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bcn

5,473 karma · joined December 18, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bcn; my proof: https://keybase.io/bcn/sigs/yo2l5PbRgBZi6FCk5gP1LkpraepJm1jXq52t7LYEIso ]
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bcn··on French prosecutors say Telegram CEO freed from custody, will appear in court
Politico claims to have (exclusively) seen a French administrative document that narrows the focus to a single case where Telegram did not respond to legal request for user information. Copied from the article, here are a few key points:

> The arrest warrants were issued after the messaging platform gave "no answer" to an earlier judicial request to identify a Telegram user, according to the document, which was shared with POLITICO by a person directly involved in the case.

> Warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai, the platform’s co-founder, were issued on March 25 over charges including “complicity in possessing, distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group.”

> The warrants were issued after an undercover investigation into Telegram led by the cybercrime branch of the Paris prosecutor's office, during which a suspect discussed luring underaged girls into sending "self-produced child pornography," and then threatening to release it on social media.

> The suspect also told the investigators he had raped a young child, according to the document. Telegram did not respond to the French authorities’ request to identify the suspect.

> There’s no suggestion either of the Durov brothers were directly involved in any of the illegal activities identified by the investigation.

-https://www.politico.eu/article/exclusive-telegram-ceo-broth...

bcn··on Demand for seed-oil-free foods is growing
The claim that oils rich in linoleic acid (e.g. seed oils) increase inflammation was looked at in, "a systematic review of randomized controlled trials that permitted the assessment of dietary LA (linoleic acid) on biologic markers of chronic inflammation among healthy noninfant populations was conducted to examine this concern."...

"We conclude that virtually no evidence is available from randomized, controlled intervention studies among healthy, noninfant human beings to show that addition of LA to the diet increases the concentration of inflammatory markers"

see: Effect of dietary linoleic acid on markers of inflammation in healthy persons: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22889633/

bcn··on Why Timber Towers Are on the Rise in France
Here are a few renderings of the "Arboretum" project that was mentioned in the article- http://www.laisneroussel.com/fr/projects/55
bcn··on Encryption “would not have helped” at OPM, says DHS official
A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"
bcn··on Offer HN: Free Domains
These coupons expire (if not used) in less than ~6 hours and there are still a few un-used ones:

1 .XYZ 1 .EU

The following were claimed but as of yet not used. If they are not used in the next 2-3 hours, I will pass them on to the anyone else who will make sure to use them before the deadline later today.

1 .EU 1 .XYZ 1 50% OFF .SURF,.BEER or .VODKA

bcn··on Offer HN: Free Domains
The .com, .me and 1 .xyz have been sent.

1 .xyz, 1 .eu and the 50% off are left.

bcn··on Two Federal Agents in Silk Road Case Face Fraud Charges
Here's a link to the the complaint: http://cryptome.org/2015/03/force-001.pdf
bcn··on Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
Recommend this 30 min. documentary about about Nimoy growing up in Boston. https://vimeo.com/90940421
bcn··on Best Resources to Learn Russian? German? Etc.?
They don't have Russian available yet* but check out https://www.duolingo.com

*though it will be coming soon according to https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2175794

bcn··on Yahoo Nears Investment in Snapchat
For more perspective on this question, I'd recommend this recent video (~6 min) by Casey Neistat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKSr6h5-fCU
bcn··on Gmail app hack works 92 percent of the time
Agreed, After submitting and then going to read the paper (http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/sec14_android_activity_in...) it's clear the researchers never attempted this attack on anything other than Android, though they do imply that the attack might be possible in other OS.
bcn··on How is your resisting to Google asking to merge Google account with youtube?
http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/153375.user.js
bcn··on Startup School 2013 – Live Stream
From his cousera class, a paper called "Regulation, Disruption, and the Technologies of 2013" has more details. https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/startup%2Flecture_slid...
bcn··on Important Customer Security Announcement
More details from Brian Krebs' blog post - http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/adobe-to-announce-source-...

  "KrebsOnSecurity first became aware of the source code leak roughly one week ago...with fellow researcher Alex Holden...discovered a massive 40 GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet and Kroll."

  "The hacking team’s server contained huge repositories of uncompiled and compiled code that appeared to be source code for ColdFusion and Adobe Acrobat."
bcn··on W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6491144
bcn··on Ask HN: How would you build a service that is still be functional in 1000 years?
Not an Internet service, but the Long Now Foundation has started construction on a physical clock that's designed tot to last 10,000 years.

-http://longnow.org/clock/ -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

bcn··on Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light
Here is the abstract (all I could find) of this paper:

  Memories can be unreliable. We created a false memory in mice by optogenetically manipulating memory engram–bearing cells in the hippocampus. Dentate gyrus (DG) or CA1 neurons activated by exposure to a particular context were labeled with channelrhodopsin-2. These neurons were later optically reactivated during fear conditioning in a different context. The DG experimental group showed increased freezing in the original context, in which a foot shock was never delivered. The recall of this false memory was context-specific, activated similar downstream regions engaged during natural fear memory recall, and was also capable of driving an active fear response. Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.
- from https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387

The Ars article also has a good link to a backgrounder on optogenetics: http://f1000.com/prime/reports/b/3/11/

bcn··on SF plane crash: Responders turned chaos into hope
https://t.co/ALOfgu1Ab2- This twitter shortened version seems to lead to an unlocked version of the story.
bcn··on In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.
Here's a zinger:

The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court’s opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of “metadata” — facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations — does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications.

This concept is rooted partly in the “special needs” provision the court has embraced. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data,” a third official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing.”

bcn··on Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow
Maybe it was changed since you saw it, but the statement now reads:

"...the United States of America has been..."

Edit to add: The statement as quoted at http://boingboing.net/2013/07/01/snowden-asks-russia-for-asy... has the original version with "have" still in there.

Here's a screenshot from twitter of the original - https://twitter.com/ClaraJeffery/status/351833289000112128

bcn··on Edward Snowden Q&A
William Binney, Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, who have over 100 years of combined NSA experience between them all seem to be supporting the bulk, if not all of Snowden's claims. -http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd...

Why do you claim that the evidence is all provided by "ONE person"?

bcn··on Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access
It looks like they're using the short burst data (SBD) service to 'control' the balloons.

  (Email) : SENT : B1 > power on rocket
  RESPONSE : B0 > SUCCESS(0)
  RESPONSE : B1 > SUCCESS(0)
bcn··on Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance
Q: Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital's Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be "disappeared". How do you feel about that?

In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit — Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) June 8, 2013

A: "Someone responded to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

-From the written Q & A, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblowe...

The tweet by Steve Clemons- https://twitter.com/SCClemons/status/343392529913356289

bcn··on NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily
Glenn Greenwald, while being a US citizen is a resident of (i.e. typically 'based' in) Brazil according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald.
bcn··on NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily
The order in a nutshell:

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

-http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...

It was approved (reapproved?) on April 25, and valid until mid July, and scheduled for declassification in (oops!) 2038. Interesting to note that this order was directed at Verizon, but presumably other carriers have received similar ones?

bcn··on Government obtains wide AP phone records in probe
The AP was with "notified" in a letter...

From the article, "News organizations normally are notified in advance that the government wants phone records and enter into negotiations over the desired information. In this case, however, the government, in its letter to the AP, cited an exemption to those rules..."

and then,

"It is unknown whether a judge or a grand jury signed off on the subpoenas."

bcn··on Government obtains wide AP phone records in probe
The CEO of AP, Gary Pruitt, responds to Holder (DOJ) regarding the record seizure- http://www.ap.org/Images/Letter-to-Eric-Holder_tcm28-12896.p...
bcn··on Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals
"The news gathering technique appears more widespread than the Goldman incident, which was first reported by The New York Post." I don't know what's more surprising- calling this a 'news gathering technique' or the fact that this was scooped by the NY Post.
bcn··on A Conversation with Elon Musk & Sal Khan
The last question was about 'the hypertube' https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...
bcn··on A Google Maps on Steroids
The platform will be taken to the ISS later this year and will provide (via the web) both still imagery and (nearly) live HD video with 1 meter resolution.
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