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Belgian Home Affairs Minister: Terrorists Communicate Via PlayStation 4 (qz.com)
bricko writes with story at Quartz reporting the words of Belgium's home affairs minister Jan Jambon, who says that ISIL operators communicate using their PlayStation 4s; "which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. 'PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,' he said. The gaming console also was implicated in ISIL's plans back in June, when an Austrian teen was arrested for downloading bomb plans to his PS4." This seems a strange place to concentrate investigators' energies; terrrorists could be communicating in the chat session on the side of many social media games, too, or by any number of other means; Jambon would do well to read through some of the movie plotlines that Bruce Schneier has gathered.
We should ban all communication devices that terrorists might use, including pigeons
same can be said for cops shooting people, or colleges "not acting" in relation to race. or (insert other buzz worthy topics of the day)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Either this information is false, or the Belgian minister is an idiot. If we can track them on a single platform, it would be dumb to let them know, because they will move somewhere else. It would also be dumb to tell them that it is hard for authorities to monitor if that was actually true. So I assume this is all false information disseminated as a deception.
Ban all telephones, because if we don't, terrorists might kill us.
Jews did WTC and Paris.
9/11 was an inside job (mossad)
catpcha: robbery
and love Microsoft.
completely agree.
The minister gave no source for this conclusion or any information, really -- or at least Quartz didn't report any). As it is, he's speaking out his pie-hole.
Do they? Do they really?
We're expected to believe that terror cells are importing big heavy expensive embargo'd PS4s and games in order to chat on a likely unencrypted and easily tappable by Sony/EA/whoever channel?
Pull the other one. They're clearly going to be using a TAILS USB stick and the apps that come with it, at the lower levels.
Higher ones? Couriers, handwritten paper, for-your-ears-only whispers.
With all the spying on its citizens, the governments are still clueless!
Actually, game-chat would probably be a good (for them) way to hide certain types of planning. I'm not saying it's true, but for a modern shooter or perhaps FPS, they could simply substitute "game" targets for real-life ones, and otherwise the conversation might sound much you would hear in some games.
OK, so sneak your infiltrator into the enemy Science Centre. There will be about 3 guards in positions X, Y, and Z. Group B will take them out, then you delivery the package by 14:00. Meanwhile group C enter the mass relay by 13:50, and take out all present. Group A will attempt to take out enemy power infrastructure and cause confusion at 13:30.
Maybe some of it would sound like weird BS, but would *you* suspect that some of the weird guys in CoD were actually plotting nefarious things in real life? Some of the shit that trolls said might be a good cover too, as most sane people either mute them or just ignore it. As a mid-level gamer I'm not sure I could tell the difference between a real-life nutball and the online nutball variety.
Taxpayers should pay us to play video games instead,
yours truly,
homeland security
Terrorists have attacked again. Drop your freedoms and bend over.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You're far more likely to die by slipping in your bathtub.
That's because your bathtub is designed by terrorists
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Belgium simply doesn't have enough manpower to monitor all potential jihadists. It has the largest number of muslim citizens to go fight in Syria per capita out there. I imagine you could automate most of the monitoring of chats etc online, but when you need to monitor group audio sessions with dozens of participants in a pool of maybe millions of gamers. How do you manage something like that ?
Why would any sane terrorist use any sort of service run by someone else? That just makes them vulnerable. Any sort of PC, install Linux and set up their own private XMPP server, instant fully-encrypted communications without leaving any logs or other traces on anyone else's systems where the authorities could get access to them. And with the authorities' current focus on social media it adds the additional layer of security of not being where anyone's looking for them to be. Geesh, I think government officials have been reading too many best-seller spy novels and listening to too few tech geeks.
Communicating plans to commit evil deeds isnt the problem, its actually carrying them out that is the problem. In fact the more people these extremists communicate with about there plans the more likely someone will be able to talk them out of it.
But i guess the politicians will bring in more extreme laws in an effort to make people free of extremists....
All video games are now tools of terror and anyone owning or using one can be arrested immediately and detained indefinitely without charge.
It started based on one overheard comment: "we go to ambus' em and kill all da f***tards"
N/T
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Because in your typical frag-fest there is a lot of innocuous talk about killing off some other folk. Blend right in etc
"You're far more likely to die by slipping in your bathtub."
If you're not with us, you're with them. Be careful because a drone strike will be coming your way soon.
Seriously? Who didn't expect something like this eventually.
I pictured this possibility to pass information all the way back in the 1990s.
Remembered thinking about how it would be easy for someone to start up their own password protected quake 2 servers where you uploaded your custom characters to the other players, than just had the message in the textures for the players.
Or during Counter Strike Source with your custom tags. Also thought about having my tag set to an animated gay porn picture and standing in front of it so anyone who tried to shoot me was stuck looking a hardcore gay porn to do it. Or an animated tag of lots of my character scrolling past making really hard to target me from the wallpaper.
among the last 9 stories only 1 is about terrorism. try new glasses maybe?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The news coverage on terrorism is INSANELY blown out of proportion.
Let's look at what just happened. ISIS mega attack in France, 129 dead, 352 wounded of which 99 in critical state. It's not out of proportion if we have a couple of extra discussions on the topic right now.
Are you forgetting 9/11? You're not a patriot. Therefore you're a terrorist. Enjoy your free time to Guantanamo and we'll even throw in a free session of waterboarding. Brought to you by Carl's Jr. Because they pay me every time I say that.
You seem to have forgotten that the Internet spans the entire world. And that many /. readers are not from the USA.
while I agree that the news coverage on the subject is often a bit excessive in some regards I strongly disagree with your apparent position that the 127 people who died in France yesterday and the hundreds of others who die every month elsewhere in the world don't matter because they are not American.
and FYI I am an American, I just have a broader world view than you have demonstrated.
If you have point to point communication, traffic analysis can easily detect the participants of a network. If you have a central server with lots of uninvolved people, you either need to get the information from the server or rely on timing analysis. The timing is useless with asynchronous communication and can be obfuscated by introducing delays.
You're an inhuman little douchepot. You don't give a damn about terrorisim unless it involves the death of Americans? #frenchlivesdon'tmatter #britishlivesdon'tmatter #onlyamericanlivesmatter #i'mafuckingxenophobewhocaresfornooneoutsidemycozylittleworld #jewishlivesdon'tmatter #ragheadlivesdon'tmatter #onlydouchebagslikemematter
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's always about Americans. Slashdot: place where trolls get modded "Insightful".
Within hours after the attacks in Paris, Belgium raided multiple sites, and arrested a number of suspected accomplices.
They have the ability to monitor, what they lack is the balls to act on their intelligence. Better to wait until an attack goes down, then arrest the conspirators, than to use the intelligence proactively.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The attackers did not yell "God is great!". They yelled "Allah is great!"
The two are not equivalent. The latter reveals pertinent information about the terrorists' beliefs.
That's a bit ignorant. In many parts of the world terrorism is responsible for thousands of deaths every year. The best way to find your country in a similar situation is to ignore what is going on around you.
Also, slipping in your bathtub is preventable. Finding oneself in the middle of a terrorist attack is not. Deaths by terrorist tend to be painful and slow, which is a far worse fate than dying by slipping in your bathtub.
Why is such crap even given airplay?
As a European, thank you.
The problem is that a few hundred French were literally blown out of proportion... Anyhoo, France already sent their aircraft carrier east. Now there will be even more resolve to roll ISIS up.
can we get 1 article not about terrorism? Something like 30 Americans have died from terrorism in the past 5 years. You're far more likely to die by slipping in your bathtub. The news coverage on terrorism is INSANELY blown out of proportion. I'd be fine not seeing another one for the rest of this decade.
At least this article has a technical angle, albeit a strange one. Throughout history entities have sought to keep their communications secret. At times obscurity was the order of the day, at other times cryptography was the method of choice, and sometimes a combination of the two are used.
Now that it's pointed out I'm not all that surprised that this kind of Internet-based medium would be used; it's specialized enough to be easily overlooked and given the nature of what's said on gaming systems during gameplay that there might not be much desire on the part of the operator of the proprietary system to monitor or even log communications. Of course, a downside, playing devil's advocate, is that if the operator of the system is logging, even if only to be able to address abuse after the fact, they might be able to comb through communications and uncover the participants, their IP addresses and possibly a degree of geolocation, plus any discussed plots including those that might not have been carried-out.
One of the things that kind of bothers me is that in this era of so much spying, including the very likely state of warrantless surveillance, that we've had high profile examples where that questionable system has failed. We had a fake expert on terrorism that lied about his credentials for many years. We've had cases of American domestic terrorism and mass-shootings that were publicized in advance by the shooters that were not uncovered or stopped. We've had cases of international terrorism in Western nations that were not uncovered. Clearly this spying is not only questionable in its legitimacy, but it's not even effective. Proponents can't claim that all of this spying on us, all of this expense and the chilling effects of known surveillance aren't even making us safer, so it's a net-negative.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We must relinquish our freedoms to defend freedom in the name of freedom!
Game console chat, even if it was monitored by various authorities, has the extra obscuration for terrorist planning something of the noise of various first person shooters. There is already plenty of legitimate in game talk about bombs, firearms, killing people, paramilitary tactics etc. that it would be much more difficult to spot a terrorist group talking about a real plan to carry out a real act with keyword searching.
Now now. You cry for 3d printer articles.
You prefer 3D printing and uber?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You should be up-voted for being highly insightful. Sorry, I have no mod points to help.
There are build by an evil Corporation anyway.
They've already revved up the "this is because snowden told them how to avoid being watched by us" rhetoric.
and I'm sure France's next version of the patriot act is days away from being enacted. they just happened to have the legislation ready to go.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Game communications have been monitored in the past and likely still are. Someone knew where to look; it's just not clear that they found the signal in the noise.
As someone loving democracy and post-enlightenment society, the incompetence of those polit-talheads is absolutely -- nearly physically -- painful.
I think we should enhance democratic ruling: every democrat should, for once in their lives have the right to smack one of those talking heads of their choice in the face (provided said talking head has had one of those *duh* fuckups). Publically.
And you think they're harmlessly playing Call of Duty?
No, no. They're training on how to be more effective terrorists.
Better ban video games just to be safe.
What? Where? I need to see that. Care to share a link?
Gaming chats have been used for long time for "non-gaming" activities such as this.
you think they are not monitoring major chat channels in games?
Ofcourse they are, they have been watching the internet since day 1, and you only got your panties in a twist only recently when they admitted it.
Did anyone ever use radios instead of teamspeak or other voice chat software during a CoD (or whatever) session? Quite scary for anyone listening in...
This makes complete sense. It's kind of a steganography, putting their data in where it can't be separated out easily or flagged because it blends in with the rest of it.
>Anyhoo, France already sent their aircraft carrier east. Now there will be even more resolve to roll ISIS up.
You mean more Western bombs falling in the Middle East? How else can we a actively fund their recruiting efforts?
.
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, because outlawing encryption and total surveillance of communication already did such a wonderful job we have to up the ante now.
How, I'd ask?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have we found a way to tack yet another shooting on games. I'm impressed, I thought you couldn't steer this one towards the bad, evil games of murder, but leave it to our politicians to find a way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just yesterday I noticed that when I entered something in the comment field of an address in my gmail account, the entry was almost instantly mirrored in the comment field for that address on my phone.
It occurred to me that this phenomenon could be exploited for rapid and private communications, then the address and it's associated comments could be deleted at the end of the conversation. This requires both parties to the conversation to share access to a common gmail account.
Not everyone is american, asshole.
There have been around 500 deaths in the last week's terrorist strikes.
I am working on these three article submissions as we speak:
1) Uber starts offering 3D printing services of questionable legality to terrorrists in [insert country], says Elon Musk.
2) Terrorrists use Uber cabs to pick up 3D printed stuff from distributed crowd-sourced production facilities after sharing their 3D designs via the cloud, horrifying IT security experts.
3) Government to introduce law requiring 50% quota for white females in leadership positions of uber-terrorrists' 3D printing start-ups. Will this make the children safer?
From the 80s though. Got into management and politics after awhile.
PlayStation 4 is always a good place for the investigators to concentrate their energies on.
Yup, Snowden didn't help anything out by telling them how to avoid being caught. He is partly to blame for this, and now the government will have to spend more money monitoring Xbox and Playstation game chatter.
The civil libertarians aren't going to win this by helping the terrorists become better at avoidance, even if the tactics used were being anaylzed in mass and shared among our allies.
Possible. On the other hand, I personally know folks in their 80s who smoked their whole life. This doesn't mean that measures cut down on smoking don't work. It also doesn't mean that smoking does not, on average, lead to an earlier death. My point is that you don't have the data to conclude that "it's not even effective" nor can you state the surveillance "aren't eve making us safer." I'm not saying that these statements are false, just that without access to "successes" you can't speak to the proportion of failures.
"For the love of god, can we get 1 article not about terrorism?"
The terrorism _was_ for the love of god.
4) Could there be bitcoin on other planets, and is it being used to fund a replacement for systemd? If so what are the implications for you, the hard-working CIO?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not good enough for terrorists; not good enough for you.
And as a Canadian I apologize for the point of view of the parent Anonymous Coward, which is too USA-centric.
I don't think "NOT PLAYING" is a valid option here. This is not two nuclear superpowers fighting each other, this is nuclear-capable countries fighting individual terrorists cells all over the place, hidden in the population.
IMHO the mass surveillance is just to line someone's pockets. It doesn't work, nobody is listening before or after the facts. They might find how they communicated but unless Facebook or Google kept track of it, the government sure as hell didn't or can't find it.
So it is basically a method of siphoning tax money towards companies and developers and since nobody cares or is listening it doesn't matter to our 'rights' whether or not they do it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
In some of these multiplayer games you could also just run around and use the player movement and/or weapons fire as a covert channel to send a low bit-rate of data that gets recorded and decoded on the other end. Imagine someone using the in-game pistol and shotgun for the dots and dashes of Morse code, or changing direction or speed of travel as a semaphore. That hyperactive player that seems to randomly bounce around the other team members might be the virtual radio man performing an interpretive dance. You could also encode symbols as positions in the game grid. Run to spot A, take cover. Run to spot B, take cover. Other players can observe this from a distance without necessarily showing that they are really communicating, like the cold-war stories of putting a mark or object in a public place to signal a predetermined message.
Indeed. The French have perfected a method for reducing - or even totally avoiding - this risk.
According to the Australians, the Brits aren't far behind.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
tl;dr
People die, therefore doctors are useless. Crimes happen, therefore police are useless. People post illogical fallacious crap on the internet, therefore whoever taught you logic is useless.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This Belgian minister is unfortunately not a stupid idiot. He just has a different goal than we do: this isn't about catching terrorists but about trying to drum up support for increased government surveillance.
Then luckily it's all in Belgium. A country where government and regulation seem optional, to the point that the country essentially did without a government for almost 2 years at one point in time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
We need to take any and all actions reasonable to ensure that those in power remain rightfully fearful of the governed masses.
Or you know, you could begin by not giving that much power to the government.
There's this small thing called "direct democracy" (= where it is the actual people who have the final say on everything. Not some representatives, but the general population). You should try it sometimes.
Oh, and please no dummy complaints that "it only works in very small territories". Come on. It's 2015. We're in the Internet Age.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Something like 30 Americans have died from terrorism in the past 5 years. You're far more likely to die by slipping in your bathtub. The news coverage on terrorism is INSANELY blown out of proportion. I'd be fine not seeing another one for the rest of this decade."
So how do you breathe under all that sand?
Any open society can be penetrated by terrorists. Making western countries work like the terrorists' own hellholes is not a solution. You have to blast the terrorists at home and take away their funding sources for international operations. In this case that would mean carpeting ISIS territory with fuel-air bombs and sacking Saudi Arabia. It's the only way to be sure.
More like, homeopathic doctors are useless, so we should stop paying homeopathic doctors and use a different approach so that less people die. Like, police that do not leave the major artery roads are useless at helping reduce crime in neighborhoods, better re-evaluate how the police operate to help reduce crime.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Now, I'm not saying that we should, but the last time we actually did play that game, it totally worked.
And whats the odds of being forced into an style of life you don't wish for yourself in the next 10 years or so?
First, he didn't say it was useless, but to address your logic argument: if doctors just collected medical knowledge, but never helped helped anyone, then I'd consider them useless. If police logged all crime in a big data center but did nothing to stop it, then I'd consider them useless. Same for mass surveillance. If you collect terabytes of crap in a big data warehouse, but can only find information that would stop attacks in retrospect, that's useless.
I don't know how useful mass surveillance is, but from what limited information about it I'm allowed to see, we are a lot better at collecting it and storing it than we are on acting on it. Instead of focusing on how many terabytes of data we can vacuum up on our citizens, we should instead focus on the effectiveness of how that data can be used to save lives.
Yep, it did... Japan surrendered.
However, we aren't fighting against a government, or even a fixed piece of land, this time. This war is with hidden combatants, not physically localized in any one area. As much as ISIS (or ISIL, or whatever the hell they are calling themselves) wants to believe, suggest, or force upon the world that they do indeed have a piece of land somewhere under full Islamic State laws (the closes would be Iran, maybe?) they really don't. And it's hard to bomb something to kingdom come that does not exist.
Keeping them out of other countries, and allowing them to only blow themselves and their own relatives up, is what the world really does need to do. They'll peter out at some point in the future. Just keep them the hell out of our countries (ie: Europe, Asia, and the west). Let their own deal with them locally in the Middle East. Those countries are either already going down that path, or are so aligned with the western way of life that they won't put up with the threat against their new, modern lifestyle for long. For that to work, though, we have to keep them contained there, and not allow them to infiltrate our societies.
And that's the really, really hard part... How do you pick out the bad guys from the benign groups? No one has yet figured that out...
I know you're trying to be all smug and self-righteous about how "war is bad, n stuff, hmmkay?"
But consider the results of the only time nuclear weapons were fired in anger. Yes, a lot of Japanese people died... but it also put a relatively quick stop to the war, and possibly cost fewer lives than the projected invasion of Japan.
Sometimes when you preach, people learn different lessons than you intended, friend.
Sounds like some police just want an excuse to buy some Playstation 4's just prior to Star Wars battlefront coming out...
"Sorry sarge, we're too busy today 'monitoring' Playstation 4 to do any other work, I'm afraid we'll probably be at it pretty constantly for the immediate future..."
You seem to have forgotten that the Internet spans the entire world. And that many /. readers are not from the USA.
while I agree that the news coverage on the subject is often a bit excessive in some regards I strongly disagree with your apparent position that the 127 people who died in France yesterday and the hundreds of others who die every month elsewhere in the world don't matter because they are not American.
and FYI I am an American, I just have a broader world view than you have demonstrated.
I concur with your views and position on war deaths.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
if you see something, pwn something
It is quite irritating to see that every time they manage to put the screws to terrorists, or white-collar criminals or whomever, the cops, FBI, Homeland Security et al show, just how, smart they are in using such clever means to cat h their prey. Good going, guys. Now these cretins know that they shouldn't use PlayStation to communicate any more and will find some other pipeline with which to converse. Maybe you might have just kept mum about what you discovered? Yes, we would not have known just how friggin' clever and resourceful you are, but then maybe we just might have found it a lot easier to happen upon the next terrorist cabal.
Bullshit. Your saudi friends and prince charles fund and protect isis. Americans are just dumb as hell and believe the msm propaganda.
Sunni money from islamabad to ankara funds isis while claiming to do the opposite.
Tje bushes, the clintons and the battenbergs protect the scam.
Happy roasting, chickens.
Their massive, indiscriminate take serves to control the sheep, while the real terrorists know it and work around it.
Mass control, not anti terror is the objective.
Direct democracy doesnâ(TM)t work at any scale.
The pure direct democracy Switzerland begs to differ.
The United States founding fathers were correct in that the biggest threat to any populace is its own government.
...if this government has power.
If the government's only role is to organise things, and the final say for any decision is taken with democratic vote (ie.: nearly every single law gets voted by the general population before acceptance), the government can't pass any stupid or oppressive law.
(Unless the majority of the population is dumb enough to approve it. That can happen occasionnally. But in a country where the general population is happy - thanks to good welfare and good economy - and educated, it tends to be rare)
When any segment of society looses fundamental rights, no ones rights are safe.
So put all the segments of society in charge, and be done with it.
Or do you prefer to still concentrate all the decision power in a few elect ?
And then have the general population running constantly armed with deadly force in order to be ready to kill any rogue elect (and risking killing each other in the process. a lot)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]