William Merideth of Hillview, Kentucky faces charges in the first degree of criminal mischief and wanton endangerment for shooting down a nuisance drone (archived) which was loitering within the bounds of his yard's privacy fence. His neighbors had complained to Merideth about the drone before it breeched the boundaries of Merideth's yard. Neighbor's complaints allowed Merideth the time to retrieve a shotgun which he used to responsibly ground the drone consciously avoiding discharge of his weapon over roads and neighboring properties. Continue reading
Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier
After Petition Obama Still Wants to Try Snowden for Espionage
Two years after Barack Obama's Whitehouse closed a petition requesting Edward Snowden receive a pardon for generally making the world a better place, the Obama administration has finally issued a response. Deferring to Lisa Monaco Obama's adviser for matters concerning Homeland Security and Counterterrorism the response alleges that the Obama administration had undertaken some anomalous reforms though Snowden did not whistle blow on United States surveillance overreach until well into Obama's second term as the United States chief executive. Monaco also reiterated the Obama administration's intent to subject Snowden to prosecution under the Espionage Act. What more could a person really have expected though from an executive administration that serves as gardeners cultivating terrorists.
Gawker Media Shutters National Security Blog Less Than 4 Months In
William Arkin announced that he is leaving Gawker Media. This comes as a part of the turmoil facing Gawker Media following their now retracted article on David Geithner, the brother of former Obama treasury secretary Timothy Geithner. In his letter Arkin criticizes Gawker for making the world a worse place and marks the Geithner story's retraction as signifying the end of a long internal fight at the company which is being decided in favor of a "kinder" Gawker Media. A new kinder Gawker Media that refocuses on Celebrity and "Public Figures" and doesn't want Arkin's writing on the internals of the American National Security state. Continue reading
Holographic Performance Shut Off by Police
Hammond, Indiana police shut down a remote holographic being broadcast at a local hip hop festival by rapper Chief Keef who was performing at a secure Los Angeles sound stage. The show dubbed Craze Fest was being held as a charity event in a public park to raise funds for the family of Keef's late friend Marvin Carr and a 13 month old child who was killed by a vehicle fleeing the scene of Carr's slaying. Continue reading
Ministry of Games Begins Hosting Eulora Dependencies
Eulora's publisher Ministry of Games has now begun mirroring source packages for Eulora's dependencies Cal3D and Crystal Space on their downloads page. This comes after a week of downtime on SourceForge. An beneficial side effect is that this move removes the requirement to use SVN to acquire the right version of Eulora's dependencies in order to install the game.
Phuctor Factors 100th RSA Modulus
The Phuctor, operated by No Such lAbs, has factored its hundredth modulus by using Euclid's Greatest Common Denominator algorithm. The Phuctor began digesting a dump of public keys from sks keyservers back in May. Less than two weeks later Phuctor had managed to factor a key attached to a key in the PGP strong set. Considering the way the news of Phuctor's first key factoring was handled all interested parties should examine the set of public keys factored for their own betterment.
US Standards Institute Moves From Timekeeping to Methamphetamine
An explosion this weekend at the United State's National Institute of Standards and Technology's Gaithersburg, Maryland complex appears to have resulted from the clandestine manufacture of crystal meth. A security guard was injured in connection with the explosion. NIST is most commonly known for their role as timekeeper for the United States Government.
Universal Shares Own Film With Pirates
On the 15th of this month Universal Pictures France filed a takedown request with Google (archived) demanding they remove from results sites hosting or linking pirated copies of Jurassic World. Among the addresses Universal demanded Google sanction was 127.0.0.1 which is the IP address a computer reserves for communicating with itself. This means that not only was Universal seeding its own film to pirates, it was likely doing so from the same machine used detect and prepare a report on infringement for Universal. Continue reading
Coin.mx Operators Arrested For Violating Anti Money Laundering Laws
Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev operators of the Bitcoin/Fiat exchange Coin.mx were arrested by the FBI at their Florida homes last week and charges in the Southern District of New York by Preet Bharara's office were unsealed against them this week. The Feds accuse Coin.mx of trading roughly 1.8 million dollars worth of Bitcoin and Fiat using the pretext of a memorabilia collector's club to conceal their actual activities from their banks and later acquiring control of a small credit union for greater autonomy. Continue reading
Brute Force for keyboard-interactive OpenSSH Logins Discovered
There is a proof of concept which allows for an attacker to attempt to brute force OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive logins enabled. FreeBSD users are especially affected as FreeBSD allows keyboard-interactive OpenSSH logins by default. This brute force allows attempting up to 10,000 password entries at a time. For quite some time it has been known that all forms of password authentication over SSH are weaker by necessity than key based authentication which should be the only login method allowed on any machines over SSH. This is a rather minor enhancement to an existing protocol level vulnerability, but this incident should serve as a reminder that a well configured SSH server will by necessity only allow key based logins. A patch which corrects this issue has already been committed to the source tree and will be included with OpenSSH 7.0 which is due for release in a few weeks.