US, UK and Dutch authorities levied heavy accusations against Russian intelligence officials Thursday, alleging that seven Russians had hacked various agencies, organizations and institutions. The accusations come just one day after the US announced it would share offensive cyberwar technology with NATO allies “if asked.”

"We announce an indictment charging seven Russian military officers with violation of several US criminal laws for malicious cyber activities against the United States and its allies," US Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers told reporters Thursday. Four of the accused are allegedly GRU agents, Russian military intelligence, who were previously expelled from the Netherlands, the Los Angeles Times reported.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis, at a meeting with NATO allies in Brussels, said Russia would "have to be held to account."

Timing of UK, Dutch Accusations Against Russia Point to 'Closely Coordinated Action' – Scholar

US, UK and Dutch authorities levied heavy accusations against Russian intelligence officials Thursday, alleging that seven Russians had hacked various agencies, organizations and institutions. The accusations come just one day after the US announced it would share offensive cyberwar technology with NATO allies “if asked.”

"We announce an indictment charging seven Russian military officers with violation of several US criminal laws for malicious cyber activities against the United States and its allies," US Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers told reporters Thursday. Four of the accused are allegedly GRU agents, Russian military intelligence, who were previously expelled from the Netherlands, the Los Angeles Times reported.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis, at a meeting with NATO allies in Brussels, said Russia would "have to be held to account."

Timing of UK, Dutch Accusations Against Russia Point to 'Closely Coordinated Action' – Scholar

During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.

This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

Some Windows 10 users have learned the hard way that even if upgrades have gone smoothly in the past, it's still wise to back up files before updating the OS.

Microsoft this week kicked off the Windows 10 1809 rollout, and now some users have found the update is wiping important files, including photos and music, reports MSPoweruser.

Several early adopters of the Windows 10 1809 update have reported vanishing file problems on Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft's Community forum.

One poor Windows 10 1809 user, Robert Ziko, claims to have lost 220GB of data after updating.

Earlier in the day, the Netherlands stated that the United States was going to announce charges against some "Russian intelligence agents." Moscow has yet to comment on the US charges.

The US Justice Department has announced charges against seven alleged Russian military intelligence officials it accuses of hacking doping agencies and other international organizations.

"We announce an indictment charging seven Russian military officers with violation of several US criminal laws for malicious cyber activites against the United States and its allies," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers told reporters.

According to the DOJ, WADA, the OPCW, USADA, Westinghouse nuclear power company, which provides power to Ukraine, at least 250 athletes and sports figures from different countries were allegedly targeted by Russian intelligence officers; they also ostensibly targeted a Canadian anti-doping agency.

Phantom Secure made custom, encrypted BlackBerry phones and sold them to customers all over the world, including to the Sinaloa cartel, according to prosecutors.

A vote concerning the controversial opening of a sex robot brothel in Houston is set to take place Wednesday at city hall.

But if Tuesday's public discussion on the matter was any indication, an ordinance vote that would effectively ban it appears poised to pass.

During the discussion, city council members heard from several people who believe the business is bad for Houston and will promote sex trafficking.

If the ordinance passes, no business could allow a sexual act to take place with a robot at the proposed Galleria-area site.

On Monday October 1st, Sacramento, Houston, Indianapolis and Los Angeles became the first cities to gain access to Verizon’s 5G Wireless service.

The rollout of 5G is expected to herald the beginning of Smart Cities, where driverless cars, pollution sensors, cell phones, traffic lights, and thousands of other devices interact in what is known as “The Internet of Things”. The move towards the smart grid was hastened last week when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a rule that will limit the role of local authorities regarding the build of 5G networks, specifically the amount city officials can charge telecommunication companies (“Big Tech”).

On September 20, 2018 the White House released the US National Cyber Strategy, which was signed by President Donald Trump.

It probably delighted both hawks and Democrats. The former were pleased that the strategy includes new components that clearly indicate an expansionist momentum. And the latter were gratified by the Trump administration’s renewed interest in the subject of cyberspace, since Donald Trump eliminated the position of White House cybersecurity coordinator after his election and significantly reduced spending in this area. But the president now seems to have reconsidered, as indicated by the fact that the 40-page document is in many respects a rehash of efforts from the Obama era.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen noted in her statement that “[t]oday’s National Cyber Strategy — the first in fifteen years — strengthens the government’s commitment to work in partnership with industry to combat those threats and secure our critical infrastructure.”

Three New Yorkers are attempting to halt a scheduled test of a system that will allow President Trump and future presidents to send alert messages to the phones of all Americans.

J.B. Nicholas, Kristine Rakowsky, and Liana Nikitovich filed a lawsuit last week to a U.S. District Court in Manhattan, which argues that the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, violates free speech rights and is an unconstitutional seizure of electronic devices, Politico reports.

A test of the system is scheduled to take place Wednesday. The first test was originally planned for Sept. 20, but it was delayed due to Hurricane Florence, which made landfall over the Carolinas in the middle of the moth.

The plaintiffs are worried that the system will turn into "government loudspeakers," which would allow presidents to send propaganda, according to the suit.

A Saudi dissident living in Canada was likely spied on by Israeli phone-hacking technology, according to a Monday report.

The Herzliya-based NSO Group uses its controversial Pegasus spyware program to turn smartphones into listening devices. It has been accused of selling the technology to countries, including Saudi Arabia, who use it to spy on dissidents, journalists, and others.

The Citizen Lab, a group of academics from Toronto University, said it has “high confidence” that the Israeli technology was used to spy on 27-year-old Omar Abdulaziz, an outspoken Saudi dissident who sought asylum in Canada.

It’s a given that Big Brother is always watching us.

Unfortunately, thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Big Brother (and his corporate partners in crime) is getting even creepier and more invasive, intrusive and stalker-like.

Indeed, every dystopian sci-fi film (and horror film, for that matter) we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science and technology, Big Business, and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful—but not without help from the citizenry.

On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

Microsoft will soon begin delivering the official release of Windows 10 version 1809, the October 2018 Update. If you do nothing, it will arrive via Windows Update some time in the next few months. Here's how to take more control over the process.

According to an article in the National Post the Five Eyes intelligence network is demanding tech companies provide a backdoor into all their electronic devices.

"Canada joined its intelligence allies recently in demanding that technology companies co-operate with law enforcement agencies in allowing access to encrypted communications."

Although similar requests for co-operation have been made in the past, that “is the most aggressive call we’ve seen,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

The big change, according to Israel, is that governments are now saying “fix it for us or we will fix it for you.” That’s led to concerns among privacy experts that the government will try to legislate a requirement for tech companies to build backdoors for law enforcement.

Barely an hour after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed what's widely believed to be the toughest net neutrality law ever enacted in the US, the US DOJ announced that it would sue California to invalidate the new law, setting up yet another showdown between the federal government and the largest state in the union.

According to the Washington Post, California has become the largest state to adopt its own rules requiring Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to treat all web traffic equally. State lawmakers wrote their law after the FCC scrapped nationwide protections last year, citing the regulatory burdens they had caused for the telecom industry. The lawsuit opens yet another legal showdown between Brown and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Recently, a federal judge threw out most of the DOJ's challenge to California's sanctuary state laws.

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

After more than a year of Washington being crippled by evidence-free claims that the Russians have influenced our elections, we have a senior US Administration official openly calling for the overturning of elections overseas.

Imagine if President Putin’s national security advisor had grabbed a megaphone in New York and called for the people of the United States to overthrow their government by force!

Python creator Guido van Rossum retired as "benevolent dictator for life" in July, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, he's been pulled back in to resolve a debate about politically incorrect language.

Like other open source communities, Python's minders have been asked whether they really want to continue using the terms "master" and "slave" to describe technical operations and relationships, given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution, a historical legacy that fires political passions to this day.

Last week Victor Stinner, a Python developer who works for Red Hat, published four pull requests seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne.

MEDDLING IN FOREIGN elections is bad. I think we can all agree on that.

And almost everyone — bar Donald Trump — seems to believe that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election. So that should be condemned.

Here’s the problem, though: U.S. politicians and pundits cannot credibly object to Russian interference in U.S. elections without also acknowledging that the United States doesn’t exactly have clean hands. Or are we expected to believe that Russian hackers were the first people in human history to try and undermine a foreign democracy?

In this video, I examine the ways in which the United States has, in fact, spent the past 70-odd years meddling in elections across the world.

New Zealand's Customs and Excise Act 2018 went into effect today. That means travelers who refuse to give their phone or laptop password to customs officials will be fined NZ$5000. In addition, their devices will be confiscated and forensically searched.

Customs Minister Kris Faafoi said these digital strip searches are necessary because "A lot of the organised crime groups are becoming a lot more sophisticated in the ways they're trying to get things across the border. And if we do think they're up to that kind of business, then getting intelligence from smartphones and computers can be useful for a prosecution."

But Thomas Beagle of Council for Civil Liberties pointed out that organized criminals are smart enough not to keep incriminating files on their devices.

From Radio NZ:

[Customs spokesperson Terry Brown] said the law struck the "delicate balance" between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities.

More evidence has surfaced about the disturbing political coverup of grave national security violations committed by the Pakistani who ran House Democrats’ information technology. His name is Imran Awan and last year he was arrested on bank-fraud charges at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. while trying to flee to his native Pakistan. Even after getting fired by some members of Congress for stealing computers and data systems, Florida’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, kept him and let him have access to her emails and files as well as the password to the electronic device she used for DNC business. At one point, Awan had access to the computers of dozens of members of Congress, including those on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. Judicial Watch has launched an investigation and is pursuing public records.

The inventor of the world wide web has admitted that he's become disillusioned by his creation because it has become 'an engine of inequity and division.'

Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the web in 1989 with the idea that the sharing of information would benefit all mankind – but now, he says it is 'swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.'

In a blog post, the 63-year-old spoke of how the public have developed a mistrust of apps that 'have an ulterior motive.'

In the wake of the breach of millions of people's Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, he revealed he has been working on a new online platform that would help users regulate the personal information they share online and how the data is stored.

BMW just publicly revealed their new camera-based driver monitoring system. It is called Extended Traffic Jam Assistant and will be available in the 2019 X5, the company’s best-selling mid-sized SUV.

The assistant is part of what’s styled Level 2 automated driving tech. The 2019 X5 can drive itself – including steer itself – without the driver touching anything – all the way up to just under 40 MPH. But for obvious reasons – including legal liability reasons – BMW doesn’t want to leave it entirely up to the X5 to drive itself.

Well, that’s not exactly accurate.
The driver is still expected to pay attention to his driving – even when he’s not the one actually driving the car.

But if the driver is supposed to pay attention to driving, shouldn’t he just . . . drive?

Some owners of the new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max are reporting on Apple's community site that the devices aren't charging when plugged into a power supply via a Lightning cable.

Certain users are reporting that the iPhone XS will sometimes start to charge after reinserting an Apple-made cable. Others have noticed that if the device is not charging, picking it up or tapping the screen to wake up the device will cause it to charge.

"If I haven't interacted with the phone for some time, it becomes unresponsive to a charger being plugged in. But if I unplug then lift it and start using it, it will recognize the charger," wrote one iPhone XS owner.

The ability to vote for local, state, and federal representatives is the cornerstone of democracy in America. With mid-term congressional elections looming in early November, many voices have raised concerns that the voting infrastructure used by states across the Union might be suspect, unreliable, or potentially vulnerable to attacks. As Congress considers measures critical to consumer rights and the functioning of technology (net neutrality, data privacy, biometric identification, and surveillance), ensuring the integrity of elections has emerged as a matter of crucial importance.

With mid-term elections in just two months, Secretaries of State should be pressed to do their jobs and increase security before voters cast their ballots.

Add “a phone number I never gave Facebook for targeted advertising” to the list of deceptive and invasive ways Facebook makes money off your personal information. Contrary to user expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements, the company has been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes—or that users never provided at all—for targeted advertising.

A group of academic researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University, along with Gizmodo reporters, have used real-world tests to demonstrate how Facebook’s latest deceptive practice works. They found that Facebook harvests user phone numbers for targeted advertising in two disturbing ways: two-factor authentication (2FA) phone numbers, and “shadow” contact information.

Two-Factor Authentication Is Not The Problem

Wanna take a peek at jets stationed at Belgian airbases and learn how many US nukes are stored there? Just google it! It’s all there on the maps. But Brussels now plans to sue Google for not blurring its military sites.
The Belgian Defense Ministry had already asked the tech giant to blur the sensitive data from Google Maps, but the American company apparently ignored the demand. Now the military has decided to take action.

“The Defense [Ministry] had made a request to Google to blur [Belgian military] sites. After it found out that this [request] wasn’t satisfied, it [the ministry] will sue Google,” an official from the defense ministry’s press service told Sudinfo newspaper.

Update: from the SEC press conference:

MUSK'S STATEMENTS HAD NO BASIS IN FACT, SEC'S AVAKIAN SAYS
NONE OF MUSK'S STATMENTS PRECLEARED BY ANYONE ON TESLA: SEC
TESLA INVESTOR RELATIONS TOOK MUSK TWEETS AT FACE VALUE: SEC
MUSK'S TWEETS WERE `SIMPLY NOT TRUE,' SEC'S PEIKEN SAYS
And the punchline:

MUSK'S TWEET ON $420 PRICE WAS TIED TO MARIJUANA CULTURE: SEC
MUSK THOUGHT HIS GIRLFRIEND WOULD FIND PRICE HUMEROUS: SEC
Oops.

Jack Poulson is one of several googlers to quit the company over Project Dragonfly, the company's secret plan to launch a Chinese search tool that will incorporate state surveillance and censorship on behalf of China's authoritarian government.

Now, Poulson has sent a letter to the US Senate detailing the internal workings of Project Dragonfly, confirming that the tool is designed to block such queries as "student protest" and "Nobel prize," and to facilitate tracking users whose search history reveals an interest in politically sensitive topics.

Google confirmed that this product has been developed, but insisted that the product is "not close to launch."

The letter alleges Google is working on:

* A prototype interface designed to allow a Chinese joint venture company to search for a given user's search queries based on their phone number

Governments are coming for the big tech companies.

But governments use big tech’s data too… So obviously they aren’t going to solve the biggest privacy concerns.

This is a problem because the main issue with Amazon, Google, and Facebook is how they interact with governments.

I talked about this yesterday… the real reason the government won’t hold big tech accountable.

We only need to look to China’s dystopian social credit scores to see how Google and Facebook data is used by governments.

And the CIA seems to be pretty happy with their deal with Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

Why would we expect the government to protect our privacy when the government profits from the intrusion into our privacy?

Clearly, China is not going to prohibit Google and Facebook from providing them with incriminating information on citizens.

Is the CIA going to make sure the money they give Bezos doesn’t influence the Washington Post, which Bezos owns?

Are elected officials going to get Facebook out of elections, or are they going to make sure Facebook helps them win the next election?

Is the government going to protect your privacy from Google, when the government is only too happy to subpoena incriminating evidence against you from the search giant?

The government already teamed up with these companies!

And that’s, like, most of the problem!

The government is going to focus on regulating the wrong things.