Posts Tagged technology

Making Your Own Firearm Has A Long History

From Slate.com:

While the technological ingenuity and legal maneuvering of makers such as Wilson and Imura may strike us as quintessentially modern, in fact the work of these garage gunsmiths hearkens back to the first experiments with gun-making in the late Middle Ages, an era before firearms became the province of corporations—and centuries before their subjection to any kind of government regulation or oversight.

The story begins with that most dastardly of medieval inventions, gunpowder, first developed in China probably during the Tang Dynasty before gradually making its way to Western Europe by the middle of the 13th century. Initially the use of gunpowder weapons on the medieval battlefield was limited to larger artillery pieces such as the pot-de-fer and theribauldequin. Soon, though, gunsmiths began experimenting with smaller, increasingly portable weapons that could be carried more easily across a battlefield.

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DARPA Self Guiding Ammo

From DARPA:

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Surveillance Planes Tracked Over Baltimore

From The Washington Post:

Discovery of the flights — which involved at least two airplanes and the assistance of the FBI — has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to demand answers about the legal authority for the operations and the reach of the technology used. Planes armed with the latest surveillance systems canmonitor larger areas than police helicopters and stay overhead longer, raising novel civil liberties issues that have so far gotten little scrutiny from courts.

 

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Defense Distributed Sues State Department

From The New York Times:

Now, with a high-powered legal team behind it, Mr. Wilson’s company,Defense Distributed, a self-described “anti-monopolist digital publisher,” has filed suit against the State Department claiming that its efforts to stop him from publishing his instructions, which are no more than computer code, amount to a prior restraint on free speech. The 25-page suit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Austin, Tex., is an innovative and apparently unprecedented effort to use the First Amendment in support of the Second.

From Wired:

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.

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K-9 Search and Rescue Using Technology To Be More Efficient

From Police One:

Search One and Chesapeake Search Dogs both rely on cloud-based Mission Manager Incident Management software to help manage their personnel and equipment, and also enhance situational awareness in the field.

Mission Manager software plays a key role in the teams’ training, searches, and debriefs. At the most basic level, Mission Manager is used for posting training schedules and allowing members to respond with their objectives so training can be coordinated. The Web-based software helps the team leaders develop mock scenarios, including checking in and checking out personnel, creating subject profiles, setting up task assignments, and mapping out the search areas.

 

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Former Civil Servant: Hillary’s Email Excuse is Laghable

From Politico:

In this case, which is truly unprecedented, no matter what Secretary Clinton would have one believe, she managed successfully to insulate her official emails, categorically, from the FOIA, both during her tenure at State and long after her departure from it—perhaps forever. “Nice work if you can get it,” one might say, especially if your experience during your husband’s presidency gives you good reason (nay, even highly compelling motivation) to relegate unto yourself such control if at all possible.

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Your Apps Are Following You

From The Wall Street Journal:

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University concluded that a dozen or so popular Android apps collected device location – GPS coordinates accurate to within 50 meters – an average 6,200 times, or roughly every three minutes, per participant over a two-week study period.

The researchers recruited 23 users of Android version 4.3 from Craigslist and the Carnegie Mellon student body. Participants were allowed to use their own choice of apps after installing software that noted app requests for a variety of personal information; not only location but also contacts, call logs, calendar entries, and camera output. They weren’t told the purpose of the study and were screened to weed out people who had a technical background or strong views about privacy.

 

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Fourth Amendment Negated By AOL Terms of Service

From TechDirt:

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer alerts us to a district court ruling in NY that effectively says that by merely agreeing to AOL’s terms of service, you’ve waived your 4th Amendment rights. The case is the United States v. Frank DiTomasso, where DiTomasso is accused of producing child porn — with most of the evidence used against him coming from AOL. DiTomasso argues that it was obtained via an unconstitutional search in violation of the 4th Amendment, but judge Shira Scheindlin rejects that, by basically saying that AOL’s terms of service make you effectively waive any 4th Amendment right you might have in any such information.

All the more reason to use services like Silent Circle and encrypt your email.

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DARPA Tests Soft Exoskeleton Protoype

From KitUp:

“The suit mimics the action of leg muscles and tendons so a soldier’s muscles expend less energy,” Ignacio Galiana, a robotics engineer working on the project, said in the Army’s release.

Soldiers wearing suit prototypes along with battle gear tested the suit at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Researchers collected data as the soldiers walked on treadmills and a three-mile course on paved roads and rough terrain.

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Primer for Protesters and “Anti-Government Extremists”

From EFF:

Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters, Updated 2014 Edition

With major protests in the news again, we decided it’s time to update our cell phone guide for protestors. A lot has changed since we last published this report in 2011, for better and for worse. On the one hand, we’ve learned more about the massive volume of law enforcement requests for cell phone—ranging from location information to actual content—and widespread use of dedicated cell phone surveillance technologies. On the other hand, strong Supreme Court opinions have eliminated any ambiguity about the unconstitutionality of warrantless searches of phones incident to arrest, and a growing national consensus says location data, too, is private.

Protesters want to be able to communicate, to document the protests, and to share photos and video with the world. So they’ll be carrying phones, and they’ll face a complex set of considerations about the privacy of the data those phones hold. We hope this guide can help answer some questions about how to best protect that data, and what rights protesters have in the face of police demands. Read the rest of this entry »

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1.2 Billion Passwords Stolen by Gang in Russia

From USA Today:

Security researchers say a Russian crime ring has pulled off the largest known theft of confidential Internet information, including 1.2 billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses.

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Italy Gives Google Privacy Ultimatum

From The Guardian:

Google has been given 18 months by the Italian data regulator to change how it handles and stores user data.

Users will now have to grant permission before the firm creates a profile on them, and Google has to honour requests to delete data within two months (although it will have an additional six months to remove the content from backups). Google will also have to explicitly inform users that the profiles it creates on them are for commercial purposes.

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Smartphones Track Your Movements

From KOMONews:

Students at the University of Washington volunteered their phones to see how easy it can be to see where the device has been. The frequent locations setting creates a map, and tapping on a specific locations reveals the dates and times of a particular visit and even how long you were there.

The students were taken aback that it was so easy to track their history.

“That’s kind of crazy,” Sebastian Aste said. “It’s interesting how accessible your life can be.” 

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Phone Wiping Fails on Android Phones

From CNET.com:

Avast — known for its security software on Windows, Mac, and Android — purchased 20 Android smartphones from eBay, which has around 80,000 used smartphones for sale at any given time. Among the data that Avast employees recovered from the phones were more than 40,000 photos — including 250 nude male selfies — along with 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, the identities of four phones’ previous owners, and one completed loan application.

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U.S. Senator Proposes Gun Law With Unproven Technology

From Boston.com:

The Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts said the technology championed by Markey is often flawed and smart guns ‘‘only work correctly in the movies.’’

‘‘No technology should stand between a lawful gun owner using his/her firearm,’’ the group said in a written statement. ‘‘We also find it more than disingenuous that a senator with very little knowledge of firearms, who has worked to stifle the Second Amendment, would offer mandated technology that gun owners have not asked for, nor supported.’’

 

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