milw0rm's back up & posting will start once again, I can't let all of the emails in my submit box to just sit there.How long it will be up is unknown...and while I have seen some chatter about possible groups taking it over (and running it as it is)...no solid news has been made at this point.
The experimental development work that is being done by various contributors on the Electrolysis project was recently consolidated into a single version control repository. The developers hope to have nightly builds ready for developer testing soon, but they caution that it will not yet work on Mac OS X. They are looking for volunteer Mac developers to participate in the project.
Electrolysis is going to be a truly enormous project. It's not clear yet if it will be ready in time for the next release of Firefox, which is codenamed Namaroka. The work on Electrolysis will be done parallel to Namaroka development, so it will not impede other plans to improve the browser. The early Electrolysis prototype and other parts that have been implemented so far are highly impressive. The project is off to a very promising start and has the potential to bring a lot of value to the Firefox browser and its users.
The Government Accountability Office said investigators carried bomb-making materials past security at 10 federal buildings. Security at these buildings and a total of about 9,000 federal buildings around the country is provided by the Federal Protective Service, a target of the probe.
Once GAO investigators got the materials in the buildings, the report said, they constructed explosive devices and carried them around inside. For security reasons, the GAO report did not give the location of the buildings.
The report was made available to The Associated Press in advance of a hearing scheduled Wednesday of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
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GAO-09-859T - Preliminary Results Show Federal Protective Service's Ability to Protect Federal Facilities Is Hampered By Weaknesses in Its Contract Security Guard Program (PDF)We identified substantial security vulnerabilities related to FPS’s guard program. Each time they tried, in April and May 2009, our investigators successfully passed undetected through security checkpoints monitored by FPS’s guards, with the components for an IED concealed on their persons at 10 level IV facilities in four cities in major metropolitan areas.
The specific components for this device, items used to conceal the device components, and the methods of concealment that we used during our covert testing are classified, and thus are not discussed in this testimony. Of the 10 level IV facilities we penetrated, 8 were government owned and 2 were leased facilities. The facilities included field offices of a U.S Senator and U.S. Representative as well as agencies of the Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Justice, State and others. The two leased facilities did not have any guards at the access control point at the time of our testing.
Grandma and Grandpa showed up to have a conversation, but Billy and Sally were gone. Facebook cannot be excited about this.
The dramatic change in user demographics was picked up by iStrategyLabs today. Anyone can go through Facebook's self-serve advertising program and see the user demographics numbers the company estimates now, iStrategyLabs captured that data six months ago and saved it for comparison. The changes have been dramatic.
According to this data, from Facebook's own ad platform, there are actually fewer high school and college users on Facebook today than there were six months ago.
Members of the group, which describes itself as the Liberation party in Britain but is banned in Pakistan, revealed last week that it had targeted the country as a base from which to spread Islamic rule across the world.
The Sunday Times has obtained the names of a dozen British Hizb ut-Tahrir activists based in Lahore and Karachi, or commuting between Britain and Pakistan. There are believed to be many more.
Tayyib Muqeem, an English teacher from Stoke-on-Trent, said he had moved to Lahore to convert Pakistanis to the movement.
At Lahore’s Superior College, where Muqeem has set up a Hizb ut-Tahrir student group, he said the organisation’s aim was to subject Muslim and western countries to Islamic rule under sharia law, “by force” if necessary.
In a caliphate, “every woman would have to cover up” and stoning to death for adultery and the chopping off of thieves’ hands would be the law, he said.
He added that Islamic rule would be spread through “indoctrination” and by “military means” if non-Muslim countries refused to bow to it. “Waging war” would be part of the caliphate’s foreign policy.
One of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s strategies in Pakistan is to influence military officers, he revealed.
Shahzad Sheikh, a Pakistani recruit and the group’s official spokesman in Karachi, talked openly about persuading the army to instigate a “bloodless coup” against the present government who, he said, were “worse than the Taliban”.
“It is the military who hold the power (in Pakistan) and we are asking them to give their allegiance to Hizb ut-Tahrir,” he said. “I can’t explain to you in detail how we are trying to influence the military . . . We never disclose our methodology of change. You may say it’s a coup.”
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Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic: Øِزْبُ التَØْرِير; English: Party of Liberation) is an international pan-Islamist, Sunni, vanguard political party whose goal is to combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, ruled by Islamic law and with a caliph head of state elected by Muslims.
HT is not designated as a terrorist organization in the United States, however many consider it to be a stepping stone to more militant organizations.
GlobalSecurity.org - Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami
Jamestown - Hizb-ut-Tahrir's Activities in the United States
Official Hizb ut-Tahrir website (English)
Now Danielle, a graduate student who also works full time, is struggling to pay off more than $20,000 in credit card debt her mother incurred. The older woman, who survived a bout with cancer, insists she would have been able to pay the bills had she not become ill and gets angry when Danielle mentions the debt.
"I feel bad bringing it up," Danielle said. "I feel like the bad guy."
Parents are supposed to protect their children from harm, but some inflict long-lasting financial and emotional damage by using them to commit identity theft.
Some, such as Danielle's mother, victimize offspring who are old enough to establish credit in their own right. Others use the Social Security numbers of their minor children to set up fraudulent accounts that the victims might not discover for years.
"When we first started hearing about it, we were shocked and horrified," said Beth Givens, the head of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "It turns out it is more common than you might think."
Linda Foley, the founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, also in San Diego, said she almost never heard about parent perpetrators when she and her husband established the center a decade ago. These days, though, they get several complaints a week from victims or from other adults who have uncovered the crimes.
"It just keeps getting bigger," said Foley, who fears the recession and rising unemployment will tempt more parents to cross the line.
According to an affidavit (PDF) filed by the arresting FBI officer and subsequently posted by news media, the programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, copied "proprietary trade code" from his company and uploaded it to a Website in Germany. He later quit his job at the New York firm and moved to a new company in Chicago that "intended to engage in high-volume automated trading" -- and paid him around three times his old salary of $400,000, according to the affidavit.
The financial institution, which is not named in the affidavit, allegedly saw via routine monitoring that Aleynikov's machine was used at least four times to send some 32 megabytes of data to an external site last month. The institution then recovered Aleynikov's bash history -- a record of commands used on his desktop -- to identify his specific actions, the affidavit says.
In a blog, Reuters columnist Matthew Goldstein reported that the New York firm in the affidavit is Goldman Sachs, and that Aleynikov may have stolen the "secret sauce" that has allowed the financial services firm to consistently perform better than many of its competitors. Several other publications have picked up on Goldstein's story, although Goldman Sachs has yet to make a public comment.
The affidavit does not address Goldstein's report, but it does say that "certain features of the [code], such as speed and efficiency by which it obtains and processes market data, gives the Financial Institution a competitive advantage among other firms that also engage in high-volume automated trading. The Financial Institution further believes that, if competing firms were to obtain the [code] and use its features, the Financial Institution's ability to profit from the [code]'s speed and efficiency would be significantly diminished."
Security experts, meanwhile, are saying that Aleynikov's actions should have been caught before the proprietary data got out. According to the affidavit, the downloads took place during four different sessions, and the data was encrypted before it was uploaded to the German Website. The downloads took place less than a week before Aleynikov announced his resignation. Aleynikov attempted to delete the encryption software and his bash history before transferring the files to his own computers, the affidavit says.
According to Goldstein's blog, Aleynikov told the FBI when he was arrested that he "only intended to collect 'open source' files on which he had worked, but later realized that he had obtained more files than he intended." Aleynikov's attorney reportedly is saying that her client will be proved innocent of the single charge of theft of trade secrets.
Wall Streeters, meanwhile, are wondering what might have been done with the secret software, which may have been available to others for several weeks now. The affidavit does not name the new firm that Aleynikov allegedly was prepared to join, nor does it say who had access to the data on the German site. Some financial experts expressed concern that Goldman Sachs' stock might suffer as a result of the reports, and others said they believe the financial institution in question should disclose the potential security breach and its potential impact on the company's ability to compete in the market.
