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Monday, December 19, 2016

Tabernacular Tachistoscope Tidbits

'There is this general paranoia about hackers–it's a sort of hysteria that's on par with the hysteria about witchcraft.' 


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Done with out your consent or input behind your back essentially...

The full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, has been officially released, and is available for the public to see

According to CNN, The TPP is a 12-nation deal that touches on 40% of the global economy

 The provisions of the deal would knock down tariffs and import quotas, making it cheaper to import and export, and open new Asia-Pacific markets. Negotiations have been going on for years, led by the United States and Japan — with China conspicuously absent from the list of signees.

Not to worry, the new prez says he will put an end to it...

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Scientists have now imaged the magma chambers responsible for the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.


 From the Science story:

 "Geoscientists have for the first time revealed the magma plumbing beneath Mount St. Helens, the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest.

The emerging picture includes a giant magma chamber, between 5 and 12 kilometers below the surface, and a second, even larger one, between 12 and 40 kilometers below the surface.

The two chambers appear to be connected in a way that could help explain the sequence of events in the 1980 eruption that blew the lid off Mount St. Helens."

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 Land Grab

Data center developers are buying up land in northern Virginia, preparing for explosive growth of cloud computing infrastructure. 

Digital Realty just bought land in Ashburn, Virginia to support 2 million square feet of data center space, while DuPont Fabros, RagingWire and Sabey have also locked up land parcels for future growth.

 Why is Ashburn so hot?

 Cloud builders crave proximity to an Internet exchange operated by Equinix, which itself just bought land for another 1 million square feet of colocation space. 

That's one of the reasons why Amazon Web Services operates more than 20 data centers in northern Virginia. 

"Data center demand is stronger today than it's ever been," said Bill Stein, the CEO of Digital Realty.

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 Windows Ten Underbelly Exposed

Backwards compatibility, a necessary evil for Microsoft and its need to support so many legacy
applications on Windows, may be its undoing as researchers have found a way to exploit this layer in
the operating system to bypass existing mitigations against memory-based exploits.

 Specifically in this case, researchers slid past Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, or EMET, a suite of more than a dozen freely available mitigations against memory attacks. 

The soft spot, the researchers said, is the Windows on Windows, or WoW64, Windows subsystem that allows 32-bit software to run on 64-bit Windows machines.

 The researchers said 80 percent of browsers in their sample size were 32-bit processes executing on a 64-bit host running WOW64, meaning they're all vulnerable to this attack.

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Looking to counter the threat unmanned aircraft might bring to Federal prison guards and prisoners, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is looking at what types of technology could be used to defeat the drones


 The group, which is an agency of the Department of Justice issued a Request for Information specifically targeting what it called a fully integrated systems that will allow for the detection, tracking, interdiction, engagement and neutralization of small — less the 55lb — unmanned aerial system.

Video of a drone firing a semi-automatic handgun with the recoil pushing it backwards in the air.

The story.

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While many students are drowning in dept, these young people are billionaires.

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The vast majority of websites you visit are sending your data to third-party sources, usually without your permission or knowledge.


 That's not exactly breaking news, but the sheer scale and ubiquity of that leakage might be. 

Tim Libert, a privacy researcher, has published new peer-reviewed research that sought to quantify all the "privacy compromising mechanisms" on the one million most popular websites worldwide.

 His conclusion?

 "Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware."

A solution ?


"Mozilla is a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better.

We emphasize principle over profit, and believe that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold.

 We answer to no one but you and believe it is crucial to put you in control of your online experience.

We are aiming to give you better insight and control into the ways your personal information is collected, used, stored and shared online.

Mozilla Firefox offers a Do Not Track feature that lets you express a preference not to be tracked by websites.

When the feature is enabled, Firefox will tell advertising networks and other websites and applications that you want to opt-out of tracking for purposes like behavioral advertising.

 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/dnt/
Image result for firefox download
Firefox download 

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 TSA screeners' ability to detect weapons in luggage is "pitiful," according to classified reports on the security administration's ongoing story of failure and fear. 


"In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic.

 When I say that I mean pitiful," said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports (PDF) from federal watchdogs (PDF).

 "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added.

 A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings.

 Lynch's comments were in response to the classified report's findings.

  A report from CNN that U.S. and UK intelligence agencies believe it is more likely than not that the destruction on October 31st of a Russian A321 jetliner in Sinai "was most likely caused by a bomb on the plane planted by ISIS or an affiliate of the group."

 Kogalymavia Flight 9268 fell apart in flight, killing all aboard. From CNN's article:  

The British government announced Wednesday that it had "become concerned that the plane may well have been brought down by an explosive device."

 A formal conclusion has not been reached by the intelligence communities of either country. An UK aviation team is travelling to inspect the Sharm airport to look at whether there were proper security measures at the airport and the various scenarios by which an explosive device could have made it to the Russian airliner "including a person or in cargo," according to the British transport minister.

Both Russian and Egyptian officials discount the claim, but detecting bombs is hard...

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