts, Controls, and Kills Other Drones

Mother Jones

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When 27-year-old Samy Kamkar—a security researcher who famously made one million Myspace friends in a single day—heard the announcement on Sunday that Amazon was planning to start delivering packages via drone in 2015, he had an idea. He knew that whenever new technology, like drones, becomes popular quickly, there are bound to be security flaws. And he claims that he found one within 24 hours and promptly exploited it: America, meet the zombie drone that Kamkar says hunts, hacks, and takes over nearby drones. With enough hacks, a user can allegedly control an entire zombie drone army capable of flying in any direction, taking video of your house, or committing mass drone-suicide.

“I’ve been playing with drones for a few years,” Kamkar, who is based in Los Angeles, tells Mother Jones. “I’m sure that with most of the drones out there, if you scrutinize the security, you’ll find some kind of vulnerability.” Kamkar says that the Amazon announcement was an opportunity to point out that drone security has room for improvement.

Kamkar’s hack, also known as “Skyjack,” was performed on a Parrot AR Drone 2 (More than 500,000 Parrot drones have been sold since 2010, and it’s been used to help collected flight data for the European Space Agency.) It’s unknown what kind of drone Amazon will end up using, but these drones have high-definition photo and video, a flying range of about 165 feet, and can be controlled using an iPhone or an iPad. Kamkar equipped his drone with a battery, a wireless transmitter, and a Raspberry Pi computer—the total of which costs about $400, including the drone. Then, he wrote software (which he made available on the open-source website GitHub, for anyone to use) that he says allows his drone to find wireless signals of other Parrot drones in the area and disconnect the wireless connection of another drone’s original user, giving Kamkar—or any user with the software—control over both drones. The drones can even be forced to self-deactivate and drop out of the sky. “How fun would it be to take over drones carrying Amazon packages…or take over any other drones, and make them my little zombie drones. Awesome,” writes Kamkar.

Parrot did not respond to request for comment, but the BBC notes that, “experts said Parrot appeared to have ignored well-known guidelines” to prevent this kind of hack. Christopher Budd, a threat communications manager for Trend Micro, a data security company, tells Mother Jones that “reading what he’s got, on the face of it, it certainly sounds like a plausible proof-of-concept” but says Parrot still needs to validate it.

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So does this mean that your Amazon blender will be attacked by a hoard of hungry zombie drones? Not necessarily: “Amazon would be able to make drones that are immune to this,” Kamkar tells Mother Jones, claiming that the Parrot Drone’s wi-fi system is not fully encrypted, which is a security measure that Amazon would be likely to take. (Amazon did not respond to Mother Jones request for comment.) “I just want people to be concerned enough that it forces these drone makers to take an additional look at them. When you have enough people scrutinizing technology, you’re going to have added security and added attention, and that’s the benefit.”

That’s certainly how companies have responded to Kamkar’s hacks before: After he crippled Myspace in 2005 using what some called the fastest spreading virus up to that point—(he was arrested and convicted under California penal code, and Kamkar says, “community service was a blast!”)—Myspace revamped its security procedures. Still, even if Amazon manages to fend off the zombie drones, it faces other obstacles—including states that have banned drones, potential collisions in urban areas, and major privacy concerns.

“Drones are an impressive piece of technology and part of me is super excited whenever I get it outside and fly it around,” Kamkar says. “But part of me is a little fearful.”

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Now There’s A Zombie Drone That Hunts, Controls, and Kills Other Drones

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, there was a big scandal over the fact that someone apparently learned about a Fed decision sooner than they should have. It takes seven milliseconds for a signal to travel from Washington DC to Chicago over a fiber optic cable, but a couple of big orders were placed on the Chicago exchange a mere couple of milliseconds after the Fed announcement. Shazam!

But if an advantage of a few milliseconds is so important, why bother with fiber optic cables? Why not mount repeaters on blimps or something, and then relay wireless signals? At the speed of light, it would only take about four milliseconds from DC to Chicago.

I suppose I should have guessed, but naturally someone is doing this:

Ari Rubenstein, a “Star Trek” fan who counts physics as a hobby….heads Strike Technologies, a New York company that’s part of a budding cottage industry racing to build networks of ultra-fast microwave radio transmitters linking the world’s financial hubs.

….Strike, whose ranks include academics as well as former U.S. and Israeli military engineers, hoisted a 6-foot white dish on a tower rising 280 feet above the Nasdaq Stock Market’s data center in Carteret, N.J., just outside New York City.

Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company.

Remember that Keynes thing about goosing the economy by burying money in landfills and letting people dig it up? In terms of social utility, this strikes as about the same thing. It’s hard to imagine millions of dollars being spent more uselessly. Even gold plated toilet seats probably have more value to society than this.

In any case, I still think my idea for a neutrino communications network that transmits directly through the earth is a better bet. Sure, you’d need a million gallons of chlorine or heavy water or something to act as the detector, but that seems pretty trivial in order to save another 500 microsceconds. Who’s going to be the first to do this?

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

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Twitter Just Made it Harder for the NSA to Read Your Private Tweets

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Twitter announced that it has enabled a new form of Internet security, already used by Google and Facebook, that makes it considerably more difficult for the NSA to read private messages. With this new security, there isn’t one pair of master “keys” that unlock an entire website’s encryption, instead, new keys are produced and destroyed for each login session.

“If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic,” Twitter wrote on its blog. To put that into simple terms, that would be like giving a new set of keys to each visitor coming to your house, melting them down after the person gets inside, and changing the locks. The method is called “Perfect Forward Secrecy,” and while it has been around for at least two decades, it hasn’t been picked up by tech giants until recently, following the allegations of vast government surveillance by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

This security system specifically takes aim at the NSA’s alleged practice of scooping up the encrypted communications of millions of users—either through hacking or top-secret national security orders—and then storing them until the agency is able to get a company’s keys to access all of the data.â&#128;&#139; While Twitter was never implicated in the NSA’s vast online surveillance program, PRISM, there is still quite a bit of private information the US government could be interested in on Twitter for its counterterrorism efforts—direct messages, time zones, user passwords, and email addresses, for example.

To get a peek at how this security might play out in real life, look no further than the legal battle the Department of Justice is currently waging against Lavabit, an alternative email provider that was reportedly used by Snowden. When the founder of Lavabit refused to give up its master encryption keys to the US government—because it would have had access to thousands of email accounts—the company was held in contempt of court. If Lavabit had installed Perfect Forward Secrecy, however, the company wouldn’t have been able to give up its master keys, since they would have already been destroyed.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group, supports Perfect Forward Secrecy, arguing that “against the known threat of “upstream” data collection, supporting perfect forward secrecy is an essential step.” However, as EFF notes, this doesn’t necessarily make a company completely NSA-proof, since it doesn’t protect data that’s stored on a server (and NSA still managed to hack into Google, by breaking into its front end server, according to documents in the Washington Post.)

The New York Times says that this new security will slow traffic down by about 150 milliseconds in the United States, and Tweeters are unlikely to notice. But it will “make the National Security Agency’s job much, much harder,” the paper said.

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Twitter Just Made it Harder for the NSA to Read Your Private Tweets

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Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter Have a New Lobbying Target—the NSA

Mother Jones

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Not a month goes by without former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden dropping another explosive bombshell about the US government’s vast surveillance programs. In response, lawmakers have proposed a flurry of bills that aim to clamp down on NSA spying. But tech companies aren’t just sitting on the sidelines—the latest lobbying disclosure forms filed by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter reveal that their lobbyists are keeping an eye on a number of these anti-NSA bills. And although most of the companies won’t say which specific bills they support or oppose, some new bills have popped up on their lobbying forms just as the companies are publicly demanding surveillance reform.

The lobbying disclosure forms cover the period from July 1 to September 30, the months immediately following the first Snowden disclosure about the PRISM program in June. Bills introduced after those dates, such as the tech industry-backed USA Freedom Act proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), aren’t included. There are also some bills that were introduced pre-Snowden.

In total, during this period, Facebook spent $1.44 million on lobbying, Yahoo spent $630,000, Google spent $3.37 million, and Twitter spent $40,000. The forms don’t break down whether a company poured thousands of dollars into lobbying for one bill, or had one brief conversation about it with a lawmaker or an aide. Nor do the forms reveal whether companies have lobbied for or against a given bill. And for now, most US tech companies are keeping their positions about specific bills secret, so they can present a unified front against NSA spying and keep their options open.

Representatives of the most important tech companies have, however, made public statements indicating that they’re likely to support bills that allow them to shed more light on government surveillance. “I was shocked that the NSA would do this—perhaps a violation of law but certainly a violation of mission,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told CNN last week, in response to an October 30 Washington Post report that the NSA was tapping into Google’s servers without the company’s consent. “From a Google perspective, any internal use of Google services is unauthorized and almost certainly illegal.” Niki Fenwick, a spokesperson for Google, said that the company doesn’t comment on whether it supports specific bills, but Bloomberg News reported last week that the company, which has bulked up its lobbying presence on Capitol Hill, “seeks to end National Security Agency intrusions into its data.”

“Defending and respecting the user’s voice is a natural commitment for us and is why we are so committed to freedom of expression,” Colin Crowell, Twitter’s vice president for global public policy, tells Mother Jones. A Twitter representative noted that the company is actively supporting two of the bills below, S. 607 and HR 1852, which require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing private emails. “For the others, at any given moment, bills are in a state of change so it is rare to emphatically state that we formally support or oppose any given bill until it is nearer a point of final passage,” the representative added.

Without further ado, here are eight pro-transparency bills that some of the biggest names in tech are watching:

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Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter Have a New Lobbying Target—the NSA

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Watson Not Just for Jeopardy! Anymore

Mother Jones

IBM plans to make Watson, the computer that beat the all-time Jeopardy! champs, available on the web to everyone. But why? In addition to the PR value for its cloud computing business, I suspect the answer is at the bottom of this New York Times story:

Besides gaining bragging rights and a much bigger customer base, IBM may be accelerating the growth of Watson’s power by putting it in the cloud. Mr. Gold said that Watson would retain learning from each customer interaction, gaining the ability to do things like interacting in different languages or identifying human preferences. IBM has taken steps to keep these improvements for its own benefit, by retaining rights in user agreements that customers are required to sign.

Once it’s publicly available, Watson is going to receive a tidal wave of new interactions that it can learn from. Basically, the public will be doing IBM’s beta testing for it. Everybody wins.

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Watson Not Just for Jeopardy! Anymore

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WATCH: Get Your Very Own NSA Children’s Toy Fiore Cartoon

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Get Your Very Own NSA Children’s Toy Fiore Cartoon

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Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

Mother Jones

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1) Use open-source software
Software whose source code is publicly available is more secure than anything developed by Microsoft, Apple, or Google: Its transparency means developers can’t easily conceal security holes at the behest of hackers or governments. You’ll want open-source platforms for your browser (Firefox, for example), email (Thunderbird), and instant messaging (Jabber), all of which are virtually idiot-proof to install. Switching to open-source for your operating system (Linux is the most popular choice) seems more intimidating, but ultimately isn’t much harder than changing the format on a text document.
Nerd factor: You’ve tweaked the default settings in your apps.


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Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

2) Hide your location
Install the easily downloaded Tor Browser, which comes preconfigured to mask your IP address and, therefore, your location. Tor’s software bounces your data through several of its thousands of volunteer servers; anyone intercepting traffic will think the data came from the last server in the chain. It’s like a lightning-speed version of trying to shake a stalker by racing around town and repeatedly switching cars—it may not always work, but it makes you much harder to follow. Downside: The FBI recently acknowledged that it hacked into some Tor servers.
Nerd factor: You’ve downloaded software.

3) Encrypt
Though we learned in September that the NSA has defeated most commercially available encryption, scrambling your online activities will still foil hackers. The easily installed browser extension https Everywhere encrypts your web activity; for instant messaging, try Off-the-Record Messaging. For email, the program Pretty Good Privacy will let you set up a system of security “keys” to safeguard correspondence.
Nerd factor: You likely ride the Google bus.

4) Mind the “air gap”
If you’re serious about becoming a digital Deep Throat, buy (or better yet, build) a computer that has never been connected to the internet. If you want to give somebody else a file, encrypt it on the secure computer and physically deliver it to the recipient on a USB stick.
Nerd factor: You own The Matrix on Blu-ray.

5) Ditch your phone
In July, a federal appeals court ruled that the government can obtain your location data from carriers without a warrant. You can minimize what you share by disabling tracking functions on your apps and turning off your phone when you aren’t using it. Better yet, remove its battery (though iPhone owners don’t have that option).
Nerd factor: You own a phone.

6) Use a passphrase
A string of random common words—”jose llama tequila mountain”—is way easier to remember and way harder to crack than a single word. Because passphrases are significantly longer than passwords, they contain, as cryptographers like to put it, more bits of entropy. Now if only your bank would stop demanding at least one capital letter and one number and leave you to picture a llama on a mountain of Jose Cuervo.
Nerd factor: You remember which “o” is an ø, in your previous password.

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Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

Mother Jones

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“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time” is how Mark Zuckerberg justified hijacking your privacy in 2010, after Facebook imperiously reset everyone’s default settings to “public.” “People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds.” Riiight. Little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc.) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency’s PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of internet users.


Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?


Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!


Timeline: How We Got From 9/11 to Massive NSA Spying on Americans


Meet the Data Brokers Who Help Corporations Sell Your Digital Life


Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

In light of what we know now, Zuckerberg’s high-hat act has a bit of a creepy feel, like that guy who told you he was a documentary photographer, but turned out to be a Peeping Tom. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: At the core of Facebook’s business model is the notion that our personal information is not, well, ours. And much like the NSA, no matter how often it’s told to stop using data in ways we didn’t authorize, it just won’t quit. Not long after Zuckerberg’s “evolving norm” dodge, Facebook had to promise the feds it would stop doing things like putting your picture in ads targeted at your “friends”; that promise lasted only until this past summer, when it suddenly “clarified” its right to do with your (and your kids’) photos whatever it sees fit. And just this week, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin told the Wall Street Journal that the company is experimenting with new ways to suck up your data, such as “how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.”

There will be a lot of talk in coming months about the government surveillance golem assembled in the shadows of the internet. Good. But what about the pervasive claim the private sector has staked to our digital lives, from where we (and our phones) spend the night to how often we text our spouse or swipe our Visa at the liquor store? It’s not a stretch to say that there’s a corporate spy operation equal to the NSA—indeed, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Yes, Silicon Valley libertarians, we know there is a difference: When we hand over information to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and PayPal, we click “I Agree.” We don’t clear our cookies. We recycle the opt-out notice. And let’s face it, that’s exactly what internet companies are trying to get us to do: hand over data without thinking of the transaction as a commercial one. It’s all so casual, cheery, intimate—like, like?

But beyond all the Friends and Hangouts and Favorites, there’s cold, hard cash, and, as they say on Sand Hill Road, when the product is free, you are the product. It’s your data that makes Facebook worth $100 billion and Google $300 billion. It’s your data that info-mining companies like Acxiom and Datalogix package, repackage, sift, and sell. And it’s your data that, as we’ve now learned, tech giants also pass along to the government. Let’s review: Companies have given the NSA access to the records of every phone call made in the United States. Companies have inserted NSA-designed “back doors” in security software, giving the government (and, potentially, hackers—or other governments) access to everything from bank records to medical data. And oh, yeah, companies also flat-out sell your data to the NSA and other agencies.

To be sure, no one should expect a bunch of engineers and their lawyers to turn into privacy warriors. What we could have done without was the industry’s pearl-clutching when the eavesdropping was finally revealed: the insistence (with eerily similar wording) that “we have never heard of PRISM”; the Captain Renault-like shock—shock!—to discover that data mining was going on here. Only after it became undeniably clear that they had known and had cooperated did they duly hurl indignation at the NSA and the FISA court that approved the data demands. Heartfelt? Maybe. But it also served a branding purpose: Wait! Don’t unfriend us! Kittens!

O hai, check out Mark Zuckerberg at this year’s TechCrunch conference: The NSA really “blew it,” he said, by insisting that its spying was mostly directed at foreigners. “Like, oh, wonderful, that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies. I thought that was really bad.” Shorter: What matters is how quickly Facebook can achieve total world domination.

Maybe the biggest upside to l’affaire Snowden is that Americans are starting to wise up. “Advertisers” rank barely behind “hackers or criminals” on the list of entities that internet users say they don’t want to be tracked by (followed by “people from your past”). A solid majority say it’s very important to control access to their email, downloads, and location data. Perhaps that’s why, outside the more sycophantic crevices of the tech press, the new iPhone’s biometric capability was not greeted with the unadulterated exultation of the pre-PRISM era.

The truth is, for too long we’ve been content to play with our gadgets and let the geekpreneurs figure out the rest. But that’s not their job; change-the-world blather notwithstanding, their job is to make money. That leaves the hard stuff—like how much privacy we’ll trade for either convenience or security—in someone else’s hands: ours. It’s our responsibility to take charge of our online behavior (posting Carlos Dangerrific selfies? So long as you want your boss, and your high school nemesis, to see ’em), and, more urgently, it’s our job to prod our elected representatives to take on the intelligence agencies and their private-sector pals.

The NSA was able to do what it did because, post-9/11, “with us or against us” absolutism cowed any critics of its expanding dragnet. Facebook does what it does because, unlike Europe—where both privacy and the ability to know what companies have on you are codified as fundamental rights—we haven’t been conditioned to see Orwellian overreach in every algorithm. That is now changing, and both the NSA and Mark Zuckerberg will have to accept it. The social norm is evolving.

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

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Here’s the Latest on the Obamacare Website

Mother Jones

Good news! HHS tweets: “FACT: In the first few days, very few could create an account on @HealthCareGov, we are now at an over 90% success rate.”

Bad news! Creating an account is nice, but apparently only about 30 percent can successfully complete an application.

Good news! “CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said that about half of the roughly 700,000 people who had completed applications [] came through healthcare.gov, which serves residents of 36 states.” And CMS claims that the website will be functioning smoothly for almost everyone by the end of November.

I dunno. Is this the kind of happy talk that’s common when teams are working to fix troubled programs? Or is it for real? And is the end of November soon enough to avoid a huge backlog of applications?

I’m not sure. But that’s the latest. If there’s a reason for caution, it’s this: teams that are fixing bugs are usually under enormous pressure to offer up the most optimistic date possible for getting the system working. This suggests that the end of November is the absolute earliest plausible date for getting the Obamacare website working well. Take it with a grain of salt.

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Here’s the Latest on the Obamacare Website

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WATCH: The Obamacare Rollout, 200 Years Ago Fiore Cartoon

Mother Jones

Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: The Obamacare Rollout, 200 Years Ago Fiore Cartoon

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