Remember when India was threatening to shut down BlackBerry service unless it could tap user's communications? Reports have RIM operating a wiretapping facility in Mumbai to help with that.
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| Using a thermal camera to track copper cable thieves. |
Gangs like the Bloods and the Crips are engaging in crimes such as identity theft, counterfeiting, selling stolen goods and even bank, credit card and mortgage fraud, said a new FBI gangs threat assessment.
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The Village Voice is reporting that the Church of Scientology attempted to investigate Parker and Stone after a controversial 2005 episode of “South Park” titled “Trapped in a Closet.” The Emmy-nominated episode, airing on Comedy Central, satirized such figures as Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology member Tom Cruise.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is expanding. 
Engineers on Thursday patched a hole in Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player that allowed website operators to silently eavesdrop on visitors' webcam and microphone feeds without permission.
PA - State police are looking for a Washington man who is one of four accused of placing a wiretap in the home of a relative because they did not believe his alibi for the murder of a Buffalo Township woman.
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| The real Edison lighthouse. |
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| Seen on the USS Midway this week. |
“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read,” said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science. “But then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack.” (more)
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FL - A computer hacker accused of infiltrating the email accounts of Hollywood stars including Scarlett Johansson has apologized, and says he plans to plead guilty to all charges.
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| An Iranian Furgetaboutit |
Germany - A group that calls itself the Chaos Computer Club prompted a public outcry here recently when it discovered that German state investigators were using spying software capable of turning a computer’s webcam and microphone into a sophisticated surveillance device.
Nobody has a clear fix on just how often employees steal vital confidential information from their employers. What is clear is that over the past five years six former chemical company employees have admitted to or been convicted of stealing trade secrets from their employers. In five of the cases, the employee involved was of Asian descent. And in all of the cases, the intended recipient of the proprietary information was an Asian company or university.
The reasons for the IP (Intellectual Property) theft aren’t clear either. “Those who engage in a major scam are likely to have complex motivations,” says Chris MacDonald, author of the Business Ethics Blog and a visiting scholar at the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics & Board Effectiveness at the University of Toronto. “It’s hard to boil it down to a single factor.”
MacDonald points out that “when people do the wrong thing, it’s generally not because they lack the relevant values.” Instead, wrongdoers find ways to rationalize their behavior. For instance, employees who steal IP may believe they serve a higher purpose in committing the act, such as helping fellow countrymen or bringing the benefits of technology advances to underprivileged people.
Although the motives of those who steal corporate secrets may be complex, monetary gain was involved in most of the chemical industry cases, according to a review of court documents by C&EN. After Mitchell stopped working for DuPont in 2006, he began to work as a paid consultant for Kolon and e-mailed proprietary DuPont documents to Kolon employees. Court documents ascribe the crimes of former Dow Chemical researcher Kexue Huang mostly to greed but also to feelings of patriotism and paternalism. (more)Why do people betray their country? MICE, of course: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego.
The two men were accused of downloading confidential documents including suppliers' names, contact details, rosters and costings, resulting in the men being banned from Torrens Transit sites for life.
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In our recent story on the privacy risks of using technology, we called out some of Google's products as potential privacy leaks. But Google also has some excellent tools you might not be familiar with that help preserve your privacy. Here are five tools you should be using... (more)
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| Unfortunately, it's never this obvious. |
