NSA Website Bumped Offline By Alleged DDoS Attack

What goes around comes around.  From NBC:

The official website of the National Security Agency, NSA.gov, is offline and has been for several hours. Not only that, but the rumor being jubilantly spread around the net is that it is a deliberate denial-of-service attack.  Downtime-tracking service Isitdownrightnow.com reports that the site has been unavailable since about 2 p.m. ET.

Large government webpages don't tend to go down for hours for no reason, but it has not been confirmed yet whether this is an attack or simply a technical problem.

Chrome Auto-Complete May Be Undermining Your Data Security

From Yoast:

Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off autocomplete in your browser.

This test URL will show you why quicker than I can explain it in words. Please try it and come back. If you’re using autocomplete to, for instance, sign up for an email newsletter, you might have just provided that website with your full address and/or (even worse) your credit card details too.

Court Rules that Constitutional Protections Do Not Apply to "Hackers"

Are you keeping up with today's newspeak?  From Digitalbond:

The US District Court for the State of Idaho ruled that an ICS product developer’s computer could be seized without him being notified or even heard from in court primarily because he states on his web site “we like hacking things and don’t want to stop”. . . .

Apple to Offer iWork Suite for Free on New Macs

From CNET:

Apple showed off revamped versions of its iLife and iWork apps Tuesday at its event in San Francisco. Both suites of apps, which include Garageband, iPhoto and Pages, are now free with any Mac computer or iOS device purchase.  Apple is calling this the biggest update to iWork ever, though some of the changes are subtle. The most notable change, is a brand-new sharing feature that marries iWork on your Mac or iOS devices with the iWork for iCloud beta, Apple's office apps for the Web. You can now start a document or project on one device and pick up where you left off on another. Files that you share via iCloud can be opened by up to 20 people at once and edited in real-time. You can also edit documents from the web, through the iCloud website, which challenge's Google's cloud-based and web-based Google Drive, which offers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps. iWork for iCloud is still in beta and works on Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

Senate Makes Another Push for Internet Censorship

From Mother Jones:

This summer, when Edward Snowden dropped his bombshell about PRISM, the NSA's vast Internet spying program, the House had recently passed a bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Widely criticized by privacy advocates, CISPA aimed to beef up US cybersecurity by giving tech companies the legal freedom to share even more cyber information with the US government—including the content of Americans' emails, with personal information intact. CISPA supporters, among them big US companies such as Verizon and Comcast, spent 140 times more money on lobbying for the bill than its opponents, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But after Snowden's leaks, public panic over how and why the government uses personal information effectively killed the bill. Now that the dust has settled a bit, NSA director Keith Alexander is publicly asking for the legislation to be re-introduced, and two senators confirmed that they are drafting a new Senate version.

"I am working with Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) on bipartisan legislation to facilitate the sharing of cyber related information among companies and with the government and to provide protection from liability," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Mother Jones in a statement.

With both Democrat and Republican support, we can safely presume this legislation will be doubly bad.  

Filling the Vacuum After the Silk Road Bust

From Atlantisblog:

It’s almost two weeks since I reported on the race to create Silk Road 2.0 and it seems the mass migration is well underway with existing sites busting at the seams to accommodate the huge increase in traffic with some sites witnessing a 600% increase in listings in two weeks alone and with several more in the final stages of testing it looks like it won’t be long before silk roads legacy of 12,000 drug listings are divided out among its suitors. So who will be the big winners and losers in the battle for the spoils? Well it would seem Sheep Marketplace with its slick interface and easy to navigate listings has seen the biggest explosion in growth while the well established heir to the throne Black Market Reloaded has almost doubled it number of drug listings despite having to temporally close the site on several occasions due to huge influx of traffic and a security breach on another occasion.

This morning the Silk Road subreddit graced me with a list containing links to many new TOR marketplace sites and since many of these are still untested and unproven I decided now might be a good time to assess the state of the union and check  each of them out for myself.

The rest of this post goes into quite a bit of detail on each market so if you are looking for a tl;dr It’s my opinion the new Silk Road [2.0] site is going to be the one to watch and for second place it’s a total free for all.  Below are the most promising sites I’ve seen, I could have listed more but if you cant get what your looking for on one of these I don’t think it exists.

Microsoft Releases Remote Desktop App for Android and iOS

From The Next Web:

In addition to the release of Windows 8.1, Microsoft today launched Microsoft Remote Desktop for Android and iOS, bringing the Windows desktop to phones and tablets. You can download the free app now directly from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

As its name implies, the app lets you can connect to a remote PC while on the go. This is mainly aimed at business users looking to get their work done from wherever they are, but you can use the Remote Desktop client for your own purposes . . .