EFF initiates a new blog – Stupid Patent of the Month, featuring spectacularly dumb patents that have been recently issued or asserted. With this series, we hope to illustrate by example just how badly reform is needed—at the Patent Office, in court, and in Congress.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices by Jonathan Zdziarski
Slides from the talk Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS by Jonathan Zdziarski at the 2014 Hope X conference in New York.
Patent Reform by Example – Tesla Opens Up Patents
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced in a blog post he has "Open Sourced" Tesla's electronic vehicle patents.
FBI Weighs Looser Pot Rules for New Hires – Funny
From todays WSJ – quote from FBI Director James Comey
Congress has authorized the FBI to add 2,000 personnel to its rolls this year, and many of those new recruits will be assigned to tackle cybercrimes, a growing priority for the agency. That is a problem, said Mr. Comey, as a lot of the nation's top computer programmers and hacking gurus are also fond of marijuana.
"I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cybercriminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview," Mr. Comey said. He added that the agency was now "grappling" with how to amend its marijuana policies. Full Article
Fixing the “ACL found but not expected on …” error during OSX Volume Repair
Symptom – Running the OSX Disk Utility program and selecting Verify Disk permissions results is multiple error of ACL found but not expected on [filename]” While these errors can be safely ignored (ACLs are Access Control Lists) it does make reading the results of the disk verify difficult. Fix – Fletcher Tomalty has written a python script that can be run from the command line to remove these unexpected ACLs. The script uses the OSX Disk Utility to find the files and then does a sudo chmod -h -N on each of them. I have used it successfully on Mountain Lion 10.9.9.
FCC’s New Rules Could Threaten Net Neutrality
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is circulating a proposal for new FCC rules on the issue of network neutrality, the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks equally. Unfortunately, early reports suggest those rules may do more harm than good. READ MORE
Why You Shouldn’t Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ
Wall Street Journal
April 18, 2014
Talk about dirty money: Scientists are discovering a surprising number of microbes living on cash.
In the first comprehensive study of the DNA on dollar bills, researchers at New York University’s Dirty Money Project found that currency is a medium of exchange for hundreds of different kinds of bacteria as bank notes pass from hand to hand.
By analyzing genetic material on $1 bills, the NYU researchers identified 3,000 types of bacteria in all—many times more than in previous studies that examined samples under a microscope. Even so, they could identify only about 20% of the non-human DNA they found because so many microorganisms haven’t yet been cataloged in genetic data banks. READ MORE at WSJ
Proposal to Prevent Grid Attack Lacks Power, Critics Say
April 17, 2014
A year after gunfire knocked out a substation that funnels power to Silicon Valley, the U.S. government has promised to make power companies amp up protection of equipment vital to the electric grid. Read full article at the WSJ
