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3.12.28: longterm
VIDEO: 'Every day is Bill Murray day'
Feds say NSA “bogeyman” did not find Silk Road’s servers
The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn't need the National Security's help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.
The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site's leader. Trial is set for later this year.
The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server's IP address through a misconfiguration in the site's login window. They said that a US warrant wasn't required to search the Icelandic server because "warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas."
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VIDEO: Parents 'emotional' as deaf baby hears
US opens first commercial plant that converts corn waste to fuel
So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they're probably going to have to be made from something that can't also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar.
The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation's first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.
"Project Liberty," the result of a joint venture between US-based POET and the Netherlands' Royal DSM, will have the capacity to process over 750 tons of corn stover each day. Stover is the inedible parts of the plant: husks, cobs, the stalk and leaves. Although intended to work with corn (hence the Iowa location), it's possible that the facility could be used for other sources of cellulose, like grasses.
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Barclays brings finger-vein biometrics to Internet banking
Barclays has announced the arrival of personal biometric scanners to keep your Internet banking security firmly under your thumb.
Gone are the days of fumbling with desktop card readers, phone authentication, and PIN codes as a finger scanner will be available to wealthy corporate banking clients from 2015, and the rest of us surely soon after.
The device, developed with Hitachi's Finger Vein Authentication Technology (VeinID), will read the subdermal patterns of the client's finger vasculature in order to combat identity fraud. Vein pattern recognition holds several advantages over fingerprint scanning, including reliability and speed, with the authentication taking only two seconds.
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The Sims 4 review: Halfway house
CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Because I am a particularly awful person, I started my first playthrough of The Sims 4 by trapping one of its virtual citizens in a four-wall box with no doors. This simple, horrible power has been available in Sims games for over 15 years, and I am confident in claiming that everybody who has played the series has done this at least once, if just to test the weirdness boundaries of EA and Maxis’ dollhouse-management series.
Used to be, doing this resulted in your Sims soiling themselves and swaying awkwardly until keeling over. That’s still the case, only now it comes with the added awfulness of the game outright telling you how your character feels about the predicament. Any Sim you control in The Sims 4 has his or her portrait displayed in a corner of the screen at all times, and those come with giant, white letters, and a color to match, explaining exactly what the simulated person is feeling and why.
Our test case, Ashley, turned “very uncomfortable” within a few hours of game time, owing to a mix of sleeplessness and a fetid stench; 18 hours later, she turned “desolate,” indicating that she’d grown very lonely in her den of sadness. Roughly 24 hours after that, she fell over and vanished, her body and her emotions lost to the sands of time.
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VIDEO: Ceasefire holding but 'very fragile'
AUDIO: Scientists 'make telepathy breakthrough'
VIDEO: Gaza girl weeps for her father
VIDEO: Blue whale numbers bounce back
3.16.2: stable
3.14.18: longterm
3.10.54: longterm
VIDEO: Policeman jumps on car during protest
When NSA and FBI call for surveillance takeout, these companies deliver
Not every Internet provider can handle the demands of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant or law enforcement subpoena for data. For those companies, Zack Whittaker reports on ZDNet, the answer is to turn to a shadowy class of companies known as “trusted third parties” to do the black bag work of complying with the demands of the feds.
Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), phone companies and Internet providers can charge back the government for their efforts in responding to warrants. AT&T charges the CIA more than $10 million per year for access to its phone call metadata. But smaller ISPs who aren’t frequently hit with warrants can’t afford to keep the infrastructure or manpower on-hand to respond to requests—so they sign up with a “trusted third party” capable of doing the work as an insurance policy against such requests.
Companies such as Neustar, Yaana Technologies, and Subsentio contract with smaller providers and reap the profits from charging federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for the data. Neustar and Yaana are also essentially private intelligence companies, providing large-scale data capture and analytics (though probably not on the scale of NSA’s Xkeyscore.) Neustar is also in the phone number portability business, and owns a number of the new top level domains approved by ICANN.
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