Lifeboat Foundation

Sarah Buhr — Tech Crunch

Edward Snowden says in a new interview with NOVA Next that the U.S. government wrongly promotes cyber offense strategies at the expense of weakening the system and leaving it open to cyber attacks from the black market.

“We’re creating a class of Internet security researchers who research vulnerabilities, but then instead of disclosing them to the device manufacturers to get them fixed and to make us more secure, they sell them to secret agencies,” Snowden says. “They sell them on the black market to criminal groups to be able to exploit these to attack targets. And that leaves us much less secure, not just on an individual level, but on a broad social level; on a broad economic level. And beyond that, it creates a new black market for computer weapons, basically digital weapons.”

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Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”

Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial-intelligence-replace-lawyers-2030/

Corporate Reconnoitering?

ABSOLUTE END.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

White Swan Book Author (Source of this Article)

http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini

Continue reading “Corporate Reconnoitering?” »

By Paul Rubens — BBC

Passwords are a pain. We choose simple words that are easy to remember, but equally easy for hackers to guess.

Yet we still forget them. And they also get stolen with alarming frequency.

Continue reading “Has the flawed password system finally had its day?” »

Caleb Chen — Cryptocoinsnews

The Celebgate incident is still unfolding, and we are already seeing mainstream media report on the connection between the “nude celebrity photos” and Bitcoin. The original leaker of the pictures returned to 4chan recently to respond to the uproar he had caused. An excerpt from his post highlights Bitcoin’s involvement in Celebgate:

People wanted **** for free. Sure, I got $120 with my bitcoin address, but when you consider how much time was put into acquiring this stuff (i’m not the hacker, just a collector), and the money (i paid a lot via Bitcoin as well to get certain sets when this stuff was being privately traded Friday/Saturday) I really didn’t get close to what I was hoping.

Continue reading “Celebgate Could Inspire More Bitcoin Blackmail” »

By Andy Greenberg — Wired

As nude celebrity photos spilled onto the web over the weekend, blame for the scandal has rotated from the scumbag hackers who stole the images to a researcher who released a tool used to crack victims’ iCloud passwords to Apple, whose security flaws may have made that cracking exploit possible in the first place. But one step in the hackers’ sext-stealing playbook has been ignored—a piece of software designed to let cops and spies siphon data from iPhones, but is instead being used by pervy criminals themselves.

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By Neil J. Rubenking — PC

The trainings component of the 2014 Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas has already begun. Press folk aren’t invited for trainings, but SecurityWatch will be there to cover the briefings Wednesday and Thursday. The briefings can be shocking. In past years, researchers revealed a technique to pwn any iOS device using a gimmicked charger, described a technique for mining your Twitter feed to create convincing phishing emails, and demonstrated an Android weakness that would allow hackers to Trojanize an Android app undetectably. And those were all part of the relatively sedate Black Hat; things get even hairier at the wild and woolly DefCon that follows.

The world’s best hackers flock to these conferences, people who live and breathe security and hacking. They don’t stop trying to hack all the things just because they’re at a conference. In fact, DefCon features a “Wall of Sheep” to publicly shame any attendees careless enough to get hacked. If you’re attending, you’ll want to crank up your paranoia and be as careful as possible.

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From CLUBOF.INFO

All religions have points of agreement concerning human toil and its relationship to the divine. This essay considers some of the Biblical and Hellenic parables of human origin, specifically the origins of human knowledge and instrumentality.

Here I want to present how knowledge and instrumentality are reported to originate with an act of mischief, specifically the theft of a divine artifact. My argument is that, although the possession of knowledge may be seen as a sin to be atoned for, the kind of atonement originally promoted may have simply been for us to apply our knowledge constructively in our lives. The concept of atoning for original sin (whether it is the Biblical or Hellenic sin) can then be justified with secular arguments. Everyone can agree that we retain the capacity for knowledge, and this means our atonement for the reported theft of such knowledge would simply rest with the use of the very same tool we reportedly stole.

The story of the titan Prometheus, from ancient Greek mythology, has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times. A great deal of writers and organizations have laid claim to the symbolism of Prometheus, including in modern times. [1] I would argue that too many writers diluted and over-explored the meaning of the parable by comparing everything to it, although this is not the focus of my essay. Greek mythology is notably weak on the subject of “good and evil” because it predates the Judeo-Christian propagation of their dualism, and this means most of the characters in Greek mythology can be defended or condemned without violating Hellenic theology. Prometheus as a mythic figure could be condemned from a Christian standpoint, because he seems strikingly similar to other scriptural characters engaged in a revolt against the divine. Yet the spirit of Prometheus and his theft has also been endorsed by people and organizations, such as the transhumanists who see him as an expression of the noblest human aspirations. [2]

Continue reading “Parables involving the Theft of Knowledge” »