Category: Uncategorised

Enlarge

Kanye West, after reportedly considering legal action against The Pirate Bay for facilitating mass piracy of his new album The Life of Pablo, has seemingly been caught trying to pirate some music software from The Pirate Bay.

Early Wednesday morning, Kanye tweeted a photo that showed him listening to Sufjan Stevens on YouTube. If you look closely at Kanye's browser tabs, however, you can see that prior to watching the video he was researching—and possibly attempting to download—some advanced wavetable synthesiser software called Serum.

Deadmau5, music producer and co-founder of Xfer Records, which makes Serum, was not amused by Kanye's actions. "What the fuck @kanyewest ... Can't afford serum? Dick," he tweeted. A few minutes later he followed up with this zinger: "Let's start a Kickstarter to help @kanyewest afford a copy of Serum."

NASA/Bill Ingalls

The Soyuz spacecraft, under its main parachute, nears a cloud layer above the Kazahkstan steppe.

9 more images in gallery

Scott Kelly returned from space Tuesday night, landing on a cold, barren Asiatic steppe. And he couldn't have seemed more pleased with himself—or even with the weather, which featured a cool wind and temperatures in the 20s. "The air feels great out here," Kelly told NASA officials, who were helicoptered to the landing site to meet him.

Shortly after being extracted from the spacecraft, Kelly told his flight surgeon, Dr. Steve Gilmore, that the experience was "not much different than it was five years ago," when he spent six months on the International Space Station.

After a few minutes, Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov were moved to a medical tent where they underwent several tests, such as measurements of their vision, balance, muscle tone, strength, nimbleness of their fingers, and so forth. They then took a helicopter flight back to Dzhezkazgan, in Kazakhstan.

The famous munition t-shirt--the way security data might have to have been shared if proposed trade restrictions under the Wassenaar Arrangement were approved.

After nearly a year of protests from the information security industry, security researchers, and others, US officials have announced that they plan to re-negotiate regulations on the trade of tools related to "intrusion software." While it's potentially good news for information security, just how good the news is will depend largely on how much the Obama administration is willing to push back on the other 41 countries that are part of the agreement—especially after the US was key in getting regulations on intrusion software onto the table in the first place.

The rules were negotiated through the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, an agreement governing the trade of weapons and technology that could be used for military purposes. Originally intended to prevent proliferation and build-up of weapons, the US and other western nations pushed for operating system, software, and network exploits to be included in the Wassenaar protocol to prevent the use of commercial malware and hacking tools by repressive regimes against their own people for surveillance.

These concerns appear to have been borne out by documents revealed last year in the breach of Italy-based Hacking Team, which showed the company was selling exploits to Sudan and other regimes with a record of human rights abuses. And security systems from Blue Coat were resold to a number of repressive states, including Syria's Assad regime—which may have used the software to identify and target opposition activists.