For its two and a half years online, thousands of drug dealers sold every kind of narcotic imaginable on the anonymous online marketplace known as the Silk Road. But put one of the site’s heroin dealers in a courtroom and ask him questions under oath, and the scale and consequences of that drug empire suddenly […]
The post A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like to Sell Drugs Online appeared first on WIRED.
A month ago, Google said it does not publicly address individual cases when it comes to government requests for customer data “to help protect all our users.”
But on Wednesday, Google changed course after being ripped for failing to notify WikiLeaks that three years ago, Google handed over data to federal authorities about three staffers of the secret-spilling site as part of the government’s espionage probe of the site and its founder, Julian Assange. The reason for the three-year delay, Google said, was because it had been under a gag order that it was fighting.
“From January 2011 to the present, Google has continued to fight to lift the gag orders on any legal process it has received on WikiLeaks,” Al Gidari, a Google lawyer told The Washington Post. He said the media giant’s policy is to always challenge indefinite gag orders. The gags on these were partly lifted, he said.
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The venture-backed Bitcoin startup CoinTerra has filed for bankruptcy, making it the second major miner manufacturer to do so in recent months.
The Chapter 7 filing, which begins the process of liquidating company assets, was submitted on Saturday and comes just weeks after a Utah-based data center sued CoinTerra over a contract dispute.
In June 2014, CoinTerra was sued by a California man for failing to deliver his miner on time. According to court filings, CoinTerra has $10 million to $50 million in combined estimated assets and liabilities and around 400 creditors spread out worldwide from Canada to Russia to Hong Kong.
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In North America, the Canadians have long had to play country mouse to the flashier city mouse of the U.S. It’s the latter that gets all the attention, while the former sits quietly in a corner. But recent stories have shown just how big a player the Canadians are becoming—at least in the surveillance realm.
The post Canada Joins World Powers in Spying on Smartphone and Download Data appeared first on WIRED.
NEW YORK—IRS Special Agent Gary Alford showed a jury personal e-mails from Ross Ulbricht’s Gmail account that prosecutors say line up with chats and other records from the Silk Road drug-trafficking site.
In 2013, Alford searched through the Gmail account belonging to Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan who stands accused of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road drug-trafficking website. Alford’s testimony today compared information found on Ulbricht’s computer, including Silk Road expense sheets and chats with administrators, with Ulbricht’s personal Gmail account. Alford also looked through Ulbricht’s Facebook posts.
Prosecutors weren’t able to show any direct mentions of Silk Road on Ulbricht’s Gmail or on Facebook. Instead, they associated e-mails from Ulbricht’s personal life and receipts for travel and electronics with the data found on his laptop, which was open to a Silk Road management page when he was arrested in San Francisco.
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In the wake of a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency employee’s late-night drunken mischief with a DJi Phantom 2 consumer quadrocopter drone over White House airspace, President Barack Obama called for new laws to govern the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Meanwhile, the company that manufactured the drone used in the ill-fated flight has announced that it will issue a mandatory upgrade to the firmware for its Phantom 2 line of products to make sure that customers comply with the FAA’s no-fly zone around DC.
In a press release issued this morning, DJI announced that the firmware update “will help users comply with the FAA’s Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) 0/8326, which restricts unmanned flight around the Washington, DC metropolitan area.The updated firmware (V3.10) will be released in the coming days and adds a No-Fly Zone centered on downtown Washington, DC and extends for a 25 kilometer (15.5 mile) radius in all directions. Phantom pilots in this area will not be able to take off from or fly into this airspace.”
DJI’s Phantom 2 drones already have firmware settings that prevent them from being flown near airports and other places where officials have set restrictions on flight. According to the company’s statement, DJI is also continuing to update the no-fly zone list for future firmware releases to prevent flights in other sensitive areas—and to prevent drones from being flown across national borders.
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The debate over online anonymity, and all the whistleblowers, trolls, anarchists, journalists and political dissidents it enables, is messy enough. It doesn’t need the US government making up bogus statistics about how much that anonymity facilitates child pornography. At the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday, US assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell discussed what […]
The post No, Department of Justice, 80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn appeared first on WIRED.
The curious incident of the drone in the night-time has been made a bit less mysterious today, as the Secret Service revealed new details into their investigation—including a confession by the pilot himself. According to the Secret Service, an unnamed employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) claimed responsibility for crashing a remote-controlled quadrocopter into a tree on the grounds of the White House.
The yet-unnamed employee reported the incident to his superiors at NGA. He claimed to have been drinking at an apartment near the White House when he decided early Monday morning to fly a friend’s new DJI Phantom drone. He claimed that he then lost control of the drone. Soon after the drone slipped unnoticed over the White House fence, it was spotted flying low over the grounds before it crashed into a tree.
The White House has a radar system to detect incoming aerial threats, but it did not detect the drone, which has the radar cross-section of a large bird at best. According to The New York Times, the Secret Service has been studying ways for the past few years to develop a defense against small drones, which could conceivably carry small explosives or other threats.
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In an effort to catch up to rival services like Facebook, Twitter will now allow people to shoot, edit and post video directly from its mobile apps. Also, private messages on the service can now be sent to as many as 20 people.
Since at least 2010, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been expanding a regional license plate reader (LPR) program to the entire United States. Previously the program was only known to be concentrated in the border region of the American Southwest.
The revelation comes from new documents obtained and published late Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents also show the DEA captured over 793 million license plates from May 2009 through May 2013 with the stated goal of drug-related asset forfeiture.
“The government has essentially created a program of mass tracking,” Catherine Crump, a former ACLU lawyer who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. “The US has created a system where the government can track you and the American public simply has to accept it as a fait accompli.”
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Apple has just released the final build of OS X 10.10.2, the second major update for OS X Yosemite since its release. Version 10.10.1, published just a month after Yosemite’s release, focused mostly on quick fixes for the new OS’ most noticeable problems. Apple has been issuing betas for 10.10.2 since November, though, and a longer testing period usually implies that there are more extensive fixes.
First up, the new release is supposed to fix more of the Wi-Fi problems that some users have been experiencing since Yosemite’s launch. 10.10.1 also included Wi-Fi fixes, though it apparently didn’t resolve the problems for all. The new update will also address “an issue that may cause webpages to load slowly” and improve general stability in Safari, all of which should go a long way toward improving Yosemite’s network and Internet performance.
Several privacy and security problems that we’ve reported on have been resolved in 10.10.2, as well. Though Apple will still share limited search and location information with Microsoft to enable Spotlight’s Bing-powered Web searching feature, the company has fixed a bug that caused Spotlight to “load remote e-mail content” even when the setting was disabled in Mail.app itself. Our original report describes why this is a problem:
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The agency said the devices, which make up the so-called Internet of Things, also raise serious security and privacy risks that could undermine consumers’ confidence.
Facebook said the cause was an internal malfunction rather than a cyberattack.
The police have raided the American e-commerce giant’s Tokyo headquarters, a distribution center and the offices of an affiliate, according to Japanese news reports.
A system to detect flying objects failed to pick up a small drone, raising questions about whether the Secret Service could bring down a similar object if it endangered the president.
Long overshadowed by its rival Alibaba, JD is basing its business on logistics and a promise to cater to shoppers from click to package delivery.
An employee said the company had acted to comply with an order from a court in Turkey, whose government has not hesitated to cut access to services like Twitter and YouTube for political reasons.
Facebook has blocked a page which a Turkish court claimed was offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.
China has blocked several popular services that let citizens skirt state censorship systems and reach banned sites.
Concerns the Paris attacks are fuelling an anti-Muslim backlash on social media