I find it difficult to believe that Samsung would intentionally install a keylogger on their consumer devices. My bet is that it was either installed via security breech by one or more co-opted employees (industrial or government espionage is a possibility) or else that it was configured as an engineering sample that mistakenly got shipped for sale.
So far I have seen nothing about how the keylogger was configured. Was it actually "phoning home" (and if so, where is that "home") or was it just installed but inactive?
You are correct. Their target is those folks who can buy the cars, jewelry, furs, condos and coops that are advertised in their weekly magazine supplement (and less lavishly, in the daily paper). Loser!
If Canonical is being upfront about it, and not trying to hide it, then I am not sure it is "wrong"..
"Upfront" how? Maybe something like:
Purchases made at Amazon.com through Banshee used to yield 10% to the GNOME project as an "Amazon Affiliate" but we at Canonical have decided to substitute our own "Amazon Affiliate" code in place of that of Banshee, and skim 75% off of this 10% (GNOME will still get 25% of the 10%, so don't worry about this).
So you actually think the Persians want to KILL potatoes? If that's the case, I can't change your belief. Go ask an actual Iranian then.
No, I think that your interpretation that the phrase used means "Down with.." is clearly at odds with what the author of the Guardian UK article thought and stated that it meant, i.e., "Death to.." .
I think the phrase is lost in translation. In Persian, it means "Down with Israel," rather than the idea of killing everyone there that everyone is led to think. It doesn't mean killing or wiping everyone out.
That does not seem to be the take on it by the author of the Guardian UK article that is referenced in your huffingtonpost link:
For 30 years it has been the signature slogan of Iran's revolutionary lexicon, swearing an oath of death upon America, Britain, Israel, Saddam Hussein and sundry other presumed enemies.
Now the once chilling "death to" chant, an expression of zealous radicalism still heard at Friday prayers and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rallies, has been unleashed on a new and unlikely object of wrath: the potato.
"Death to potatoes" ("marg bar sibzamini" in Farsi) has been adopted as a mantra by anti-Ahmadinejad campaigners in Iran's forthcoming presidential election. Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who has positioned himself to woo the reformist vote, chanted the slogan this week at a rally in Yasouj in central Iran.
If someone wants to do business with memory products, here's another idea: Produce USB drives with a physical write-enable switch so the drives can be malware immune when only read access is needed.
This is actually a TORX bit, and yes has been around since the 70s and in Europe is used in all sorts of electronics as a deterrent to casual fiddling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torx
Actually, if you scrolled down to the "Pentalobular" picture on the page you referenced and clicked on it, you would get to:
A pentalobular screw is a five-pointed security screw being implemented by Apple in its products.[1] It resembles Torx but is not a Torx-Plus security screw and has no commercially available screwdriver equivalent[2].
Pentalobular screws first appeared in mid-2009, holding the battery in the MacBook Pro; smaller versions are now used on the iPhone 4 and the MacBook Air.
I saw no reference to a "CIA contact" or "spy" in that link you provided. All I saw is that there was discussion about whether the Danish daily that originally published the Earth-shaking "Mohammed cartoons" should do it again on the 1-year anniversary of the event, and they apparently decided that there was too much risk that doing so would provoke additional retaliatory violence. So they didn't republish the cartoons. Ta da!
1. Can we leak China's secrets? No, leaker will be shot.
2. Can we leak Iran's secrets No, leaker will be stoned.
3. Can we leak US's secrets? Yes, everybody cheers.
4. Profit!
I live in NYC and couldn't care less about the New Year's ball or the whole wasted, drunken night of partying. It's a boon to the liquor industry though.
Because international law calls for refugees to have right to return to their homes after a war.
Maintaining a "Right of Return" does not require that the current host nations refuse to allow their Palestinian guests the rights of citizenship. Hell, for the most part they don't even allow them to work and earn a living. The Palestinian refugees are kept subjugated by their Arab hosts solely to fan the flames of anti-Israel sentiment among them and among the Arab populations.
The Israeli penal code does make blasphemy illegal (output from Google Translate):
These look like laws that were created to guarantee freedom of religious practice (note: no specific religion is mentioned - applicable to all religions in the country) rather than to outlaw blasphemy. More like the "anti-hate" statutes in the US, I'd say.
Besides a 60 year occupation...2 million people in Gaza have been living in virtual open air prison for the past 4 years. Israel controls every product that enters gaza to the extent that they recieve just enough food not to starve, but too much so they reproduce.
Numbers of Palestinian refugees according to UNRWA:
How come some of these are Arab (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria)? How come they haven't permitted the Palestinian refugees within their borders to become integrated into their Arab national life? Is it possible that the "Palestinian Problem" is being maintained solely to further the Arab states' enmity with Israel?
How would you like it if your job, country and culture was stereotyped into the guilt-ridden nonsense that The Simpsons aired? There's really something wrong when people feel proud about how much guilt they have or how much they can hate their own society/culture. This same idiocy even made it into TFS:
...still, South Korean animators make one-third the salaries of their American counterparts...
Where exactly is the requirement that everyone in the world makes the same as their "American counterparts"? Is it because everywhere in the world is the same as America, with the same taxes, costs and currency value? Utter rubbish.
which provides global "cost of living" rankings, Seoul is ranked #24, with New York at #21, San Francisco at #63, Boston at #66, Washington DC at #77, all the way down to Indianapolis at #279. So, yes, I guess in this case it's a fair comparison.
I once met a former colleague of theirs at a trade show. He told me that they had actually put the backdoor into the C compiler. They had been receiving calls at all hours from executives who demanded that systems be fixed ASAP but did not know the root login information. The backdoor set up a predefined root account whenever compiling a program named "login". It enabled them to get in and do the fixes without needing to contact the system administrators.
Wouldn't that have required also that the compiler be setuid root to enable it to modify the root entry for the password file?
If the NSA broke into Asus' president's house and pointed a gun at his wife, saying "you're adding this circuit to your motherboards," and then that manufacturer sold their board to newegg who sold it to you, would you notice?
As a matter of fact, yes, because the Asus president's 10 year old daughter twittered "American spies just broke in and threatened to shoot Mommy unless Daddy adds some extra crap to his motherboards. LOL LOL LOL"
I suppose that we can expect a subsequent news report that the thief, upon reading the same article in västerbottens-kuriren, has now sent the professor a 1.44 MB floppy diskette with all the materials he produced during the summer and fall.
BTW, although every post I read, and TFA, suggested that it was the thief who sent the USB stick, perhaps it was someone who bought the laptop from the thief and felt bad that it was likely stolen. That would also be consistent with the recurring sentiment that the thief was looking to steal something that would bring him a fast sale - it doesn't really make sense that he would then browse the hard drive, pick out some likely files, copy them to a (stolen?) USB stick, and then mail it back to the victim. And if so, I guess that would make the buyer of the laptop also a thief (because if he thought it was stolen, he should have reported it). But please ignore this part of the post so you can mod the first sentence +1 Funny:-)
Well, Mr. Slippery, I guess we will just have to accept that we disagree then.
I view "unlock the door so we can see if there are dead bodies inside" as similar to "unlock (i.e., provide the encryption key to) the hard drive so we can see if there are sexually exploitative photographs of children inside".
Of course, both of these demands must be made with an appropriate court order -- a "search warrant" in the US -- to be legal.
Granting access to the contents of the {house, hard drive} is not, per se, "testifying against oneself"; it's merely allowing the examination of premises that are reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime (hence, the granting of a warrant to search); thus I don't see this as having anything to do with the Fifth amendment, only the Fourth.
Searching a location is not the same as forcing someone to divulge information. The fact that they're covered by different Amendments should be your hint that the analogy fails.
You may have missed my intent (I left out the "FTFY" part, thinking it was obvious) which was to point out that the situation was very similar in both cases, i.e., the "Law" forcing him to "decrypt his hard drive" and the "Law" forcing him to "unlock the door". I really wasn't arguing which US Constitutional amendment either might (not) be a violation of.
To further clarify, your suggestion that it would be a fourth amendment violation is flawed in that this was a Court mandate (he was, after all, convicted for failure to comply). Thus, there would be no fourth amendment problem - they clearly had a warrant (or whatever is the similar instrumentation in the UK, where this actually took place.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent analysis, Mr AC, but you forgot that this agent now has to get authorization to connect his new 2TB HD to a federal computer system.
It ain't over yet.
I find it difficult to believe that Samsung would intentionally install a keylogger on their consumer devices. My bet is that it was either installed via security breech by one or more co-opted employees (industrial or government espionage is a possibility) or else that it was configured as an engineering sample that mistakenly got shipped for sale.
So far I have seen nothing about how the keylogger was configured. Was it actually "phoning home" (and if so, where is that "home") or was it just installed but inactive?
and here http://ing.dk/artikel/106472-engelsk-politi-brugte-en-foererloes-drone-under-en-anholdelse?utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nyheder
and here http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13608730?source=rss
and here http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20091021/COMMUNITY_NEWS/910209967/-1/RSS01
and especially here http://www.draganfly.com/uav-helicopter/draganflyer-x6/
In Iran, we don't have actual photos like in your country.
But Canadians are Americans also.
You are correct. Their target is those folks who can buy the cars, jewelry, furs, condos and coops that are advertised in their weekly magazine supplement (and less lavishly, in the daily paper). Loser!
(me too)
"Upfront" how? Maybe something like:
Purchases made at Amazon.com through Banshee used to yield 10% to the GNOME project as an "Amazon Affiliate" but we at Canonical have decided to substitute our own "Amazon Affiliate" code in place of that of Banshee, and skim 75% off of this 10% (GNOME will still get 25% of the 10%, so don't worry about this).
Yeah, I like that.
No, I think that your interpretation that the phrase used means "Down with .." is clearly at odds with what the author of the Guardian UK article thought and stated that it meant, i.e., "Death to .." .
I hope that clarifies the issue for you.
That does not seem to be the take on it by the author of the Guardian UK article that is referenced in your huffingtonpost link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/14/potatoes-iran-election-protest
Done.
:-)
https://www.kanguru.com/index.php/kanguru-defender-elite
Actually, if you scrolled down to the "Pentalobular" picture on the page you referenced and clicked on it, you would get to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentalobular_screw
Which states, in it's entirety:
So it may now be classed as a form of Torx but in fact it's a pure Apple; as someone previously noted, not an iScrew but rather a ScrewU.
I saw no reference to a "CIA contact" or "spy" in that link you provided. All I saw is that there was discussion about whether the Danish daily that originally published the Earth-shaking "Mohammed cartoons" should do it again on the 1-year anniversary of the event, and they apparently decided that there was too much risk that doing so would provoke additional retaliatory violence. So they didn't republish the cartoons. Ta da!
1. Can we leak China's secrets? No, leaker will be shot.
2. Can we leak Iran's secrets No, leaker will be stoned.
3. Can we leak US's secrets? Yes, everybody cheers.
4. Profit!
I live in NYC and couldn't care less about the New Year's ball or the whole wasted, drunken night of partying. It's a boon to the liquor industry though.
7x, that's pretty big. Not without a condom though!
Maintaining a "Right of Return" does not require that the current host nations refuse to allow their Palestinian guests the rights of citizenship. Hell, for the most part they don't even allow them to work and earn a living. The Palestinian refugees are kept subjugated by their Arab hosts solely to fan the flames of anti-Israel sentiment among them and among the Arab populations.
These look like laws that were created to guarantee freedom of religious practice (note: no specific religion is mentioned - applicable to all religions in the country) rather than to outlaw blasphemy. More like the "anti-hate" statutes in the US, I'd say.
Numbers of Palestinian refugees according to UNRWA:
Jordan: 1,983,733
Lebanon: 425,640
Syria: 472,109
West Bank: 778,993
Gaza Strip: 1,106,195
"UNRWA in figures"
How come some of these are Arab (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria)? How come they haven't permitted the Palestinian refugees within their borders to become integrated into their Arab national life? Is it possible that the "Palestinian Problem" is being maintained solely to further the Arab states' enmity with Israel?
How would you like it if your job, country and culture was stereotyped into the guilt-ridden nonsense that The Simpsons aired? There's really something wrong when people feel proud about how much guilt they have or how much they can hate their own society/culture. This same idiocy even made it into TFS:
Where exactly is the requirement that everyone in the world makes the same as their "American counterparts"? Is it because everywhere in the world is the same as America, with the same taxes, costs and currency value? Utter rubbish.
Well, according to:
http://www.ninecash.net/global-cost-of-living-rank-of-300-international-locations-world-wide-september-2010.html
which provides global "cost of living" rankings, Seoul is ranked #24, with New York at #21, San Francisco at #63, Boston at #66, Washington DC at #77, all the way down to Indianapolis at #279. So, yes, I guess in this case it's a fair comparison.
Wouldn't that have required also that the compiler be setuid root to enable it to modify the root entry for the password file?
Oooh! Shiny!
As a matter of fact, yes, because the Asus president's 10 year old daughter twittered "American spies just broke in and threatened to shoot Mommy unless Daddy adds some extra crap to his motherboards. LOL LOL LOL"
Maybe that's because it was Metro North. Did they do that also in Times Square?
I suppose that we can expect a subsequent news report that the thief, upon reading the same article in västerbottens-kuriren, has now sent the professor a 1.44 MB floppy diskette with all the materials he produced during the summer and fall.
:-)
BTW, although every post I read, and TFA, suggested that it was the thief who sent the USB stick, perhaps it was someone who bought the laptop from the thief and felt bad that it was likely stolen. That would also be consistent with the recurring sentiment that the thief was looking to steal something that would bring him a fast sale - it doesn't really make sense that he would then browse the hard drive, pick out some likely files, copy them to a (stolen?) USB stick, and then mail it back to the victim. And if so, I guess that would make the buyer of the laptop also a thief (because if he thought it was stolen, he should have reported it). But please ignore this part of the post so you can mod the first sentence +1 Funny
Well, Mr. Slippery, I guess we will just have to accept that we disagree then.
I view "unlock the door so we can see if there are dead bodies inside" as similar to "unlock (i.e., provide the encryption key to) the hard drive so we can see if there are sexually exploitative photographs of children inside".
Of course, both of these demands must be made with an appropriate court order -- a "search warrant" in the US -- to be legal.
Granting access to the contents of the {house, hard drive} is not, per se, "testifying against oneself"; it's merely allowing the examination of premises that are reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime (hence, the granting of a warrant to search); thus I don't see this as having anything to do with the Fifth amendment, only the Fourth.
You may have missed my intent (I left out the "FTFY" part, thinking it was obvious) which was to point out that the situation was very similar in both cases, i.e., the "Law" forcing him to "decrypt his hard drive" and the "Law" forcing him to "unlock the door". I really wasn't arguing which US Constitutional amendment either might (not) be a violation of.
To further clarify, your suggestion that it would be a fourth amendment violation is flawed in that this was a Court mandate (he was, after all, convicted for failure to comply). Thus, there would be no fourth amendment problem - they clearly had a warrant (or whatever is the similar instrumentation in the UK, where this actually took place.