Category: Computer

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Has Nothing to Fear from the CIA or FBI

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On the other hand, he would be worried about finding Polonium in his coffee, courtesy of the Russian FSB:

Yesterday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Security Agency is aware that the FSB — the post-Soviet KGB — is closely monitoring Wikileaks, though the U.S. has no “direct evidence” that the Russians are behind the days-long denial-of-service attacks that have brought down the Wikileaks website over and over again.

But why would the Russians care that much? In part, because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said that between the leaked cables and other information he got separately, high-level corrupt Russian officials should be worried. And some observers think that Assange’s efforts to expose corruption in Russia could be more harmful to his site and himself than exposing America’s secrets have been. One law enforcement source told The Daily Beast, “The Russians play by different rules,” adding that they would be “ruthless” in their attempts to stop him.

(emphasis mine)

Russian leaders don’t get worried, they get proactive, as in the subject of their concern ends up mailed to his family in a dozen parcel post packages, or they die mysteriously.

Prosecution Doing Back-Flips For Goldman Sachs in High Frequency Trading Trial

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If there was any doubt that the federal prosecutors in New York prosecuting Sergey Aleynikov for theft of trade secrets weren’t in Goldman Sach’s Pocket, those doubts have been allayed:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has always closely guarded the secrets of its lucrative high-speed trading system. Now the securities firm is getting a help from an unusual source: federal prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan this week asked a federal district judge to seal the courtroom at the forthcoming trial of a former Goldman computer programmer accused of stealing the firm’s computer code. The move was a formal request to empty the courtroom of the general public when details of Goldman’s trade secrets are being discussed. The trial is set to start to late November.

Prosecutors also asked that any documents related to Goldman’s trading strategies remain under seal.

Such requests are common when proprietary corporate information could be exposed in a trial, lawyers say. This case is unusual in that it involves secrets about a potentially lucrative trading system, rather than, say, ingredients in a soda formula.

What is also unusual is that this code is almost certainly obsolete, and almost certainly has no value to a competitor.

The software almost certainly has to be updated regularly, probably monthly, possibly weekly, which means that the algorithms and code are almost certainly obsolete, but still they want the court sealed.

This is not about protecting trade secrets, this is about concerns by the vampire squid* that if the details on how they conducted business came out, they would have people calling for their scalps for front-running the markets.

Basically, Goldman, and the prosecutors, are trying to conceal activity by Goldman that is either illegal, or would lead to changes in regulations that would make it so if the details came out.

My earlier posts on this are here.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

610 Grand, Not Enough

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The lawsuit against the Lower Merion school district for spying on children with webcams has been settled for $610,000:

The Lower Merion School District will pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits over its tracking of student laptop computers, ending an eight-month saga that thrust the elite district into a global spotlight and stirred questions about technology and privacy in schools.

School board members voted unanimously Monday night to pay $185,000 to the two students who claimed the district spied on them by secretly activating the webcams on their laptops.

Someone should have gone to jail over all of this.

The fact that there was not a serious criminal investigation of this, with dozens of school officials under scrutiny is a disgrace.

A True American Hero

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Colonel Lawrence Sellin, US Army Reserve, who published a blistering critique of the “PowerPoint Ranger” culture within the military in Afghanistan, and was then promptly fired and kicked out of Afghanistan.

This is not surprising. When one publishes an OP/Ed which contains gems such as this:

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.

It ain’t good for career prospects.

In fact, the phrase, “Cognitively Challenged Generals,” used in a publicly published opinion piece, is pretty much a letter of resignation for any member of the military.

Still, it mirrors my experience with FCS, were the generals seemed tremendously concerned about the consistency of colors between variants of the manned ground vehicle in the presentations.

If I were SedDef, I would be tempted to place an immediate and absolute ban on the software.

No Prosecution for Photographing Unclothed Teens in Their Houses

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Because when a school does it, it’s OK:

Federal authorities announced Tuesday they will not prosecute administrators connected to a webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district.

Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing Lower Merion School District officials of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued MacBooks. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit claim the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students, including images of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed.”

Zane David Memeger, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said he found no criminal intent in the alleged surveillance.

I cannot understand how there isn’t a trial of someone involved in this.

I guess that the prosecutor decided that high school students have no right to privacy.

Earlier posts are here.

I Would Never Endorse Computer Hacking…

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But this bit of hacking is prize:

Somewhere in the world, someone must have woke up, went to his computer and thought to himself, “I’m going to hack Fox News today.” At least that’s how I imagine things started out today for the currently unnamed hacker who gained access to the Fox News online radio newscast dashboard.

He’s either got a lot of time on his hands, is incredibly skilled or received help from others. If you look at the above photo, you’ll see a screenshot of the Fox News Radio popup that you get when you try to listen live to the online newscast on http://radio.foxnews.com/. It says the title of the next radio program is. “Glenn Beck Raped And Murdered A Girl In 1990.” And there’s more.

The entire list of shows has been tampered with. Right now, the Fox News Radio popup shows that the next newscast is going to be “Naruto.” Everything on the list now is an anime of some sort.

I can’t approve the Anime bit, but this is prize.

H/t Vonbecks Temper

Why Yes, The Obama Administration is Paying to Offshore Your Job

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It’s called the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),and USAID is spending $30 million dollars to train workers in Sri Lanka in order to outsource IT jobs from the United States:

Under director Rajiv Shah [an Obama political appointee], the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.

USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.

“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.

“Courses in Business Process Outsourcing, Enterprise Java, and English Language Skills will be offered at no charge to over 3,000 under- and unemployed students who will then participate in on-the-job training schemes with private firms,” the embassy said.

Oh, I forgot to add, they are also doing this in Armenia.

I don’t think that Barack Obama really wants to send your jobs overseas, but I do think that there are people in his administration are “strongly free trade” and they think that being “strongly free trade” means that agencies of the US government have an obligation to move jobs out of the country in this manner, on the theory that one day, eventually, these countries will develop a middle class that will buy the sh%$ that we make.

Still, if this is not on the front page of some right wing blogger in the next 3 days, I would be very surprised.

It betrays a level of political incompetence and arrogance that positively boggles the mind.

I’m going to check and see if it is on Slashdot, and if not, I’ll do some blog whoring with the story.

A Bit of Windows Coolness

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Click for full size

Freeform Snip


Square Snip

The snipping tool comes with both Vista and Windows 7, and it allows you to take a “screenshot” of a portion of the screen, either as full screen, in a single window, a rectangle, or an irregular shape. (see pix)

It is legitimately a cool bit of stuff, and it comes from the least cool company on the planet, Microsoft®.

This is Amazing

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Amazing, The Raven

10 Years ago, if you wanted to come even close to approaching something like this, you would have a team of hundereds, and a budget for a 6 minute short of something north of a million.

If you go to the film-makers channel, they have a “behind the scenes” video, and there are a remarkably small number of people doing this.

I see a fairly large number of computer controlled cameras, including variants/clones of the Stedicam, so it’s more than just CGI.

The ability to use computer controlled stabilized cameras means that you can setup and shoot scenes in an afternoon that would have taken weeks in the past.

According to one source, it was shot on a $5000 budget, which would have been impossible with conventional, non computer controlled cameras.

It reminds me of some of the work I do with castings, where tooling for a complex casting now costs less than $50K, while 15 years ago, in would cost something north of $½ million.

That being said, this is a great short, but I would be very dubious of it being any more enjoyable as a full length movie.

I think that adding character development and exposition would likely weaken the impact.

Remember the Laptop Spycam Cased in Lower Merion, PA

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I’ve been kind of remiss in all of this, but the final analysis is that someone working at the Lower Merion school district) there took thousands of pictures of minors without any justification. (Background here)

Basically, the school supplied laptops took thousands of pictures of children to whom the computers were assigned, including some that involved children in a state of partial undress, and the school district’s information systems coordinator took the 5th when questioned.

As always, there are emails:

Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program.

“I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.

What’s more, the behavior is so egregious that the school district’s insurer is balking at covering legal fees:

A New York insurer that issued a $1 million liability policy to the Lower Merion School District is balking at the school board’s request that it cover any legal costs and payments associated with the civil rights lawsuit challenging the district’s secret laptop tracking program.

In a suit filed in federal district court in Philadelphia, Graphic Arts Mutual Insurance Company contends that none of the seven claims made by Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins in his invasion of privacy lawsuit amount to “personal injury” as defined in the coverage that the district bought last year.

So, a vice principal got a copy of some of the pictures, of a kid eating Mike & Ikes candy, which she thought were drugs, the school district scrambled to buy insurance, and the behavior seems to have been egregious enough that the insurer is claiming, albeit indirectly, that the Lower Merion SD’s claim is fraud.

This is pretty much what an independent investigation of this cluster f%$# determined too.

What is abundantly clear is that the taking of these pictures constituted an invasion of privacy, that there was a reasonable expectation that this created what is technically child porn, and that a significant number of school staff, both in and out of the Information Systems department, knew that this was going on.

No prosecutions yet, but there should be.

Heads Up to My Reader(s)

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A few weeks ago, a reader told me that my site was crashing their browser.

I checked it out, and found no problems, and so I concluded that it was something that Google™ Adsense™ was serving.

Well, it appears that, on occasion, Google™ Adsense™ serving a bit more than just ads, as Avast has discovered that the large ad networks have occasionally served up malware:

Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.

Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed “malvertising.”

Now, researchers at Avast are pointing fingers at some large ad delivery platforms including Yahoo’s Yield Manager and Fox Audience Network’s Fimserve.com, which together cover more than 50 percent of online ads, and to a much smaller degree Google’s DoubleClick. In addition, some of the malicious ads ended up on Yahoo and Google sites, Avast claims.

Google™ Adsense™ is not mentioned, just DoubleClick, though there are ties between the two, since Google™ owns Double Click, and the worst offenders honors go to Yahoo and Fox.

In any case, please keep your spyware and virus filters up to date.

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

OMFG!!!!! Epic Fail!!!!

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Fighting the Kha’ak, who lack staying power

You know, it’s not, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” but in naming the alien race in X3: Reunion the Kha’ak, pronounced “kawk”, it appears that someone has seriously jumped the shark.

The developers are German, and the dialogue, which explains why they don’t understand when a native English speaker might find it amusing when a character in the game says that, “The Kha’ak are not interested in dialogue,” though it does ring true.

I’m sure that this mirrors my wife’s, as well as my XGF’s experience.

What is Missing From This Video?

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Using a blender to reduce an iPad to iPowder

The answer is after the break, but here is a hint: it involves one Steve Jobs in a redux of a very specific scene from one of Kubrik’s better known films.

Do you know what I am referring to?

Do you have an inkling?

Well, if you do not get the answer, just, “click for more” to see the answer, with appropriate photographic documentation.

Blah, blah, blah!

The video, as delightfully perverse as it is, lacks that special something: Steve jobs restrained and forced to watch the liquidation of the most recent vision to spring forth from his metaphorical loins.

I am referring, of course to the brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange with Malcolm McDowell.

This is a Case to Watch

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Sergey Aleynikov, a senior programmer for Goldman Sach’s high frequency trading software, has been indicted for software theft.

It’s alleged that he took the software, and sent copies of it to a server in Germany.

This case is odd.

First, the entire high frequency trading thing smells of corruption: The idea is that by having servers colocated in the market, you pick up a few milliseconds speed, and so can execute trades between when someone else requests a buy, and when their transaction is actually executed.

To my, admittedly untrained, gut this sounds identical to front-running, which is illegal.

Additionally, the twists and turns of the trial, where Aleynikov’s lawyers made some fairly routing requests for things like his personnel file to show that he was not a disgruntled employee, had the squid’s* lawyers seriously freaking out, and suggesting that charges should be dropped.

I think that there are some very real bits of corruption that might be uncovered in the trial, though the prosecution, defense, and judge might very well find a way to suppress that, because, after all, it’s Goldman Sachs, and rule number 1 of Goldman Sachs is that Goldman Sachs has friends in high places, so it always gets what it wants.

My prior posts are here.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.