hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1105.txt

Episode: 1105
Title: HPR1105: TGTM Newscast for 10/24/2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1105/hpr1105.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:02:51

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You're listening to Turkey To Me News, number 79, record for Wednesday, October 24, 2012.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition, to get the full podcast
including political, commentary and other controversial topics.
Please visit www.tourgeektme.us.
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And now the tech round up.
From eff.log, date October 22, 2012, by Hany Fakuri and Trevor Tim.
Stingrays, the biggest technological threat to cell phone privacy you don't know about.
The Friday EFF and the ACLU submitted an amicus brief in United States vs. Rig Maden, a closely
failed case that has enormous consequences for individuals' fourth amendment rights in
their home and on their cell phone.
As the Wall Street Journal explained today, the technology, at the heart of the case, invades
the privacy of countless innocent people that have never even been suspected of a crime.
Rig Maden sentenced around a secretive device that federal law enforcement and local police
have been using with increased frequency.
An international mobile subscriber identity locator or IMSI catcher.
These devices allow the government to electronically search large areas for a particular cell phone
signal, sucking down data on potentially thousands of innocent people along the way while attempting
to avoid many of the traditional limitations set forth in the Constitution.
The Stingray is a brand name of an IMSI catcher targeted and sold to law enforcement.
A Stingray works by masquerading as a cell phone tower to which your mobile phone sends
signals to every 7-15 seconds whether you are on a call or not and tricks your phone
into connecting to it.
As a result, the government can figure out who, when, and to where you are, calling
the precise location of every device within range and with some devices even capture
the content of your conversations.
Given the breadth of information that can stealthily obtain, the government prefers the
public and judges alike not know exactly how Stingray's work.
And they have even argued in court that it should be able to keep its use of the technology
secret.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a FOIA request for more information
on Stingrays, but the FBI is dragging its feet and is sitting on 25,000 pages of documents
explaining the device.
In Rigmaiden, the government asked a federal judge in Northern California to order Verizon
to assist in locating the defendant, who was suspected in a tax fraud scheme, but after
they received an order telling Verizon to provide the location information of an aircraft
they thought to be the defendants, the government took matters into their own hands.
They claimed this authorization somehow permitted its own use of a Stingray.
Not only did the Stingray find the suspect, Rigmaiden, but it also got the records of
every other innocent cell phone users nearby.
The government now concedes that the user device was a search under the Fourth Amendment
and claims it had the warrant, despite the fact that, as we explained in our brief, the
order directs Verizon to provide the government with information and assistance, but nowhere
authorizes the government to search or seize anything.
In fact, the government's application made no mention of an IMSI catcher or a Stingray
and only has a brief sentence about its plans buried at the end of an 18-page declaration.
The mobile tracking equipment ultimately generates a signal that fixes the geographic position
of the target broadband access cards selling the telephone.
A judge initially signed off on this order, but clearly the government did not accurately
and adequately explained what it was really up to.
Beyond the government's conduct in this specific case, there is an even broader danger in
law enforcement using these devices to locate suspects.
Regardless of whether they explained the technology to the judges, these devices allowed the
government to conduct broad searches amount to general warrants, the exact type of search
the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
A Stingray, which could potentially be beamed into all the houses in one neighborhood,
looking for a particular signal, is the digital version of the pre-revolutionary war practice
of British soldiers going tour to tour, searching American homes without rationale or suspicion
let alone judicial approval.
The Fourth Amendment was enacted to prevent these general fishing expeditions.
As the Supreme Court has explained, a warrant requires probable cause for all places searched
and is supposed to detail the scope of the search to ensure nothing is left to the discretion
of the officer executing the warrant.
But if uninformed courts approve the unregulated use of Stingrays, they are essentially allowing
the government to enter into the home via a cellular signal at law enforcement's discretion
and rummaging at will without any supervision, the government can't simply use technology
to up end centuries of constitutional law to conduct a search they would be prevent from
doing physically.
To read the rest of this article, follow links in the show notes.
From torrentfreak.com
Dated October 18, 2012 by IndigMax, new mega upload will deflect copyright liability and become
rate proof.
This week the hottest story in file sharing was the announcement that the pirate bay had
boosted its security by migrating its operation into the cloud.
Performance and cost issues aside, the main aim of the site is to have as much uptime as
possible and that necessarily involves not getting rated.
The site's operators believe they have that covered.
It's a day later and another famous file sharing operation is preparing for its relaunch
with similar issues in mind, albeit from a different angle.
The return of mega upload, or rather mega as it will be called, will have an eye firmly
placed on security to ensure not only a completely legal operation, but one there's almost
immune to shutdown.
Speaking with wiredkim.com, and business partner Matthays Ortman have been outlining how encryption
will strengthen mega's safe harbors.
Before users upload their files to mega, they will be encrypted using the AES algorithm.
Users will then be provided with a unique decryption key giving them sole responsibility
for who can have future use of the file.
Not only does this ensure complete security, and privacy for users' files, mega will
have no knowledge of any encrypted file's contents at any stage, effectively deflecting
any future accusation that they were aware of how this service was being used.
But of course, none of this can protect mega from the kind of act-first worry-later strategy
employed by the U.S. government when it raid mega upload in January, so to counter
that kind of threat, mega will employ some technical countermeasures, including placing
sets of servers in separate countries.
Quote, so even if one country decides to go completely berserk from a legal perspective
and freeze all servers, for example, which we don't expect because we're fully complied
with all the laws of the countries we place servers in, or if a natural disaster happens,
there's still an allocation where all the files are available or explained.
This way it's impossible to be subjected to the kind of abuse that we've had in the
U.S. he adds.
To read the rest of this article, follow links in the show notes.
From EFF.org, day at October 5, 2012, by Jillian York, EFF condemns a rest of prominent Cuban
bloggers.
EFF is deeply concerned to hear of the arrest of Cuban dissident blogger Yoni Sanchez,
along with her husband journalist Renaldo Escobar, and blogger Augustin Diaz, according
to reports, the trio was arrested in the eastern province of Bayamo, where they had
traveled to attend the trial of a Spanish political activist facing vehicular homicide
charges in the crash that killed democracy activists as Waldo Péra and Harold Capero.
The purpose of Cora Mero's visit to Cuba was to meet with human rights activists.
The official reason for their arrest is currently unknown.
Global voices has compiled reactions to the arrest from Cuban bloggers.
Sanchez has become one of Cuba's most prominent bloggers over the years, winning several
awards and being named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2008.
Due to Cuba's tight restrictions on internet use, she has often relied upon networks outside
of the country to publish her posts.
Sanchez has repeatedly been denied permission to leave the country.
We joined the Committee to Protect Journalists in condemning the arrest of the three bloggers
and call on Cuban authorities to release Sanchez Escobar and Diaz immediately.
From torrentfreak.com by Nick Maxx, day of October 16, 2012, DMC noticed forces 1,450,000
education blogs, offline.
The DMCA gives rights holders a mechanism through which they can have content or links
to content removed from the internet if they infringe on their copyrights.
Google alone receives millions of these kinds of requests every year and to be fair a majority
appear to play by the rules.
However, the system, or rather, the way it is being played, is clumsy.
Every week we're seeing wrongful takedowns, including those designed to hurt free speech,
bifold dissenting voices, and some that are just overly aggressive and totally blind
to the collateral damage they can cause.
Today we see the DMCA take down that fits squarely in the leader category, and involves
a publisher, Pearson, and the operator of WordPress Information Resource, WPMU Dev, or
EduBlogs, described as the oldest and second largest WordPress multi-site setup on the web.
While according to the company's stats, EduBlogs have more than 1,451,000 teacher and
student blogs online, but last week, due to the DMCA action by Pearson, and a massive
overreaction by EduBlogs server host server Beach, every single one of them was taken offline.
The problem, five years ago an Eduberg user called Clive published a copy of the Bex
Hopelessness Scale, a proct to which Pearson owns the copyright.
One of our teachers in 2007 had shared a copy of Bex Hopelessness Scale with his class,
a 20 question list, tolling some 279 words, published in 1974, that Pearson would like
you to pay $120 for, EduBlogs founder, and CEO James Former explains.
However, instead of simply contacting EduBlogs where their takedown knows, Pearson contacted
server Beach instead.
This tactic of contacting host of websites instead of the sites themselves is becoming
more widespread.
A developing strategy of anti-piracy companies is to cause as much aggravation as possible
with their takedown notices to make hosting difficult for anyone deemed to be an infringer.
Whether Pearson follows this strategy is unknown, but if they want to cause a lot of trouble
with this notice it definitely worked, despite EduBlogs complying with the notice.
So we looked at the infringing blog, figured that whether or not we liked it, Pearson
will probably correct about it, and as it hadn't been used in the last five years,
it's blocked the site so that the content was no longer available and informed server
Beach.
Says Former.
However, Former says that server Beach detected that the offending blog was still in the
EduBlogs web cache, and even though it was inaccessible to the public, responded with
the following notice, and closed as a picture of the notice.
A few hours later, server Beach took action, not to shut down just the offending blog,
but to take the whole EduBlogs operation offline.
A total of more than 1.45 million blogs.
That's a huge number of people affected, even if each blog has just a single reader.
The blogs were eventually restored, but now there is some debate over who said what to
who and when.
Former says that server Beach now inform him that they tried to contact EduBlogs 10 days
earlier via an automated system, but Former denies they received anything.
To read the rest of this article, follow links in the show notes.
From TechDirt.com by Mike Masnick, dated Friday, October 19, 2012.
School suspend students for finding Racy Photo Teacher accidentally put on their iPads.
We've seen schools that ridiculously blame men suspend their students for videotaping
misdeeds by staff or faculty, but this latest story is really bizarre.
A female middle school teacher in Anderson, Indiana, somehow, and the details are not
at all clear.
Put a Racy Photo herself onto a school-issued iPad that students were using.
They found the photo, and the school suspended the students.
Again, the details are pretty hazy.
The photo was described by one of the students as a topless photo, but a police report on
the instance said it was from the neck down with partial exposure.
At the link above, Cash Hill suggests this sounds more like, quote, a classic no-face
no-shirt shot that involved a bra and possible cleavage, but no actual nudity, unquote.
This is also not entirely clear how it got onto the iPad.
Though the suggestion is that it may have had something to do with Apple's iCloud sinking
across devices, it's entirely possible that the teacher used her own account for her
own iPhone and the school iPad, leading to the images from her phone, sinking to the iPad.
No matter what, it makes no sense that the students are suspended and may face even more
punishment.
Quote, those students have been suspended and threatened with expulsion, unquote.
The students, quite reasonably, are infuriated this, quote, it's not our fault that she had
the photo on there.
Trout said, we couldn't do anything not to look at it.
If it just popped up when he pressed the button, it was her fault that she had the photo
on there, her iPhone sink to it.
She had to have pressed something to make all of her photos sink on there, unquote.
When asked about it, the school district's assistant superintendent, Beth Clock, told
the media, the students' punishment will not be changed.
Hopefully, the students will seek to get the suspension overturned in some way, because
based on the details, this seems absolutely ridiculous.
Other headlines in the news, to read these articles, follow links, and the show notes
under the other headlines section, pirate bay moves to the cloud becomes rate proof.
The command line podcast, 1016-2012, interview with Cory Doctro over the note novel, pirate
cinema.
A tale of two countries, New Zealand apologized for illegal domestic spying, while US still
refuses to acknowledge NSA's warrantless wiretapping.
News from tech.com, worldstory.com, islingreview.com, and allgov.com used under a range permission.
News from torrentfreak.com and EFF.org used under permission of the creative commons
by attribution license.
News from democracynow.org used under permission of the creative commons by attribution, non-commercial,
no derivatives license.
News sources retain their respective copyrights.
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