These companies have been running in Ireland for years, if it was illegal don't you think this would have been noticed by now? Here, read this and you may gain some clarity on the matter.
Except that if you RTFA it doesn't sound like tax evasion at all. It sounds like the Italians are broke and are harassing Apple because they don't like the fact that Apple bases itself in Ireland.
(Reuters) - U.S. tech giant Apple is under investigation in Italy for allegedly hiding 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion) from the local tax authority, two judicial sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters..... The Italian subsidiary of Apple booked some of its profit through Irish-based subsidiary Apple Sales International (ASI), thus lowering its taxable income in Italy, the source said
"There is a global process under way and the Italian tax authority is one of the most active," said an Italian tax source. "In general, the focus is shifting towards multi-nationals that are able to lower their tax base through their international operations."
Apple is many things, but sloppy and ridden with fraud is not one of them. The Italian government, on the other hand....
Or more likely, the warrant is checked..... against a list of "superwarrants" that were fought in the FISA court and lost. Any API request that cites that warrant has to be processed so automating it, though it looks bad, doesn't really change anything.
Yes, indeed. This meme that SSL is broken or useless is very damaging and needs to end.
The fact is that despite all the handwaving and noise, nobody has yet presented proof that a CA has been subverted by intelligence agencies, let alone knowingly. It's certainly possible that this has happened and one may think it is even likely, but in the absence of any proof it's hard to credibly argue the entire system is hosed.
The difficulty of course is finding such a proof. If a CA was found to have been routinely issuing certificates to intelligence agencies, it's very very likely that browser makers would revoke that CA and destroy the business. Their written policies are quite clear on this point and do not make governments special, that's why GoDaddy revoked LavaBit's SSL cert after learning the private key had been disclosed to the FBI. So far we don't have any evidence that the NSA or GCHQ were willing to risk destruction of a civilian business in order to reach one of their targets - though I guess there are still plenty of Snowden disclosures to come.
But even if there have been such certs issued, SSL is not useless. Firstly, it raises the complexity a lot. And secondly, there are initiatives underway to prevent subversion even by multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies. For example the certificate transparency initiative is intending to upgrade the certificate format to contain a proof of inclusion in a public log. Browsers will start requiring the presence of these proofs in future, and thus it will no longer be possible to issue secret SSL certs that nobody can see except the victim. This is a large, complex upgrade of a massive infrastructure so it will take years, but eventually this system will raise the bar for SSL attackers to the point where they will either have to give up, or actually pass new laws that formally subvert SSL to the will of governments (at which point of course it does not matter if they are detected and there is no need to compromise CA's).
Which will happen is an open question at this point. However, Slashdot should get its ass into gear and switch on SSL and HSTS by default. Saying it's an option for logged in users just isn't good enough, especially when that option is so well buried I can't actually find it! SSL all the time should be the default, these days, there's just no reason not to anymore.
I don't remember Israel, Pakistan, or India threatening their neighbors or openly supporting terrorist groups. There is a little more reason to be concerned with Iran then there was with other countries when they got the nukes.
Wat?
I can't believe I just read that. If you don't remember these things, all it means is you need to revise your 20th century history again.
Let's review. Israel, in its extremely short life so far, has managed to obtain a global reputation for being insanely aggressive and warlike. The very creation of it led immediately to war with its new neighbours. Israel not only has nukes, but also created the Mossad, which openly assassinates people it doesn't like. Its leaders routinely threaten to attack or invade Iran if Israel's "friends" even think about being the slightest bit reasonable or diplomatic. Fear of what the completely crazy Israeli leadership might do if diplomacy fails is one of the reasons the rest of the world has implemented sanctions - it's seen as marginally preferable to Israel starting all out war in the middle east, which we know they wouldn't hesitate to do.
Pakistan and India have been at each others throats since the moment India became independent from the British Empire. The Partition was the rest of one of the most bloody civil wars in recent history. Since then both India and Pakistan have managed to obtain nukes, and their constant fighting over Kashmir is rated one of the most likely triggers for nuclear war. Each side routinely accuses the other of sponsoring terrorist attacks.
Of all the countries in the world you could have picked to try and make Iran look bad, you could not have chosen worse. Iran, despite the incredible amounts of shit they have had dumped on them in recent times, is not at all likely to invade a neighbour or randomly start a war in the middle east. I know this runs counter to US and Israeli propaganda, but there's no evidence at all that this is even slightly likely to happen - the Iranian leader has even said that war is un-Islamic, and he's really big on not doing things that are un-Islamic. Contrast this to the Israeli leaders who talk about war all the time.
BTW the story is crap. It's been obvious for ages that the sanctions have been put in place because America is Israeli's bitch and Europe is America's bitch. They aren't going to be removed, ever, because the people who control the sanctions regime are motivated by power, and only power. See how the moment it looked like there might be progress in Geneva the American's were running to Israel to re-assure them that the sanctions weren't going to be lifted no matter what happens (and that's despite them being struck down as illegal in European courts).
Such cards have existed for many years. The NZ bus network is apparently using "MiFare Classic" which is very, very old now and is known to be weak. Designing better systems is no use if people don't upgrade to them.
Actually it was the CIA. He witnessed a Swiss banker be turned into a CIA asset through someone getting him drunk and making him drive. So not only was this an immoral entrapment scheme, but it also sounds quite dangerous (what if he had crashed?). Of course, he should have not driven when drunk, but who knows how persuasive the CIA can get. For all we know they spiked his drink.
No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want. Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path.
In other words, you don't understand SHA256.
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.
Actual most likely job, from the BBC: "Pavel Durov, who founded VKontakte in 2006, invited Mr Snowden through a post on his own webpage to join the company's St Petersburg headquarters to work on data protection."
The fact that services don't have automated play de-spamming system should not come as a big surprise, given the pathetic earnings available. That's not research worth doing. But the outcome is - just $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder artists all think Spotify is a sick joke. They won't have to automate anti-abuse systems until the amount they're dishing out to artists goes way, way beyond that paltry amount. It's not even worth gaming their charts right now.
Have you got a citation for that? It would be very interesting (but not surprising) if true. I mean, Rep Peter King is/was a full-blown supporter of the IRA and actually sits in fucking Congress, where he actually was chairman of a homeland security committee. So there is precedent. But I couldn't find anything with the obvious keyword searches.
The amount of drugs used in lethal injections is trivial, not worth going through any efforts to make it possible, especially as - guess what - the executives and scientists at those companies are probably against having their drugs be used in executions as well! They got into pharma to save lives, not end them.
For instance, even the US firm Hospira apparently refuses to sell propofol to prisons and there's no ban against it in the US.
If you read some background articles, it appears that you're wrong - the only manufacturers of propofol at the moment are in the EU. It's very hard to make, and historically it was made by a company in the USA, a couple of companies in the EU and one in Israel. The Israeli company made it in a factory in the USA until their production runs started killing people due to bacterial infection. Both the US and Israeli company stopped. Now they're bringing it back, slowly, except not really - the Israeli firm outsourced to a company in Italy. Hospira (the US firm) meanwhile also has a policy of forbidding its drugs from being used in lethal injections.
The market for lethal injection is tiny, and the complexity of making the drug is extremely high. So there's no huge opportunity.
I found an informative article. Summary: It says that essentially the US firm Hospira is unable to proceed due to the FDA not authorizing changes in the manufacturing process. Teva, an Israeli company, exited the business after what sounds like a combination of manufacturing issues and a large number of spurious lawsuits over a hepatitis C outbreak. The drug itself is extremely hard to manufacture, and profits are nearly non-existent so there's little incentive for competitors to enter the market.
Possibly the issue would be resolved if the FDA were to change the regulations, but again, no information on what exactly the problem is were reported.
Is that meant to be a prediction, or a statement of fact? If you read the article it becomes clear that they had search warrants as part of a targeted investigation into organised crime, and apparently were surprised to discover the 3D printer at one of the searched areas. Given that they arrested someone because they think he was making gunpowder, and because you can't make gunpowder with a 3D printer, it seems that they believed (correctly) that someone was trying to manufacture ammo and got a judge to issue a warrant on that basis. When they discovered the printer, they made the obvious logical conclusion - someone who is illegally making guns, and has a 3D printer, might be experimenting with 3D printing plastic guns. What else would he use it for?
It may turn out in the course of events that the printer was used for something else, or making tools used to help make ammo rather than making gun parts, or something else. But ownership of the 3D printer is incidental. There isn't even any way they would know he had such a device, as far as I can tell.
people were turning in unsharpened movie prop fantasy knives, kitchen utensils, and yard tools afraid they were going to get prosecuted for owning lethal weaponry
Yeah, those, and also real Klingon Bat'leths (I mean, with actual sharpened edges that could take someones head off). Along with machetes and lots of other things that typically aren't needed in suburban Britain.
I would expect panics about people 3D printing guns to be relatively commonplace in the UK and throughout Europe in future. Being an island, the UK has had a particularly effective form of gun control that has seen criminal gangs reduced to trying to make their own ammo and weapons, often shittily and resulting in much less lethal weapons than those professionally made. Random shootings are extremely rare. However plenty of Brits read the newspapers and see how the USA experiences lethal shootings seemingly every day at the moment, which is completely insane. Now I read that children as young as 12 are shooting their teachers.
Everyone in the UK knows that it tends to experience a lot of US "cultural imports", and basically nobody I know there would want to see US-style gun crime. So gun controls are likely to remain popular and if it takes licensing of 3D printing equipment to enforce that, it won't surprise me at all to see such a thing be implemented.
It's non-binding because the EU Parliament is not a real Parliament. It's very weak and has limited influence, the real power at the EU level is in the European Commission which is sort of like an executive branch that is directed by national governments. The EU Commission may still decide to ignore the Parliament on this one, but I guess that wouldn't do a great deal for their legitimacy, which is at any rate already heavily weakened after years of sustained attacks on their decision making...
Well SWIFT is based in Belgium. Now their failover datacenter is not in America anymore the US theoretically doesn't have much political leverage left, and will have to rely on hacking. How good their IT security is anyones guess, but they've been around a while and more importantly will be on the alert. A lot of this hacking was invisible for so long because nobody was looking for it. You'll notice that once Snowden started leaking the GCHQ operation against Belgacom was busted, Merkel's phone being tapped got busted by German intelligence, etc. Belgian counter-intelligence will probably be a part of defending SWIFT. They know 5 Eyes are coming for them, and when you know an attack is coming it's much easier to fight it off.
And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).
SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.
The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.
Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!
Slashdot Mirror
These companies have been running in Ireland for years, if it was illegal don't you think this would have been noticed by now? Here, read this and you may gain some clarity on the matter.
Except that if you RTFA it doesn't sound like tax evasion at all. It sounds like the Italians are broke and are harassing Apple because they don't like the fact that Apple bases itself in Ireland.
Apple is many things, but sloppy and ridden with fraud is not one of them. The Italian government, on the other hand ....
Or more likely, the warrant is checked ..... against a list of "superwarrants" that were fought in the FISA court and lost. Any API request that cites that warrant has to be processed so automating it, though it looks bad, doesn't really change anything.
Not illegal banks!
Yes, indeed. This meme that SSL is broken or useless is very damaging and needs to end.
The fact is that despite all the handwaving and noise, nobody has yet presented proof that a CA has been subverted by intelligence agencies, let alone knowingly. It's certainly possible that this has happened and one may think it is even likely, but in the absence of any proof it's hard to credibly argue the entire system is hosed.
The difficulty of course is finding such a proof. If a CA was found to have been routinely issuing certificates to intelligence agencies, it's very very likely that browser makers would revoke that CA and destroy the business. Their written policies are quite clear on this point and do not make governments special, that's why GoDaddy revoked LavaBit's SSL cert after learning the private key had been disclosed to the FBI. So far we don't have any evidence that the NSA or GCHQ were willing to risk destruction of a civilian business in order to reach one of their targets - though I guess there are still plenty of Snowden disclosures to come.
But even if there have been such certs issued, SSL is not useless. Firstly, it raises the complexity a lot. And secondly, there are initiatives underway to prevent subversion even by multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies. For example the certificate transparency initiative is intending to upgrade the certificate format to contain a proof of inclusion in a public log. Browsers will start requiring the presence of these proofs in future, and thus it will no longer be possible to issue secret SSL certs that nobody can see except the victim. This is a large, complex upgrade of a massive infrastructure so it will take years, but eventually this system will raise the bar for SSL attackers to the point where they will either have to give up, or actually pass new laws that formally subvert SSL to the will of governments (at which point of course it does not matter if they are detected and there is no need to compromise CA's).
Which will happen is an open question at this point. However, Slashdot should get its ass into gear and switch on SSL and HSTS by default. Saying it's an option for logged in users just isn't good enough, especially when that option is so well buried I can't actually find it! SSL all the time should be the default, these days, there's just no reason not to anymore.
Wat?
I can't believe I just read that. If you don't remember these things, all it means is you need to revise your 20th century history again.
Let's review. Israel, in its extremely short life so far, has managed to obtain a global reputation for being insanely aggressive and warlike. The very creation of it led immediately to war with its new neighbours. Israel not only has nukes, but also created the Mossad, which openly assassinates people it doesn't like. Its leaders routinely threaten to attack or invade Iran if Israel's "friends" even think about being the slightest bit reasonable or diplomatic. Fear of what the completely crazy Israeli leadership might do if diplomacy fails is one of the reasons the rest of the world has implemented sanctions - it's seen as marginally preferable to Israel starting all out war in the middle east, which we know they wouldn't hesitate to do.
Pakistan and India have been at each others throats since the moment India became independent from the British Empire. The Partition was the rest of one of the most bloody civil wars in recent history. Since then both India and Pakistan have managed to obtain nukes, and their constant fighting over Kashmir is rated one of the most likely triggers for nuclear war. Each side routinely accuses the other of sponsoring terrorist attacks.
Of all the countries in the world you could have picked to try and make Iran look bad, you could not have chosen worse. Iran, despite the incredible amounts of shit they have had dumped on them in recent times, is not at all likely to invade a neighbour or randomly start a war in the middle east. I know this runs counter to US and Israeli propaganda, but there's no evidence at all that this is even slightly likely to happen - the Iranian leader has even said that war is un-Islamic, and he's really big on not doing things that are un-Islamic. Contrast this to the Israeli leaders who talk about war all the time.
BTW the story is crap. It's been obvious for ages that the sanctions have been put in place because America is Israeli's bitch and Europe is America's bitch. They aren't going to be removed, ever, because the people who control the sanctions regime are motivated by power, and only power. See how the moment it looked like there might be progress in Geneva the American's were running to Israel to re-assure them that the sanctions weren't going to be lifted no matter what happens (and that's despite them being struck down as illegal in European courts).
Such cards have existed for many years. The NZ bus network is apparently using "MiFare Classic" which is very, very old now and is known to be weak. Designing better systems is no use if people don't upgrade to them.
And the dumb thing is, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't need a bank. So why aren't these people using a local wallet like MultiBit?
Actually it was the CIA. He witnessed a Swiss banker be turned into a CIA asset through someone getting him drunk and making him drive. So not only was this an immoral entrapment scheme, but it also sounds quite dangerous (what if he had crashed?). Of course, he should have not driven when drunk, but who knows how persuasive the CIA can get. For all we know they spiked his drink.
In other words, you don't understand SHA256.
I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.
Actual most likely job, from the BBC: "Pavel Durov, who founded VKontakte in 2006, invited Mr Snowden through a post on his own webpage to join the company's St Petersburg headquarters to work on data protection."
VK would count as a major website, for sure.
The fact that services don't have automated play de-spamming system should not come as a big surprise, given the pathetic earnings available. That's not research worth doing. But the outcome is - just $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder artists all think Spotify is a sick joke. They won't have to automate anti-abuse systems until the amount they're dishing out to artists goes way, way beyond that paltry amount. It's not even worth gaming their charts right now.
Have you got a citation for that? It would be very interesting (but not surprising) if true. I mean, Rep Peter King is/was a full-blown supporter of the IRA and actually sits in fucking Congress, where he actually was chairman of a homeland security committee. So there is precedent. But I couldn't find anything with the obvious keyword searches.
The amount of drugs used in lethal injections is trivial, not worth going through any efforts to make it possible, especially as - guess what - the executives and scientists at those companies are probably against having their drugs be used in executions as well! They got into pharma to save lives, not end them.
For instance, even the US firm Hospira apparently refuses to sell propofol to prisons and there's no ban against it in the US.
If you read some background articles, it appears that you're wrong - the only manufacturers of propofol at the moment are in the EU. It's very hard to make, and historically it was made by a company in the USA, a couple of companies in the EU and one in Israel. The Israeli company made it in a factory in the USA until their production runs started killing people due to bacterial infection. Both the US and Israeli company stopped. Now they're bringing it back, slowly, except not really - the Israeli firm outsourced to a company in Italy. Hospira (the US firm) meanwhile also has a policy of forbidding its drugs from being used in lethal injections.
The market for lethal injection is tiny, and the complexity of making the drug is extremely high. So there's no huge opportunity.
They're already in prison anyway. Unless your country routinely experiences prison breaks, it shouldn't make any difference.
I found an informative article. Summary: It says that essentially the US firm Hospira is unable to proceed due to the FDA not authorizing changes in the manufacturing process. Teva, an Israeli company, exited the business after what sounds like a combination of manufacturing issues and a large number of spurious lawsuits over a hepatitis C outbreak. The drug itself is extremely hard to manufacture, and profits are nearly non-existent so there's little incentive for competitors to enter the market.
Possibly the issue would be resolved if the FDA were to change the regulations, but again, no information on what exactly the problem is were reported.
RTFA - it says "Federal regulations make propofol difficult to manufacture in the United States". It does not elaborate on what those regulations are.
Is that meant to be a prediction, or a statement of fact? If you read the article it becomes clear that they had search warrants as part of a targeted investigation into organised crime, and apparently were surprised to discover the 3D printer at one of the searched areas. Given that they arrested someone because they think he was making gunpowder, and because you can't make gunpowder with a 3D printer, it seems that they believed (correctly) that someone was trying to manufacture ammo and got a judge to issue a warrant on that basis. When they discovered the printer, they made the obvious logical conclusion - someone who is illegally making guns, and has a 3D printer, might be experimenting with 3D printing plastic guns. What else would he use it for?
It may turn out in the course of events that the printer was used for something else, or making tools used to help make ammo rather than making gun parts, or something else. But ownership of the 3D printer is incidental. There isn't even any way they would know he had such a device, as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the corrections.
Yeah, those, and also real Klingon Bat'leths (I mean, with actual sharpened edges that could take someones head off). Along with machetes and lots of other things that typically aren't needed in suburban Britain.
I would expect panics about people 3D printing guns to be relatively commonplace in the UK and throughout Europe in future. Being an island, the UK has had a particularly effective form of gun control that has seen criminal gangs reduced to trying to make their own ammo and weapons, often shittily and resulting in much less lethal weapons than those professionally made. Random shootings are extremely rare. However plenty of Brits read the newspapers and see how the USA experiences lethal shootings seemingly every day at the moment, which is completely insane. Now I read that children as young as 12 are shooting their teachers.
Everyone in the UK knows that it tends to experience a lot of US "cultural imports", and basically nobody I know there would want to see US-style gun crime. So gun controls are likely to remain popular and if it takes licensing of 3D printing equipment to enforce that, it won't surprise me at all to see such a thing be implemented.
He did as much as was necessary to establish trust and no more.
I just want to say to Xavier - thanks. Great work.
It's non-binding because the EU Parliament is not a real Parliament. It's very weak and has limited influence, the real power at the EU level is in the European Commission which is sort of like an executive branch that is directed by national governments. The EU Commission may still decide to ignore the Parliament on this one, but I guess that wouldn't do a great deal for their legitimacy, which is at any rate already heavily weakened after years of sustained attacks on their decision making ...
Well SWIFT is based in Belgium. Now their failover datacenter is not in America anymore the US theoretically doesn't have much political leverage left, and will have to rely on hacking. How good their IT security is anyones guess, but they've been around a while and more importantly will be on the alert. A lot of this hacking was invisible for so long because nobody was looking for it. You'll notice that once Snowden started leaking the GCHQ operation against Belgacom was busted, Merkel's phone being tapped got busted by German intelligence, etc. Belgian counter-intelligence will probably be a part of defending SWIFT. They know 5 Eyes are coming for them, and when you know an attack is coming it's much easier to fight it off.
And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).
SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.
The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.
Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!