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Posts Tagged technology
Tactics In The Modern Age
From War on the Rocks:
The historian David Edgerton authored a book entitled The Shock of the Old in which he argues that our society’s collective obsession with rapidly changing technology often blinds us to the older tools and techniques that actually drive most of what we observe around us. We believe this logic can be applied here. The diffusion of 100-year old combat techniques, coupled with readily available technology, may create serious threats that are not currently being considered.
Data Should Be Covered By Fourth Amendment Says Silicon Valley
From Ars Technica:
A group of prominent tech companies and lawyers has come together in new friend-of-the-court filings submitted to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The group is arguing in favor of stronger legal protections for data generated by apps and digital devices in an important privacy case pending before the court.
The companies, which include Apple, Google, and Microsoft among many others, argue that the current state of the law, which distinguishes between “content” (which requires a warrant) and “non-content” (which does not) “make[s] little sense in the context of digital technologies.”
Defense Distributed Part of New Documentary
From The Verge:
In the film, Wilson is openly positive about the election of Donald Trump, which may help explain the film’s chilly reception among the liberal-leaning Sundance audience. Then again, there are plenty of reasons for people on the left — Lough included — to find Wilson unsettling. Lough interviews him at length in The New Radical, about other pioneers of the crypto movement, other libertarian radical activists, and how printable weapons level the playing field for anyone who wants a potentially undetectable plastic gun without any government oversight.
Marines To Use Tablets For Fire Support
Posted by Brian in Gear, News, Warrior Tools on 20/Jan/2017 07:00
From KitUp:
The Target Handoff System Version 2 will work with the Samsung Tab 2, an 8-inch tablet that retails for about $400, Capt. Jesse Hume, project officer for the system, told Military.com. Roughly 900 Marines will receive the systems this spring, including joint fires observers, joint terminal attack controllers, forward air controllers, and air officers throughout all Marine Corps ground units, he said.
Defense Distributed Snubbed By NSSF
From Guns.com:
During the Second Amendment Foundation’s annual gun rights policy conference in Tamp, Florida last weekend, Wilson revealed he was denied membership to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s largest trade group, for reasons he is unsure of.
Choosing A Strong Password Is Easier Than You Think
Posted by Brian in Tech, Threat Watch on 8/Aug/2016 07:00
From EFF:
Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)
Measuring the security of a randomly-generated passphrase is easy. The most common approach to randomly-generated passphrases (immortalized by XKCD) is to simply choose several words from a list of words, at random. The more words you choose, or the longer the list, the harder it is to crack. Looking at it mathematically, for k words chosen from a list of length n, there are kn possible passphrases of this type. It will take an adversary about kn/2 guesses on average to crack this passphrase. This leaves a big question, though: where do we get a list of words suitable for passphrases, and how do we choose the length of that list?
In general choosing four five-letter words is better than one long word with number substitutions and some weird characters thrown in. It’s easier to remember and vastly harder for a computer to guess.
Sharing Passwords May Now Be A Crime
From Motherboard:
At issue is language in the CFAA that makes it illegal to access a computer system “without authorization.†McKeown said that “without authorization†is “an unambiguous, non-technical term that, given its plain and ordinary meaning, means accessing a protected computer without permission.†The question that legal scholars, groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and dissenting judge Stephen Reinhardt ask is an important one: Authorization from who?
Cody Wilson Versus The United States
From Fox News:
The (15) members of Congress, led by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kent., signed onto an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where Texas inventor Cody Wilson is fighting a lower court ruling in favor of the government agency. The State Department in 2013, citing a law allowing it to regulate international arms trafficking, blocked Wilson and his nonprofit group Defense Distributed from posting technical data for 3-D printing of legal handguns.
Wilson has received more “friend of the court” backup from policy think tank Cato Institute and various free speech organizations.
WaPo: Printed Guns Will Lead To Printed Nukes
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 21/Sep/2015 07:00
From The Washington Post:
The ability to “print†or manufacture guns privately will allow individuals to bypass background checks, the primary way that guns are regulated today. And that challenge will expand exponentially as the technology advances, one day enabling individuals to print chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction at home.
The threat of privately printed weapons will soon grow beyond the lethal handguns now in circulation. As we argue in research forthcoming in the October issue of the Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, considering expected advances in the technologies, terrorist groups will threaten nations with 3-D printed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons within a couple of decades.
Defense Distributed Injunction Against State Department Denied
From Reason.com:
This week U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against the State Department in the case of Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State.
Quotes and comment from Judge Pitman’s decision.
He starts with explaining that it takes a lot to get a preliminary injunction to stop someone from an action you assert violates your rights, and he believes the very fact it took DD so long after the injury to file suit proves that they do not face any urgent necessity to stop the State Department from violating their rights.
Judge Pitman does then grant that, well, precedent states that First and Second Amendment violations do rise to the level of “irreparable”  that might demand an injunction.
Wireless Thermal/NVG Scope Connects To Helmet
From KitUp:
In three years, the Army hopes to start fielding the Family of Weapon Sights-Individual, a new lightweight thermal weapon sight that is designed to communicate wirelessly with the service’s latest Enhanced Night Vision Goggle (ENVG).
Linking these two technologies creates a new capability called Rapid Target Acquisition, according to Lt. Col. Timothy Fuller, product manager for Soldier Maneuver Sensors at Fort Belvoir, Va.
LastPass Servers Compromised
From Ars Technica:
LastPass officials warned Monday that attackers have compromised servers that run the company’s password management service and made off with cryptographically protected passwords and other sensitive user data. It was the second breach notification regarding the service in the past four years.
In an e-mail to reporters, Ars resident password expert Jeremi Gosney said the real-world risks the breach posed to end users was minimal. He based his assessment on the LastPass response to the breach and the system that was in place when it happened. He paid particular attention to the 100,000-round hashing routine, which he said was among the strongest he has ever seen.
State Department Gun Regs Designed To Counter Defense Distributed Lawsuit
According to Sean Davis at The Federalist the new regulations are nothing more than retaliation against Defense Distributed:
On June 3, just four weeks after Defense Distributed filed its complaint in federal court, the State Department suddenly decided to propose a new rule giving it the authority to pre-approve speech related to publicly available firearm plans. The State Department’s play here is obvious: it hopes to promulgate a new rule making its previous anti-speech efforts superficially legal in order to short-circuit Defense Distributed’s court case. If that were to happen, the non-profit would then have to file a new and separate suit alleging the unconstitutionality of the new rule.
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.”