The Pentagon's premier research and development division, DARPA, has awarded a $40 million grant to a pair of American universities to help develop "memory restoration technologies" that the agency says are aimed at helping military personnel cope with brain injuries, but which seem like they could also be used to implant phony memories.

When the responses were analyzed, the researchers found that the manner in which the harmful consequences of an action are described significantly influences the level of punishment that people consider appropriate: When the harm was described in a graphic or lurid fashion then people set the punishment level higher than when it was described matter-of-factly. However, this higher punishment level only applied when the participants considered the resulting harm to be intentional. When they considered it to be unintentional, the way it was described didn't have any effect.

Whether it's the NSA exploiting weaknesses in encryption software, the holes in Tor making it less anonymous, or the major problems with Tails - vulnerabilities are constantly testing the security and anonymity of computer users.

But little known Montreal-based developers at Subgraph want to change all that, and have started working on a zero-day resistant Operating System (OS), protecting against infiltration.

Subgraph takes the approach that overall computer security is critical to anonymity, targeting protection against zero-day vulnerabilities, the types of weakness unknown to the developers while they're writing software.

Six years have passed since the Xbox Media Center became XBMC, and simply put, "XBMC" fits less now than it did even in 2008. The software only barely runs on the original Xbox, and then only because some clever developers are still hacking on that platform. It has never run on the Xbox 360 or Xbox One.

Beyond the nonsensical nature of the software's name, there is a secondary issue. Because "XBMC" was originally based on the name Xbox, the developers of the software (that's us) have never had any sort of legal control over the use of its name, which has resulted in a whole slew of problems.

"Blaze speculates that the USB attack may in fact already be common practice for the NSA. He points to a spying device known as Cottonmouth, revealed earlier this year in the leaks of Edward Snowden. The device, which hid in a USB peripheral plug, was advertised in a collection of NSA internal documents as surreptitiously installing malware on a target's machine. The exact mechanism for that USB attack wasn't described. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the things [Nohl and Lell] discovered are what we heard about in the NSA catalogue....The alternative is to treat USB devices like hypodermic needles."

The program's code quality has also been greatly improved in the last two years. Coverity Scan found the defect density per 1,000 lines of code has shrunk from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.13 since 2012. According to Coverity, "LibreOffice has done an excellent job of addressing key defects in their code in the short time they have been part of the Coverity Scan service."

Like previous versions, LibreOffice is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems. You can also run an older version, LibreOffice 4.2, from the cloud using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

With the United Kingdom making LibreOffice's native ODF its default format for government documents, LibreOffice is certain to become more popular. Other cash-strapped governments, such as Italy's Umbria province, have found switching to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office has saved them hundreds of thousands of Euros per thousand PCs.

SUMMARY
On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks.

The attacking relays joined the network on January 30 2014, and we removed them from the network on July 4. While we don't know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected.

We know the attack looked for users who fetched hidden service descriptors, but the attackers likely were not able to see any application-level traffic (e.g. what pages were loaded or even whether users visited the hidden service they looked up). The attack probably also tried to learn who published hidden service descriptors, which would allow the attackers to learn the location of that hidden service. In theory the attack could also be used to link users to their destinations on normal Tor circuits too, but we found no evidence that the attackers operated any exit relays, making this attack less likely. And finally, we don't know how much data the attackers kept, and due to the way the attack was deployed (more details below), their protocol header modifications might have aided other attackers in deanonymizing users too.

Microsoft's quarterly financials are out, and they paint a startlingly clear picture of why new CEO Satya Nadella is in such a hurry to scuttle away from the "devices and services" mantra rolled out by former honcho Steve Ballmer just last year: Microsoft's hardware efforts just aren't making much money. In fact, they're actually losing money hand over fist.