No Such Agency (NSA) Teams With Providers To Monitor Your Email
Surely they were doing this anyway? Ellen Nakashima reports for the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is working with Internet service providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.
The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data flowing to the nation’s largest defense firms. Such attacks, including one last month against Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, are nearly constant as rival nations and terrorist groups seek access to U.S. military secrets.
“We hope the . . . cyber pilot can be the beginning of something bigger,” Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said at a global security conference in Paris on Thursday. “It could serve as a model…
Know Your Email Senders’ Political Donations
Creepy and cool — an add-on tool from the Sunlight Foundation that, with a single click, gives you the hidden political allegiances of both companies or institutions and family, friends, and coworkers. Perhaps someday when you apply for a job or an apartment, your boss or landlord will use it on you:
Inbox Influence provides details on both the sender of the email and the company from which it was sent. With it, you can even see how your friends and family have given to political campaigns. Perhaps Uncle Joe has more mainstream views after all?
Sakawa Boys: Ghana’s Cyber-Juju Email Scam Gangs
What do you get when you combine identity theft and email fraud with black magic, spells, and shape shifting? The explosively popular West African subculture known as Sakawa. Via Motherboard, who filmed their visit in Ghana with Sakawa boys:
While Nigeria’s 419 scammers may have written the book on West African internet fraud, their shtick looks like Compuserve compared to what’s going on in Ghana. Ghana’s scammers decided to stack the odds in their favor the old-fashioned way: witchcraft.
Traditional West African Juju priests adapted their services to the needs of the information age and started leading down-on-their-luck internet scammers through strange and costly rituals designed to increase their powers of persuasion and make their emails irresistible to greedy Americans. And so “Sakawa” was born.
Not only is Sakawa the country’s most popular youth activity and one of its biggest underground economies, it’s a full-blown national phenomenon. Sakawa has its own tunes, clothing…
What?!? Men Really Can Make Their Penises Longer
Anyone who uses email is constantly bombarded with spam emails with subject lines like “Lengthen Your Man Snake,” which one assumes most recipients consider to be nonsense and quickly delete.
However, AFP via France24 reports that in fact penis lengthening actually is possible:
Some non-surgical methods for increasing the length of the male sex organ do in fact work, while others are likely to result only in soreness and disappointment, a review of medical literature has shown.
Surgical procedures, however, can be dangerous and have an “unacceptably high rate of complications,” according to the study, published this week in the Journal of the British Association of Urological Surgeons.
“An increasing number of patients seek urological advice for the so-called ’short penis’,” the researchers reported.
This is true despite the fact that “penile length is normal in most of these men, who tend to overestimate normal phallic dimension.”
A male member — measured on the dorsal, or upper,…
Government Needs Warrant To Secretly Read Emails, Court Rules
I’m confused — you’re telling me that the Constitution doesn’t grant the government the right to peruse our emails as desired? Via Gizmodo:
The government must obtain a court warrant to require internet service providers to turn over stored e-mail to the authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first time an appellate court said Americans had that Fourth Amendment protection.
“The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s e-mails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause” (.pdf), the appeals court ruled. The decision—one stop short of the Supreme Court—covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded the decision.
“I expect e-mail providers across the country will comply with this,” he said in a telephone interview.
The legal brouhaha centered on Steven Warshak, founder of an…
Google Engineer Stalked, Spied On Teens Through Their Gmail
It never hurts to forget that gigantic internet companies aren’t necessarily safeguarding your privacy, and that they’re comprised of humans (who can be fallible, and creepy). Gawker writes:
A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.
David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users’ accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment, we’ve learned. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, Wash. office. He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company.
It’s unclear how widespread Barksdale’s abuses were, but in at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors’ Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the…
10 Years Ago: The Devastating ILOVEYOU Virus
Last week marked the ten-year anniversary of one the most fiendishly successful computer viruses of all time, whose occurrence signaled the rise of spam email. The virus’s incredible spread was based more on psychological than technical skill: the subject line ILOVEYOU and attachment name LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU were what got people. I.e. we found out that people on the internet are lonely. BBC News looks back:
All around the world, security researchers were waking up to the scale of the problem confronting them.
It all started in the Philippines many hours earlier when 24-year-old Onel De Guzman released a virus that he had proposed creating as part of his undergraduate thesis.
Few could resist opening the attachment which kicked off the attack code that then plundered their e-mail address list and sent itself to every name it found. In 2000, many people did not have any security software and even those that did only updated the…
