Sony Unveils World's Fastest Internet in Japan

It is widely known that in comparison with other countries, people in the United States pay more money for slower internet connections.  Yesterday, Sony unveiled the world's fastest internet in Japan. From Engadget:

Google Fiber might be making waves with its 1Gbps speeds, but it's no match for what's being hailed as the world's fastest commercially-provided home internet service: Nuro. Launched in Japan yesterday by Sony-supported ISP So-net, the fiber connection pulls down data at 2 Gbps, and sends it up at 1 Gbps.

Why is the US lagging so far behind in this important technological metric?  You know the answer: the collusion of big business and big government.  From Reuters:

The backbone of the Internet — fiber, cables, and copper wires – sounds boring. But these physical structures enable the bits and bytes that increasingly define our lives to flow to and from computers around the world. Without them, there’s no Internet. If they’re slow or outdated, they handicap our access to the digital world. Which means these boring pieces of hardware are a new battleground for access in our digital age.

In this interview, I speak with telecom policy expert Susan Crawford about the state of this backbone. She explains the technologies involved, the players who control them, and how the U.S. has already fallen well behind other developed nations when it comes to speeds and connectivity. Finally we talk about her prescription for how America can regain its preeminence — not just as the creators, but as the leaders — of the Internet.

Wordpress Under Botnet Attack

Admins beware.  Make sure you've got a secure password.  From the BBC:

Wordpress has been attacked by a botnet of "tens of thousands" of individual computers since last week, according to server hosters Cloudflare and Hostgator.  The botnet targets Wordpress users with the username "admin", trying thousands of possible passwords.  The attack began a week after Wordpress beefed up its security with an optional two-step authentication log-in option.  The site currently powers 64m websites read by 371m people each month.

The NYPD's Internal Smartphone App: Big Brother is Watching

The NYPD has been experimenting with a smart phone app that allows officers to track, and surveil citizens and communities in real time.  Excerpt:

The Police Department has distributed about 400 dedicated Android smartphones to its officers, part of a pilot program begun quietly last summer. The phones, which cannot make or receive calls, enable officers on foot patrol, for the first time, to look up a person’s criminal history and verify their identification by quickly gaining access to computerized arrest files, police photographs, and state Department of Motor Vehicles databases. 

The technology offers extraordinary levels of detail about an individual, including whether the person has ever been “a passenger in a motor vehicle accident,” a victim of a crime or in one instance, a drug suspect who has been known by the police to hide crack cocaine “in his left sock,” according to Officer Donaldson. 

The app provides:

access to the names of every resident with an open warrant, arrest record or previous police summons; each apartment with a prior domestic incident report; all residents with orders of protection against them; registered gun owners; and the arrest photographs of every parolee in the building. The officers could even find every video surveillance camera, whether mounted at the corner deli or on housing property, that was directed at the building. 

If police are going to have access to this kind of information on the taxpayer's dime, then the public should have access to it as well. 

Government Believes It Can Read Your Emails and Text Messages Without a Warrant

Among the greatest dangers to the rights and liberties of the people of the United States is the sustained assault on the Fourth Amendment being waged by agencies and individuals at all levels of the government.  For example, the IRS claims it can read your email without a warrant, because you have no expectation of privacy.  From CNET:

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.  Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge. 

Police take the very same liberties with your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.  From the EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Washington State Supreme Court Monday to recognize that text messages are "the 21st Century phone call" and require that law enforcement officers obtain a warrant before reading texts on someone's phone. . . . In this case, police seized a cell phone during a drug investigation and monitored incoming messages. Officers responded to several texts, setting up meetings that resulted in two arrests, without first getting a warrant. Prosecutors have argued that no warrant was required because there should be no expectation of privacy in text messages, as anyone can pick up someone else's phone and read what's stored there. 

If you do not see a problem with a government that believes it has the right to monitor all of your electronic communications, perhaps you should re-read the constitution and brush up on the history of totalitarianism. 

Yahoo's Odd App Acquisition

From Talking Points Memo:

A few weeks ago, Yahoo made headlines when it acquired Summly, a startup run by a 17-year-old CEO named Nick D’Aloisio for $30 million. Summly is a news aggregation app.  We thought the deal was weird. . . .

Now we’ve learned another piece of information that makes the deal stranger. Not only did the Summly team not invent the app’s technology, they also did not build the app. A company called Somo did . . . So here is what Yahoo did: It “aqui-hired” a team of people, led by a 17-year-old living in London, that cannot claim to have invented a cool technology OR to have built a cool app.

What could be going on here?  Is this just incompetence?  Or is it something more nefarious?

Beware of Bitcoin Malware

One month ago, one bitcoin was worth around $50.  Today, Bitcoin has surged past the $200 mark, and, as if this writing, is trading at $218 on MtGox, the most popular bitcoin exchange.  There are many different theories floating around out there to explain this explosive growth in price.  By far the most common is the claim that we are in the midst of a massive bubble.  As new money pours into the system – and these days that new money is big money from professional investors – the incentives for scammers, hackers, crooks and the like grow accordingly.  If you are relatively new to Bitcoin, are are relatively new to it, make sure you do your due diligence to secure your wallet and coins, it is certain that there are a great many people out there salivating at the idea of making off with a great deal of coin.  Even if you have no interest in Bitcoin whatsoever, or even think that it is nothing more than a pyramid scheme, as some skeptics do, you should also be cognizant of these potential threats.  From The Next Web:

A new piece of malware propagating across Skype has been discovered that tries to convince the recipient to click on a link. What makes this particular threat different is that it drops a Bitcoin miner application to make the malware author money.  While malware has spread on Skype and mined Bitcoins before, putting the two together could be an effective new strategy. Security firm Kaspersky discovered the threat, which it names Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt

How Secure Are Your Passwords?

In an increasingly digitized world, the importance of information security arguably expands at an exponential rate.  Many people and institutions still take a cavalier attitude toward the security of the information about them own and their clients lives that is both theoretically and practically accessible to anyone who is determined to get access to it.  CNN reports on Shodan, a search engine that provides access to information on half a million devices and services connected to the internet.  Excerpt:

Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. . . .

It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan. 

What can you do to make sure your information is secure online?  The answer is actually quite simple. Take password protections seriously.  From Three Twelve:

Eight-character passwords are simply not effective enough. According to Wikipedia:"As of 2011, commercial products are available that claim the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 passwords per second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor." Guess how long your 8-character password can stand up against that attack? If you made it to a few minutes, you'd be lucky. The computer can guess EVERY SINGLE COMBINATION of eight lowercase letters in 22 seconds at that rate. Throwing in special characters, uppercase, and numerals greatly increases the complexity, of course. In reality, though, people have pre-computed ALL 8-digit passwords into databases called "rainbow tables" and can just look up (in something like .001 seconds) whether your password has been computed already. . . .

So What Does a Good Password Look Like? XKCD gives a great example: "correct horse battery staple" Check it out--it's incredibly easy to remember, yet its length is 28 or 25 characters, depending on whether you use spaces. This would take the same computer above centuries or millenia to break . . .

Because you have dozens of accounts all across the web, you will need dozens of UNIQUE passwords. For an easy, repeatable way to do that, come up with a system that generates a password for you . . .