Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Mikhail Deynekin)

The Wall Street Journal just published an incendiary article that says hackers working for the Russian government stole confidential material from an NSA contractor's home computer. The hackers did so, according to the WSJ, after identifying files though the contractor's use of antivirus software from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab.

The report may well be true, but, for now, there's no way to independently confirm it. The report is based on unnamed people the publication says had knowledge of the matter, and it provides no evidence to support its claim. What's more, the lack of detail leaves open the possibility that, even if Kaspersky's AV did help Russia home in on the highly sensitive code and documents, the disclosure was the inadvertent result of a software bug and that no one from Kaspersky Lab cooperated with the attackers in any way. Also lost in the focus on Kaspersky Lab is the startling revelation that yet another NSA insider managed to sneak classified material outside of the NSA's network and put it on an unsecured computer. More of this analysis will follow.

First, here's a summary of what the WSJ reported.

Enlarge (credit: Nabi)

Mattel has scrapped a "smart home" device designed with kids in mind after awful reviews and privacy concerns.

"Aristotle" was first shown off at CES earlier this year. The red-and-white device is meant to be kept in a child's room where its WiFi-enabled camera acts primarily as a voice-controlled baby monitor. It can adjust lighting levels, noting when babies wake up and then playing a lullaby or turning on a night light.

The device also claimed to be able to extensively interact with a young child. It can recognize and answer questions, play games, do singalongs, and teach the ABCs. Aristotle's voice-interaction capabilities are intended to be like a kid-centric version of Amazon's Alexa.

Enlarge / Miami Beach: home of beautiful beaches and thin-skinned police officers. (credit: danielvalle5)

A Miami Beach man is facing criminal charges after he created a parody account purporting to be Ernesto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department. The defendant, Ernesto Orsetti, is charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer, a third-degree felony, according to a press release posted by the Miami New Times.

"Defendant falsely created and assumed the identity of the victim (active police officer/police information officer) via Twitter," the police report says. "The Twitter account, @ernierodmb, had a marked Miami Beach police vehicle and a photo of the victim in uniform."

Twitter had already suspended the account. Orsetti was arrested on Thursday afternoon, the New Times reports.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Worried about a dystopian future full of robots that decide how you see the world? You can wait until tomorrow's fantastic Blade Runner 2049 to imagine how that might look in the future, or you can get there faster by logging in to modern YouTube.

At least, that's The Wall Street Journal's take. The paper tested and confirmed some bizarre content-surfacing results on the massive video-sharing site as recently as this Tuesday. The results, which sullied its "Top News" box with debunked rumors, drove YouTube to "accelerate the rollout of planned changes to its search engine," according to a YouTube source close to the WSJ.

(credit: Internet Archive)

Homero Josh Garza, who founded two cryptocurrency startups, GAW Miners and ZenMiner, has been ordered to pay a final civil judgment of $9.1 million, plus $700,000 in interest.

The judgement, which was formally approved by a federal judge in Connecticut on Tuesday, comes months after Garza pled guilty to a single criminal wire fraud charge. In May 2017, as part of the same lawsuit, Garza’s companies were hit with a default judgment of more than $10 million. No representatives made any formal response to the lawsuit—Garza himself invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege.

According to the civil complaint, which was first brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2015, Garza and his companies sold more than 10,000 “investment contracts representing shares in the profits they claimed would be generated from using their purported computing power to ‘mine’ for virtual currency.”