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Posts Tagged technology
Feds Want To Restrict Talking About Guns On The Net
The State Department has proposed new ITAR rules that would cover merely talking about guns according to the NRA.
From The Washington Examiner:
…the NRA boiled it down for gun owners with this warning:
“In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the ‘public domain.’ Essentially, this means data ‘which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public’ through a variety of specified means. These include ‘at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.’ Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.
“The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been ‘exported,’ as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.
“With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be ‘clarifying’ the rules concerning ‘technical data’ posted online or otherwise ‘released’ into the ‘public domain.’ To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible.”
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.
DARPA Self Guiding Ammo
From DARPA:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Primer for Protesters and “Anti-Government Extremists”
Posted by Brian in Comms, Law, News, Threat Watch on 31/Aug/2014 12:14
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 »
1.2 Billion Passwords Stolen by Gang in Russia
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 14/Aug/2014 12:58
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.
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.
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.