“To improve location accuracy and for other purposes, Google and other apps may scan for nearby networks, even when Wi-Fi is off,” describes Google.
Los Angeles Police Department Det. Kevin Coffey trained local law enforcement officers on the alerts in February and found most were surprised by the new reach they already have.
“We’ve never had this ability,” Coffey said. “We’re going to have instantaneous connectivity with every person with a cellphone within our county and potentially multiple counties in the state.”
Picture this: You’re relaxing on the commode with a good book …, when without warning you feel the whirl of the toilet flushing or the squirt of the bidet.
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.
“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsyrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”
When does “do what you have to do“, clash with “obey the law“. You see this is a apparently a hack to identify the people who sent up child porn servers.
The heart of the malicious Javascript is a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box.
But the Magneto code doesn’t download anything. It looks up the victim’s MAC address — a unique hardware identifier for the computer’s network or Wi-Fi card — and the victim’s Windows hostname. Then it sends it to the Virginia server, outside of Tor, to expose the user’s real IP address, and coded as a standard HTTP web request.
Problem is, this program is out there now. And anyone can use it.
Q: Would you eat a hamburger made of artificial meat created in a lab?
A group of 160 citizens, many if not most of whom were armed, confronted government officials Tuesday who had attempted to have a wounded Army veteran kicked out of a meeting due to the fact that he carried a gun. The veteran has a state license for concealed carry, which means that he was carrying the gun to the meeting within the boundaries of the law.
Caught the Progressives by surprise, that won’t happen again.
One citizen told the council that if the fact that citizens who are merely exercising their right to keep and bear arms intimidates city officials, then they need to look within to determine why the rights of the people are so intimidating to them.
Another citizen addressed the council and stated that his mother was a Jew and that his parents had died in Hitler’s gas chambers. “I will not go into the night quietly while these two ask me to board the train,” he said.
Unless the people in that town vote out That Member of the town council, it means nothing.
As a Basic cable subscriber, I have been paying less than ten bucks for Comcast TV to deliver the “over-the_air” channels along with the hi-speed internet.
Then the FCC got involved last year and granted Comcast the right to encrypt the BASIC channels (the same channels that are delivered over the air, unencrypted). Why would Comcast want to do that? Answer, to force you to accept cable adapters on each house TV or other device (DTA’s) which though a short grace period (as short as six months in some areas and as long as two years in others) eventually all DTA’s will be added to the monthly bill. After an initial period the monthly charge will be small (but larger than “didn’t pay anything before now”) as Comcast’s webpage says;
Local market pricing will apply after the two year period.
My research on the web indicates that that market price will be $9.95/month. In my house (including the DVR) I’d need four devices, bringing my monthly bill for Basic cable from $10/month to $50/month. And the signal through the DTA is not HD, but SD.
So, I’m buying a antenna.
There was an article this week from Reuters, Comcast lost 20,000 (168,000 for quarter)TV subscribers. The writer was mystified as to the reason. Hello!
Update: The antenna…
Results, twice as many local channels than Comcast Basic.
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I sent the unwanted adapters back to Comcast. The result was they sent me back a notice that they were canceling my TV Basic subscription and since my Internet service was priced with a multi-product discount they were increasing the price of my Internet so after removing TV the monthly bill goes up $5.
Buy an Antenna. Plot vengeance.
The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an “electromagnetic pulse” so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.
Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth’s typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.
“The world escaped an EMP catastrophe,” said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.
“There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us,” said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America.
The replacement heavy transformers would have to be manufactured in China and shipped by sea to the USA, then trucked or transported by rail to the effected regions and installed. It would take months, or even years. Millions of people would die in the interim.
Pry, Cooper, and former CIA Director James Woolsey have been recently demanding that Washington prepare the nation’s electric grid for an EMP, either from the sun or an enemy’s nuclear bomb. They want the 2,000-3,000 transformers in the grid protected with a high-tech metal box and spares ready to rebuild the system. Woolsey said knocking out just 20 would shut down electricity to parts of the nation “for a long time.”
But Washington is giving them the cold shoulder, especially the administration. Woolsey told Secrets that some in Congress are interested in the issue, but the administration is just in the “beginnings” of paying attention.
Please, don’t let this spoil the beautiful summer day for you. 
Sent to me for distribution
This is a pencil. There isn’t a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Continue reading
A sandy area formed at (and by) the confluence of the North and South Rivers, in Scituate.