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It’s the end of the year and the there are just a few shopping days left before Christmas, so there are plenty of stores running last minute sales… but some stores are going a bit further and just giving things away. Ubisoft, GOG, and the H…
It’s the end of the year and the there are just a few shopping days left before Christmas, so there are plenty of stores running last minute sales… but some stores are going a bit further and just giving things away. Ubisoft, GOG, and the Humble Store are all giving away PC games with titles […]
Deals of the Day (12-19-2017) is a post from: Liliputing
HP may have been the first company to bring a laptop with an AMD Ryzen Mobile processor to market. But the $750 HP Envy x360 15z touch is going to get company soon. As promised, Acer is prepping versions of its Swift 3 laptops powered by Ryzen Mobile c…
HP may have been the first company to bring a laptop with an AMD Ryzen Mobile processor to market. But the $750 HP Envy x360 15z touch is going to get company soon. As promised, Acer is prepping versions of its Swift 3 laptops powered by Ryzen Mobile chips. But while HP only offers a […]
Acer Swift 3 laptop with Ryzen 7 2700U coming soon is a post from: Liliputing
Bevor neue Förderprogramme durch die künftige Bundesregierung aufgelegt werden, muss sichergestellt werden, dass die Mittel aus dem laufenden Programm auch tatsächlich in konkreten Ausbauprojekten umgesetzt werden. Das forderte der Breko nach einer Ank…
Bevor neue Förderprogramme durch die künftige Bundesregierung aufgelegt werden, muss sichergestellt werden, dass die Mittel aus dem laufenden Programm auch tatsächlich in konkreten Ausbauprojekten umgesetzt werden. Das forderte der Breko nach einer Ankündigung des Bundesverkehrsministeriums. (Breitband, Glasfaser) A VPN server operated by ExpressVPN was seized by Turkish authorities to investigate the assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey. Authorities hoped to find more information on people who removed digital traces of the assassin, but the server in question held no logs.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN discounts, offers and coupons
VPNs are valuable tools for people who want to use the Internet securely and maintain their anonymity. They are vital for whistleblowers and people who rebel against Government oppression.
As with any online service, they can also be used for criminal purposes. According to Turkish news sources, this is also what happened following the assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, exactly one year ago.
Karlov was shot dead in Ankara by Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, an off-duty Turkish police officer. While that much is clear, the investigation into the assassination is not closed yet.
When the authorities tried to find links to other people that may have been involved, they found out that the policeman’s Gmail and Facebook had been deleted. This happened remotely over a VPN connection, operated by ExpressVPN.
To find out more, the authorities raided the datacenter and seized the server through which the connection went. This all happened last January, but the information just came out today.
Like many other VPN services nowadays, ExpressVPN doesn’t store any logs, and this is what the investigators soon found out as well. An inspection of the server in question yielded no useful information.
Following the seizure, an investigator also reached out to ExpressVPN directly, asking for logs. The VPN provider is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and only responds to local court orders, but the investigator was informed that they don’t store connection or activity logs.
“As we stated to Turkish authorities in January 2017, ExpressVPN does not and has never possessed any customer connection logs that would enable us to know which customer was using the specific IPs cited by the investigators,” ExpressVPN writes in a statement.
“Furthermore, we were unable to see which customers accessed Gmail or Facebook during the time in question, as we do not keep activity logs. We believe that the investigators’ seizure and inspection of the VPN server in question confirmed these points.”
Speaking with TorrentFreak, the VPN provider mentions that they’ve had physical server seizures in the past, but generally not more than a few times per year.
These seizures are not announced in public, but the company stresses that user anonymity is their highest priority.
“While we don’t have a policy of announcing such incidents, we’ve designed our technology to ensure that VPN servers do not possess logs which would enable a third party to determine sensitive information about our users, such as their VPN activity or connections.
“A physical server seizure is therefore highly unlikely to provide relevant information to someone trying to determine data about specific usage,” ExpressVPN tells us.
Incidents like these show that decent VPNs do what they’re set out to. They safeguard the privacy of users which, like the Internet in general, can be used for good and bad.
It also highlights the importance of the server location. When servers are operated by third-party companies in foreign jurisdictions, they can be easily targeted, or perhaps even worse, monitored.
ExpressVPN told TorrentFreak that after the seizure incident in Turkey, the company decided to no longer use physical servers in Turkey. Instead, they provide a virtual location with Turkey-registered IP addresses pointing to VPN servers hosted in the Netherlands.
The VPN provider regrets that its services were used for unlawful purposes but says that its policies will remain the same.
“While it’s unfortunate that security tools like VPNs can be abused for illicit purposes, they are critical for our safety and the preservation of our right to privacy online. ExpressVPN is fundamentally opposed to any efforts to install ‘backdoors’ or attempts by governments to otherwise undermine such technologies,” the company concludes.
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Disclosure: ExpressVPN is a TorrentFreak sponsor
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN discounts, offers and coupons
Auch der jüngste Entwurf des TLS-1.3-Protokolls führt zu Verbindungsabbrüchen. Google nennt jetzt einige Schuldige, darunter ein Gerät von Cisco, ein Virenscanner – und eine Spur zur NSA-Hintertüre Dual EC in der RSA-BSAFE-Bibliothek. Von Hanno Böck (T…
But the Fitbit-Adidas Ionic collaboration is still happening.
Adidas-owned Runtastic released a series of wearables in 2015. (credit: Valentina Palladino)
Signs point to Adidas abandoning wearables or, at the very least, its own wearable devices. According to a Women's Wear Daily report, the activewear company recently cut its Digital Sports division, which was responsible for both hardware and software related to its in-house wearable devices. About 74 employees made up the Digital Sports division, and Adidas will make efforts to find those employees other places in the company.
Adidas started making wearables back in 2001, and in recent years it developed a fairly large MiCoach family of devices. MiCoach devices included a wristband running tracker, a heart rate chest strap, and a connected soccer ball, but Adidas stopped supporting MiCoach after it purchased Runtastic in 2015.
The shuttering of the digital sports division comes as Adidas is reportedly shifting focus to its two most important mobile platforms: Runtastic and the relaunched Adidas app. Runtastic released its own wearable, the Moment Classic, a few years ago, but it's likely that it won't focus on making hardware any more.
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Smartphone users are used to the idea of a one-stop-shop for apps. If you have an iPhone, you get all of your apps from the App Store (unless you have a jailbroken device). Android is a bit more of an open platform, but the Google Play Store is still t…
Smartphone users are used to the idea of a one-stop-shop for apps. If you have an iPhone, you get all of your apps from the App Store (unless you have a jailbroken device). Android is a bit more of an open platform, but the Google Play Store is still the best place to find most […]
Google Chrome is now (kind of) available in the Microsoft Store is a post from: Liliputing
City Council passes bill addressing algorithmic discrimination in city government.
The algorithms that play increasingly central roles in our lives often emanate from Silicon Valley, but the effort to hold them accountable may have another epicenter: New York City. Last week, the New York City Council unanimously passed a bill to tackle algorithmic discrimination—the first measure of its kind in the country.
The algorithmic accountability bill, waiting to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, establishes a task force that will study how city agencies use algorithms to make decisions that affect New Yorkers’ lives, and whether any of the systems appear to discriminate against people based on age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or citizenship status. The task force’s report will also explore how to make these decision-making processes understandable to the public.
The bill’s sponsor, Council Member James Vacca, said he was inspired by ProPublica’s investigation into racially biased algorithms used to assess the criminal risk of defendants.
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Das Bundeskartellamt hat im Facebook-Verfahren Stellung bezogen. Besonders das unbegrenzte Sammeln von Daten über Drittseiten auch ohne Nutzung des Like-Buttons wird kritisiert. (Facebook, Soziales Netz)
Das Bundeskartellamt hat im Facebook-Verfahren Stellung bezogen. Besonders das unbegrenzte Sammeln von Daten über Drittseiten auch ohne Nutzung des Like-Buttons wird kritisiert. (Facebook, Soziales Netz) Across the cislunar blackness, we set sail for a landing that almost didn’t happen.
Video shot by Joshua Ballinger, edited and produced by Jing Niu and David Minick. Click here for transcript.
A vast, gray expanse loomed just a few hundred meters below as Neil Armstrong peered out his tiny window. From inside the spidery lunar lander, a fragile cocoon with walls only about as thick as construction paper, the Apollo 11 commander finally had a clear view of where the on-board computer had directed him to land.
He did not like what he saw there. A big crater. Boulders strewn all around. A death trap.
To make matters worse, Eagle had limited fuel reserves. If Armstrong couldn’t find a safe landing site soon, he would have to ditch the bottom half of the lander and burn like hell for lunar orbit in a dangerous and risky abort procedure. Otherwise, he and Buzz Aldrin would not only become the first humans to land on the Moon, they’d become the first humans to die there, too.
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Auch der jüngste Entwurf des TLS-1.3-Protokolls führt zu Verbindungsabbrüchen. Google nennt jetzt einige Schuldige, darunter ein Gerät von Cisco, ein Virenscanner - und eine Spur zur NSA-Hintertüre Dual EC in der RSA-BSAFE-Bibliothek. Von Hanno Böck (
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