Re: So in other words

Actually the complaints are about Google Wallet. See, if you want to pay for anything from Google Play, you are now FORCED to sign up for and associate your mobile account with Google Wallet..

Funny, the words Google Wallet are in a very faint off-white that's almost unreadable, so you don't even know what you're doing until it's too late.

'Dozens of attacks' prevented by snooping

NSA: "Hey, would we lie to you?"

And once again, the words "President Obama" are nowhere to be found in this article.

Re: Edward Snowden should get 2 Four Freedoms Medals

he clearly has no qualms about breaking signed promises when he feels like it, so his principles are somewhat flexible.

I'd say Snowden clearly has qualms about Obama breaking the law when he feels like it, so Snowden's principles are somewhat intact.

Re: I'm an insider and I can tell you exactly what they are doing.

There may well be a rolling code but it still has to be tied to the actual vehicle in some way

Exactly. Each keyfob is "seeded" with a code unique to that car/keyfob pair. The seed is transmitted when you press the keyfob button so your car knows it's being addressed, while nearby cars know to ignore your keyfob's transmission.

But the seed isn't transmitted in the clear or separately - it's encrypted as part of the the entire transmission sequence. First decryption of the total transmission tells the car yes, it is being addressed. That triggers the second decryption which says open the door or boot, or turn on the lights, activate alarm, etc.

Re: Sonic Screwdriver

There are companies that can analyze/reverse-engineer a surprising number of "secure" chips. Here's one, for example:

These chips can't be reverse-engineered. They will self-destruct if you:

- Clock them too fast

- Clock them too slow

- Expose them to light

- Attempt to probe any inside trace

- Expose them to extremes of heat and temperature

The chips contain false circuits and bogus code routines. And that isn't the half of it!

The gist of it is, it would be cheaper to buy a new car rather than attempt to reverse-engineer these chips.

Constitution FAIL

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society," Obama said

There's a difference between tapping someone on the arm verses shoving your hand up their ass and calling it an "inconvenience".

Re: Sonic Screwdriver

I'm an insider and I can tell you exactly what they are doing.

Remote entry keyfobs contain programmed secure microcontrollers that transmit a rolling code sequence to the car. To open the door you need to transmit the next code in the sequence. The system is programmed to take into account missed transmissions, etc.

They thieves used a special keyfob device with a microcontroller programmed to detect and transmit rolling code sequences. It intercepts and stores the rolling code signal from the keyfob to the car, then the device calculates the next sequences of that rolling code so that later it can send that code to the car to unlock the door.

Easy to do if you have inside knowledge of the highly confidential rolling code algorithm. By design this cannot be reverse-engineered - the microcontroller actually self-destructs.

So this means the special device was built and programmed by someone with inside knowledge. This means it's someone from keyfob manufacturers TRW or Bosch. My guess is they are all using Bosch keyfobs.

However, on some cars there is a way to reset the rolling code sequence and start over, no signal interception needed. This requires intense insider knowledge.

Of course, the keyfob manufacturer can't admit that this was done by someone inside their firms, as this would affect their contracts with the car manufacturers which are worth tens of millions of dollars.

There is no defense against this except to deactivate the cars wireless control.

Obama's NSA

You say now but when you get black bagged, waterboarded and set to a re-education camp

It's funny.... after 9/11 we the article says "George Bush ordered the NSA".

But for this article, the phrase "Barack Obama ordered the NSA to collect all data on Verizon customers" is strangely missing. Because after all, only the President has the authority to subvert the U.S. Constitution.

Oh, wait...

Re: Dear IT professionals, please put your stuff on the cloud where we can see it.

He called for the wider adoption of cloud-like architectures - running everything on a centrally managed server farm...

..."where we can see it."

Re: Waste of Space

Last year, Apple spent $1.97M lobbying the White House.

Re: Rich

"Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own."

- Chuck Yeager

"War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules."

- Barack Obama

"The rules are there are no rules."

- Aristotle Onassis

Re: missing the point

I dont know enough about chip design to comment, but a "sneak" circuit will take, what, 2%, .0.2% 0.0000001% who knows.

I do know about chip design. And you are correct - a sneak circuit in a chip can take whatever percentage it has to, and it can be made to be completely undetectable by making it look like something legitimate.

Or it could be in the firmware, or a tight assembly language routine hidden in the (unchangable) boot ROM.

The opportunities for semiconductor espionage are literally infinite, and it can be completely invisible and totally undetectable.

sarcasm=on

After all, the Chinese have never lied to us, have they?

sarcasm=off

Seriously, the issue isn't today's software, it's the inevitable software upgrade. In the meantime, let's see how Huawei's 2012 campaign contributions to Obama work out for them.

Re: Close your mouth Google.

Open wide.

1. A country investigates Google

2. Google spreads around campaign donations to politicians

3. Investigation ends, Google gets a symbolic slap on the wrist

4. Step forward one month

5. Select new country

6. Goto 1

Re: IT?

Get yourself a firewall. Install DroidWall and block any and all apps that do not need data access, like cameras, galleries, most games and play apps.

Half of my apps are blocked by DroidWall. My battery life improves by 30%, performance shoots up, mobile data usage is WAY down. It's all good.

Re: IT?

The phone was overheating and draining the battery.

I'm willing to bet he had downloaded a dodgy app that was behaving as a bot, and the constant data access caused the overheating.

Re: Almost too damned depressed to think about it

I agree - and this always makes me laugh, because it's like in poker, weak is really strong, and strong is really weak.

The FBI argue the net is “going dark” to them, thanks to encryption technologies which render valid wiretapping warrants useless.

FBI: YEAH, uh, hey look, um, we can't read your encrypted communications, nooooo sir, so, uh, go ahead and write all those messages because we (cough) can't read them. Nope. La de da, la de da...

Re: Security

Having hidden features that some third party can secretly exploit is a security threat to both the customer and to the manufacturer.

Nope. This isn't like software. More often than not the feature is locked out, often at the mask level. And there are other sneaky ways to prevent unauthorized use. This has been going on for years. The difference is, while software engineers can't stop talking, hardware engineers don't talk.

BTW, when you add features to a core like this it's called a Microcontroller.

Or, another sneaky thing we like to do with microcontrollers/SoC is I offer a high-end, high priced chip with the cool feature, while also having the same feature on a cheaper chip BUT undocumented. So I have people buying the cheaper device from me using the expensive feature (ripping me off). After two years I mod the cheap device so the advanced feature isn't available anymore. Customers call to complain, I tell them "Hey, that feature isn't on that device". Now they are forced, forced to pay more money for the more expensive device! REVENGE!

Re: Hope not more bloat....

Yes, Firefox is getting slower and slower. I ran some benchmarks earlier this year and found that each new version of Firefox takes more and more memory and CPU.

The fastest version of Firefox is 3.2.28. I have it installed on some old underpowered laptops and it runs great.

Yahoo veteran

I signed up for Yahoo email years ago, at the same time I signed up for a Hotmail account.

I abandoned the Hotmail account two weeks later and I've been thrilled with my Yahoo account ever since.

Re: Steno-pornography?

I was thinking the same thing - the classified info can be encrypted into the porn. The thing is, that type of encryption is like a book code, it's totally undetectable unless you have the key.

Alternately the guy was tipped off and he swapped the real data for porn.

Re: The result is that..

Screw You, Getty Images.

Re: Fireworks Anyone

Adobe's products are a security nightmare. Reader, Flash and Air are - alongside Oracle's Java browser plugin - the screen door through which the raw unfiltered sewage of the internet oozes into the homes of netizens. These products are awful, the security is worse and the management of them over the years beggars belief.

This sums it up best.

In pyrotechnics a Flash is something that occurs after the damage has been done.

Re: Proof

the bill would require each piece of funding to be signed off as unique, with no overlap with another study,

Needed badly.

Believe it or not, there is absolutely no mechanism that checks to see if a proposed project is already being duplicated by another project. It's more about "Hey, Extreme Partisans Inc has been a big help in getting me re-elected. Let's give them an award to study the effect of global warming on ducks. Just take that "The Effect of Global Warming on Ducks" study we gave the other guys and change the name to "Ducks and the Effect of Global Warming". Good, time for lunch.

It is estimated that there is about $25Billion in project duplication, such as hundreds of identical studies on global warming and the Arctic ice.

Re: Good Riddance

You've got it backwards. There was never any problem with Flash at Macromedia. It wasn't until Adobe bought them that Flash became a problem.

Adobe Acrobat, OTOH, was always having problems, the most famous was it's issues integrating with MS Office 2003 and OpenOffice. The badly implemented DRM in Adobe's later products made that worse. All pre-Macromedia.

I grabbed a 200LX the first year it came out. It was an invaluable contact manager. I used it to keep track of customers, clients, employees. somebody called, with a few keystrokes I know who they were and what business I was doing with them.

Kept my frequent flyer numbers handy with specific hints for each airline for getting a valuable upgrade. Kept product pricing charts, and even had a margin calculator. In a non-computer age it gave me a tremendous advantage over my competition.

Today my trusty 200LX sits, retired, at the corner of my desk, forever charging, forever charging...

Re: Failure

Seagates are great. For a laptop, grab the Momentus 7200.3. Stay away from the 7200.4.

Re: Plan 9 from Planet Obvious: XP -> Linux Mint + sandboxed XP VM

Amen, Turtle.

It's gotten to the point that each time I hear some fanboi shrieking "Ditch Windows and go to Linux!!!", it's like nails on a chalkboard.

Re: My plan?

The lack of a business case was cited as the key barrier to Windows XP application migration in 79 per cent of these organisations.

Translation: Why should we change if what we are doing works fine?

"lack of a business case" = "No reason to spend a truckload of cash to buy Win7".

I've said it before and I'll say it again: My brother's laptop runs Windows XP SP3. He hasn't used Windows Update in five years. He uses Outpost Firewall and a good antivirus and has never had a problem.

Re: Good Riddance

Macromedia, we miss you.

Re: A good starting point for activists

Two words: Screen Lock.

Re: Support

I want to add a "yes, but..." about LG.

My LG G2X is solid as a rock, reliable, stable, unbreakable, and the best camera you'll find on a smartphone, ever. But for the price of unbreakable hardware I have to put up with atrocious software, lousy upgrades, and absent developer support. Enter CyanogenMod7, an overclocked kernel, and I'm golden, it's now a phone I am immensely proud of and want to live with forever.

But for those that can't or won't root, LG is horrible to it's customers. Any LG phone is going to become abandonware six months after release. Contrast that to Samsung and HTC who I hear warmly embrace developers like their own children.

The phaser would be the last invention of a civilized society.

Once you invent something that can kill people without leaving a trace, co-workers would be disappearing on a daily basis.

Re: But now

So long, Anonymous.

Keep one eye open while you sleep.

Re: Windows XP was considered a failure when it was first introduced

Partial stats from my most major techie website, 150K users/month:

Windows OS of Unique Visitors:

Windows 7: 28.2%

Windows XP: 34.2%

Windows 8: 3.1%

Source: SmarterStats Enterprise 7.4

Windows XP won't stop working when Microsoft EOLs it.

As I'd written before, my brother's computer has Windows XP SP3. He hasn't run Windows Update in five years. He uses Outpost firewall and a good antivirus and has never had a problem.

Re: Don't go there

Two years ago 60 Minutes did a bit on online gambling and how honest it is.

Two months later all those online gambling sites you see on t-shirts and hats at tournaments were all shut down because they were all proven corrupt.

There is absolutely no way to verify the integrity of any online gambling site.

There's one born every minute.

Re: Faddy, played out

A mobile OS totally focused around Facebook - PLUS...

Your mobile browsing history, private emails, Amazon purchases, photos taken, music played, etc. - PLUS...

...Facebook's famous attitude towards "privacy".

What could possibly go wrong???

Re: so you really

Don't know what your off-peak circuit is. But I know that ZigBee is desperately trying to survive. After all these years there are just 5 million ZigBee nodes, everywhere. That's hardly a business.

Re: What a joke

Warrant? Obama don't need no stinkin' warrant!

Only Nixon could go to China.

Only Obama can trample civil rights.

these types of laws are designed to give prosecutors a strong negotiation position with which to threaten suspects and avoid all the expense and hassle of actually holding trials

How much expense and hassle is saved if the suspect is persecuted into suicide?