The most horrific news of the day is undoubtedly the disastrous train crash in Hoboken, New Jersey that frightened everyone in the station, and killed at least one person as it went off its rails and crashed through the station.

But it is the hacked message that happened hours before that makes this event truly creepy.

“Civil Authorities have issues a Hazardous Materials Warning for The United States. Effective until September 29, 02:16AM EDT. Would you. Could you. On a Train? Wait for further instructions.”

Read more at SHTF

The site’s autocomplete tools are set up to hide some kinds of negative suggestions, meaning that all bad things are hidden

YouTube is shamelessly incentivizing censorship by involving its users in a new program called “YouTube Heroes,” wherein creators and consumers are awarded points and exclusive perks for reporting negative videos and policing negative community content.

The host of the first presidential debate on Monday night, Hofstra University in New York, may have broken the law and could be in line for a huge fine.

Reporters at the event were appalled to find that among the heavily marked-up items they were offered – $150 to rent a lamp, anyone? – was a $200 charge for a "secure wireless internet connection."

Worse than the clear effort to price-gouge people trying to file stories, however, was the fact that the university decided that only its wireless access points were allowed to be used, and even sent someone around with a Wi-Fi signal detector apparently threatening to throw out anyone who was using an "unauthorized" access point.

“With respect to Iran, when I became secretary of state, Iran was weeks away from having enough nuclear material to form a bomb. They had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle under the Bush administration. They had built covert facilities. They had stocked them with centrifuges that were whirling away.”

At first glance, it’s an innocuous descriptor of Iran’s nuclear program, which Clinton later said the U.S. was able to tame through diplomatic and economic sanctions. But that last line — “stocked them with centrifuges that were whirling away,” is pure shade. Because Stuxnet’s primary target was the centrifuge system in the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Hackers use the fascination with celebrity news to entice unsuspecting fans to visit sites that can download viruses onto their computers and steal passwords or personal information.

Try this workaround if you're frozen out

WhatsApp’s hugely controversial data-sharing deal with Facebookis now officially banned in Germany.

The two companies announced last month that WhatsApp would start handing over data about its users to Facebook. Facebook would then use that data to help its ads, generating more information about the people using it.

The world's largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has been clocked from the same network of 152,463 compromised low-powered cameras and internet-of-things devices which punted a media outlet off the internet.

Akamai CSO laments pisspoor security design practices

The huge distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which wiped security journalist Brian Krebs' website from the internet came from a million-device-strong Internet of Things botnet.

"Attack appears to include numerous IoT devices, including security cameras. Still itemizing them," an Akamai spokesman told El Reg by email.

The attack "included substantial shaped traffic (traffic directly controlled by that botnet operator), rather than merely reflected, amplified unshaped traffic," he added.

By Derrick Broze

The release of thousands of pages of documents has revealed that California law enforcement have secretly acquired social media monitoring tools that focus on activists.

The American Civil Liberties Union of California has obtained thousands of pages of documents pertaining to California law enforcement agencies secretly purchasing social media surveillance software. The ACLU of California filed open records requests with 63 police departments, sheriffs, and district attorneys across California and found that at least 20 agencies across California are in possession of social media monitoring tools...

Clinton Campaign can't answer why staffers referred to 'Hillary Cover-up'

YouTube is shamelessly incentivizing censorship by involving its users in a new program called “YouTube Heroes,” wherein creators and consumers are awarded points and exclusive perks for reporting negative videos and policing negative community content.

If you were worried that the debate over Internet data caps would get bogged down in technical mumbo-jumbo, fear no more—it's actually much simpler than you think.
Mediacom, a US cable company with a little over 1.1 million Internet subscribers in 22 states, has put the matter to rest by explaining to the Federal Communications Commission that its customers shouldn't get unlimited data because using the Internet is just like eating Oreos.

Nevertheless, before physical devices were connected to the Internet, the damage hackers could cause was confined to financial ruin, damaged reputations and nuisance. Now it could prove deadly.

Last summer, a pair of hackers took control of a Jeep Cherokee over the Internet during a demonstration for Wired magazine, leading to a recall of 1.4 million vehicles. Hackers have also reported finding vulnerabilities in connected drug infusion pumps and pacemakers that could allow them to deliver lethal doses of medication or stop hearts.

With that in mind, a snooping vibrator starts to sound pretty tame.

With the latest update of its iPhone operating system, it seems the company might have made a big blunder that directly affects its users' security and privacy.

Apple has downgraded the hashing algorithm for iOS 10 from "PBKDF2 SHA-1 with 10,000 iterations" to "plain SHA256 with a single iteration," potentially allowing attackers to brute-force the password via a standard desktop computer processor.

It's no surprise that public transport delivers up a huge number of BSODs, since transport needs to disseminate lots of information.

So let's open this week's BSOD Watch with not one, but three BSODs readers spotted at London's aviation paradise, Heathrow Airport.

Computer users have faced major technical issues with Microsoft's new Windows 10 software since its launch in July last year, according to research by U.K. consumer charity Which.

"We've received well over 1,000 complaints about Windows 10, as well as plenty of comments ... with PC users telling us that this software update has brought them nothing but problems," Andrew Laughlin, a senior researcher at the consumer association, said in a blogpost on Thursday.

Consumers in the U.K. have told the company about being "nagged" by Microsoft to install the operating system update and, despite declining advances, have experienced the Windows 10 software installing itself anyway.

Various problems, once it is installed, have included printers, wi-fi cards and speakers no longer working, as well as instances of lost files and email accounts no longer syncing, according to Which.

The patent, “QUERY FORMULATION VIA TASK CONTINUUM”, published yesterday (22/9/2016), notes that efficient searching is enhanced if more information is available regarding the user intent, giving the example of somewhat doing a school report on dancing, and noting that despite the user having done some work already, when they hit the browser to search the search engine would not have any idea what the user is working on except for what they have typed into the search bar.

One of the biggest web attacks ever seen has been aimed at a security blogger after he exposed hackers who carry out such attacks for cash.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was aimed at the website of industry expert Brian Krebs.

At its peak, the attack aimed 620 gigabits of data a second at the site.

Text found in attack data packets suggested it was mounted to protest against Mr Krebs' work to uncover who was behind a prolific DDoS attack.

FBI director James Comey recently recommended that we all cover our webcams with tape for security reasons. Comey believes that doing so is a simple step for people to "take responsibility for their own safety and security."

Earlier this week, a twitter user named "Katica" seemingly proved the "intent" of the Hillary campaign to destroy and/or tamper with federal records by revealing the Reddit thread of Paul Combetta (aka the "Oh Shit" guy; aka "stonetear"). But what's most crazy about this story is that "Katica" was able to discover the greatest "bombshell" of the entire Hillary email scandal with just a couple of internet searches while the FBI, with unlimited access to government records, spent months "investigating" this case and missed it all. The only question now is whether the FBI "missed" this evidence because of gross incompetence or because of other motivating factors?

Now, courtesy of an opinion piece posted on The Daily Caller, we know exactly how "Katica" pieced her "bombshell" discovery together...the folks at the FBI may want to take some notes.

On Tuesday, North Korea reconfigured its nameserver to reveal — apparently by accident — a full list of its .kp domain names. The discovery was made by security engineer Matt Bryant, who published the leaked data on Github, and first reported by Motherboard. According to the data, the country has just 28 registered domains.

Motherboard puts that number in perspective. There are more than 140 million .com and .net domains in the world, and millions more for each country code top level domain, like .fr for France and .cn in China. Writing on the North Korea Tech blog, Martyn Williams notes that the list doesn’t include domains for North Korea’s intranet, which is available to a select few in the country and inaccessible from the global web.

But the leak nevertheless offers a fascinating look at online life under a totalitarian regime. Among the 28 domains is a site for recipes, a travel website, and what looks like a social network.

A student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia is accused of hacking into his professor's computer to improve his grades.

Chase Arthur Hughes, 19, was arrested and charged this week after allegedly raiding the university's computers in May. The teen made a number of alterations to his grades, and those of his friends, for two classes, it is claimed. He allegedly upgraded one of his grades from a B to an A, and changed two other people's grades from F to A and C to A.

Intel's new power management features aren't supported on Linux.

Sources close to the investigation into how NSA surveillance tools and zero-day exploits ended up in the hands of hackers has found that the agency knew about the loss for three years but didn’t want anyone to know.

Multiple sources told Reuters last night that the investigation into the data dump released by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers had determined that the NSA itself wasn't directly hacked and the software didn't come from exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden. Instead it appears one of the NSA staffers got sloppy.

It appears at this stage that the staffer, who has since left the NSA for other reasons, stashed the sensitive tools on an outside server – likely a bounce box – after an operation. Miscreants then found that machine, raided it and hit the jackpot.

Facebook has been caught miscalculating viewing numbers for those watching ads on the site.

The company admitted it had wrongly measured average viewing times for video ads by removing views of less than three seconds from its calculations, which helped to bump up the stats.

The mistake overstates median viewing times for video adverts by between 60 and 80 per cent, according to a letter sent by ad-buying behemoth Publicis to its clients, which was seen by the Wall Street Journal.

Spy chief Alex Younger says the leaks from Edward Snowden have undermined the relationship between tech firms and intelligence agencies.

The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), otherwise known as MI6, made the comments at a conference on The Ethos and Profession of Intelligence at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

The latest massive data breach, one which may or may not be blamed on Putin, came overnight when ReCode reported that Yahoo is poised to confirm that a hacker has exposed approximately 200 million user accounts.

Microsoft has quietly excised Windows 10 free upgrade offers from Windows 7 and 8, aka the GWX.exe .

PCs running Windows 7 or 8.x and Windows Update will silently delete the nagware, thanks to a new update dubbed KB3184143.

“This update removes the Get Windows 10 app and other software related to the Windows 10 free upgrade offer that expired on July 29, 2016,” Microsoft's article says, advising that no action other than a restart will be required to do the deed.

Microsoft has been given a roasting by consumer group Which? over Windows 10 woes reported by users, with the organisation calling for compensation for those who found their PCs bricked after auto-updates.

Which? said that it had surveyed its members for their experiences with the latest version of Windows, which was released just over a year ago.

The results make for interesting reading, with 12 per cent of those who installed Windows 10 reporting that they actually reverted back to their previous version of Windows, and half of those saying it was because the upgrade adversely affected their PC.

By Derrick Broze

A coalition of seventeen organizations has launched an effort to combat the growing Surveillance State by supporting accountability measures in eleven cities across the United States...

The social media company is forcing users who include "deplorable" in their profile names to change t

Leaked NSA hacking tools are now being used on Cisco customers, according to the tech giant. The company published an advisory on Friday saying that NSA grade hacking tools are now being used against customers.

The authors wrote that the “Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of exploitation of the vulnerability for some Cisco customers who are running the affected platforms.” Cisco have not yet identified those that have fallen prey to the exploit.

The vulnerability affects a variety of Cisco product and by extension, anyone who is using them including any Cisco PIX firewalls and Cisco products running affected releases of Cisco iOS software, iOS XE software and iOS XR software. However, the company are currently checking whether the vulnerability affects any more of their products.

German website Netzpolitik might be headed for another treason investigation. The German government went after the site once for publishing leaked documents detailing mass surveillance operations and it may do so again after its latest publication.

The site has obtained a classified report from the country's intelligence oversight office that shows the BND (Germany's intelligence service) illegally collected and stored data and information obtained via its partnership with the NSA.

Jigsaw, in other words, has become ­Google’s Internet justice league, and it represents the notion that the company is no longer content with merely not being evil. It wants—as difficult and even ethically fraught as the impulse may be—to do good.

(Note: So . .. Did Evalion's new YouTube channel get "Shoah'd" today by Google's new "Jigsaw AI Auto-Censoring" software after just one video posted?)

For being an IT specialist, this guy sure left a breadcrumb trail more obvious than Hansel and Gretel.

The internet is increasingly a “playground” for predatory pedophiles, a charity warns, allowing them to groom children, view pictures, and even direct live sexual abuse online.

By Rainey Reitman

The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December...

Allows Immediate Access to Phone Numbers, Locations, and Full Names

SAMSUNG will tomorrow force software to install on recalled Galaxy Note7 smartphones in Australia, crippling the handsets and preventing their batteries from fully recharging.

The South Korean tech giant issued a warning about the unprecedented “mandatory” update today, revealing the software would “automatically download and install” itself on old Note7 smartphones and would stop its battery from charging more than 60 per cent.

Australians still using the smartphones, recalled due to faulty batteries and a risk of fire, will receive a warning message about the update, and will then be told “for safety concerns related to the battery, the maximum charge will be limited to 60 per cent from now on”.

Chinese researchers control brakes, lights and mirrors with wireless attack

Special display screens that allow motorists to view their Facebook and Twitter sites have been branded a distraction and a 'potential death trap'.

Such screens are already available in models of Toyotas, Audis and Hondas, with Ford and Nissan set to follow suit next year.

Hillary Clinton’s computer specialist Paul Combetta, who deleted her e-mails for her, was found on Reddit asking for tips on deleting evidence for a “VIP” in 2014.

Hours after this was found out today by Twitter user @GOPPollAnalyst, the email-deleter then deleted the Reddit posts that showed him asking for tips on deleting evidence.

Oh, the irony!

Large numbers of HP printer owners found their printers stopped recognising unofficial printer ink cartridges on 13 September.

Dutch printer ink vendor 123inkt said it had received more than 1,000 complaints in one day.

HP said that during its last firmware update, settings had been changed so HP printers would communicate with only HP-chipped cartridges.

Kyle Hunt speaks with Frederick C. Blackburn of Blackbird9’s Breakfast Club about his experience training intelligence agents, what he learned about Israeli spying infrastructure and operations, his activities as a whistleblower, the Snowden revelations, internet censorship efforts, and current events related to the US presidential election and geopolitical turmoil in Syria.

It seems Google does record audio from microphones all the time, despite attempts to play down the situation. The “hotword” searching – when you initiate a search by saying “Ok Google” – has been criticized before, when it was downloaded to open-source browsers running Chromium. However, major privacy concerns remain as Google doesn’t start recording when you say “Ok Google”; it was recording before you said the hotword.

By Derrick Broze

Newly leaked manuals for “Stingray” surveillance provides a fresh look into how law enforcement and government agencies make use of the secretive device...

By Derrick Broze

An international campaign has launched to pressure President Obama into pardoning whistleblower Edward Snowden.

From the moment The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and O Globo began publishing leaked government surveillance documents, Edward Snowden has been the subject of controversy...

By Whitney Webb

Following Facebook’s censorship controversy over a world famous photograph of the Vietnam War, Facebook has agreed to “work together” with Israel’s government to censor content Israeli officials deem to be improper. Facebook officially announced the “cooperative” arrangement after a meeting took place between Israeli government ministers and top Facebook officials on September 11th. The Israeli government’s frenzied push to monitor and censor Facebook content it deems inappropriate follows the viral success of BDS, or Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, a global non-violent movement that works to expose Israeli human rights violations...

Nearly two weeks after Samsung recalled the Galaxy Note 7 due to the risk of explosion, the device is still being used just as frequently by its owners. This is according to data from Apteligent, a mobile analytics company that claims "usage rate of the phone among existing users has been almost the exact same since the day of the recall."

It seems not even exploding batteries can tear users away from their smartphones, but the apparent reticence of users to get rid of their faulty devices is not being helped by Samsung's mismanagement of the recall process. Swapping 2.5 million smartphones is certainly no easy task, but the South Korean firm has not helped the situation by issuing confusing information to consumers. The longer the situation goes on, the more damage it does to the company's brand.

It's not clever or original to compare modern technology to the dystopian surveillance devices imagined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thankfully, the UK launch of Amazon Echo earlier today means comparison is no longer necessary. The “constantly listening” smart speaker is not alike to Orwell’s Party-monitoring telescreen, it is it. Both devices are designed to simultaneously broadcast entertainment and listen in on your conversations. Yet one is the tyrannical tool of an authoritarian dictatorship and the other is available for £149.99 – plus £4.75 postage and packaging – on Amazon today.

Earlier this month, YouTube, the behemoth video-sharing website was accused of censoring users.

Claiming some of their videos had been barred from making money through the company’s ad services, YouTube hosts like Philip DeFranco spoke out against the policy, claiming over “a dozen of his videos had been flagged as inappropriate for advertising, including one dinged for ‘graphic content or excessive strong language.’“

In a video entitled “YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel and I’m Not Sure What To Do,” DeFranco called YouTube’s policy “censorship with a different name,” since users touching on what the company considers to be controversial subjects end up losing money. “If you do this on the regular, and you have no advertising,” DeFranco added, “it’s not sustainable.”

The U.S. intelligence community declined to conduct a required assessment of the damage to national security caused by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton sending and receiving secrets on a private email server. “ODNI is not leading an [intelligence community]-wide damage assessment and is not aware of any individual IC element conducting such formal assessments,” Joel D. Melstad, a spokesman for the of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said.

The US is prepared to end its monopoly on internet management, and technology heavyweights can’t wait. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon have all signed a letter urging Congress to not delay the transition, which is scheduled for October 1.

The World Wide Web is about to become a very literal term as Congress looks to relinquish operating the database for .com and .net based domain names, as well as the corresponding numeric addresses that computers connect to.

Sites owned by Viacom, Mattel, Hasbro and JumpStart tracked kids' online activity, violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

John McCain just had a hearing on cybersecurity. The primary point of the hearing seems to have been to get Admiral Mike Rogers to say the nation would be less safe if we split CYBERCOM Commander from Director of NSA (that is, if we split his job into two). That’s in apparent contradiction to what Rogers said at an industry conference last week.

McCain’s secondary point seems to have been to raise concerns that an unsuccessful attempt by hackers to access Arizona voting data might affect his re-election effort.

His tertiary point seems to have been to attack Apple and Twitter for making efforts to protect their customers. After getting a witness to comment about Twitter’s long-term refusal to let Dataminr to sell Twitter data to the CIA, he suggested perhaps the response should be to “expose” the company.

It's 2016 and virtual printing can make a desktop hypervisor run almost anything

Warriors from industry and law enforcement collective No More Ransom have cleansed more than 2500 machines of ransomware by distributing free decryption keys and other tools to eradicate infections.

No More Ransom is an alliance of cops and anti-malware experts including McAfee and soon-to-be-former parent company Intel, Kaspersky Labs, Europol's EC3 cybercrime division, and Dutch police.

The group has uploaded thousands of decryption keys and tools to help users avoid paying ransom to net scum who use malware to encrypt precious files demanding cash to revert the damage.

Webmaster addition: Note that these private companies, with far less resources, are able to do the job that the US Government, with more resources, cannot or will no do!

... and gov wants more of our data?

“Dumb. She should have done a ‘Full Monty’ at the beginning,” Powell wrote. He added: “I warned her staff three times over the past two years not to try to connect it to me. I am not sure HRC even knew or understood what was going on in the basement.”

Everyone's got a price

Facebook has lost a legal bid to prevent a 14-year-old girl from suing the social media giant over a naked photo that was posted on a “shame page.” The social network insists it is protected under European law.

A high court judge in Belfast rejected an attempt by Facebook to have the girl’s claim thrown out on Monday.

Two technicians who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server refused on Tuesday to answer questions posed by House lawmakers, citing their constitutional right to remain silent.

NATO’s cyber defence is based on several serious problems which, taken, together, may act as a destabilizing factor for international security as a whole. Firstly, in its 2013 report, the UN Group of Governmental Experts stated “that international law and in particular the United Nations Charter, is applicable and is essential to maintaining peace and stability and promoting an open, secure, peaceful and accessible ICT environment.” However, there is still no answer to the question of how international law should be applied. NATO is preparing its answer to that question. The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare 2.0 is set for release in 2016; the manual is a revised version of the 2013 document.

Facebook, Twitter and news organizations including Agence France-Presse have joined a coalition of media and technology groups seeking to filter out online misinformation and improve news quality on social networks.