Month: June 2016

The Seychelles-based VPN provider Proxy.sh has withdrawn an exit node from its warrant canary—a statement certifying that "to the date of publication, no warrants, searches, or seizures that have not been reported in our Transparency Report, have actually taken place."

The blog post in question simply states: "We would like to inform our users that we do not wish any longer to mention France 8 (85.236.153.236) in our warrant canary until further notice." The statement implies that the France 8 node has been subject to a warrant, but that a gag order forbids Proxy.sh from revealing that fact directly. It is not clear who served the warrant, and for obvious reasons, Proxy.sh is unable to say.

However, the TorrentFreak site obtained the following comment from Proxy.sh: "We recommend our users to no longer connect to it. We are striving to do whatever it takes to include that node into our warrant canary again."

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the Google Chrome browser that could allow users to bypass itscopy protection system and download content from streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. According to Wired, Google was alerted to the problem on May 24, but is yet to issue a patch.

The vulnerability centers around the Widevine digital rights management system—which Google owns and has implemented into Chrome—and specifically how it handles decryption of encrypted media streams. Widevine uses two pieces of tech to protect content: the encrypted media extensions (EME), which handle key exchanges and other high-level functions, and a content decryption module (CDM), which unscrambles encrypted video for playback in the browser.

Unfortunately for Google, the researchers discovered it's possible to hijack the decrypted movie stream right after the CDM decrypts the film, before it's displayed in the browser. With the right software—and let's face it, it doesn't take long for pirating software to appear following the discovery of a vulnerability—any user would be able to download streaming content for keeps.

Back before all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that briefly captured the imagination of Hi-Fi freaks across the world. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools around the world, and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland.

The humble compact cassette was already more than a decade old in 1976, and its pros and cons had by then become fairly clear to most punters. It wasn’t a huge reel-to-reel deck as was used by pro studios and was thus portable by the standards of the day—even though Sony's cassette Walkman was still a few years away.

The compact cassette's sound was generally acceptable for a generation raised on crackly mono Dansette record players. But the small tape size—two sets of stereo tracks squeezed onto a strip of tape just 3.81mm wide—and the slow playback speed of 4.76cm (1⅞ inches) per second rendered the device incapable of really capturing and playing anything near the full sonic range that music ultimately requires. What's more, there was often plenty of hiss that couldn’t easily be masked.