As a result, LEAs are increasingly hacking directly into the suspect’s devices (computers, phones, TVs, cars), installing trojans (tiny pieces of software that can do almost anything and collect almost everything without restriction).This is something new. Unsurprisingly, in many countries, the laws regulating the legitimate use of trojans are just as new, notably US Rule41 and the UK IP Bill, laws that authorize LEAs to hack into suspects’ devices, with few constraints and with an unsophisticated approach .In Italy, the Civic and Innovators parliamentary group - which includes, among others, Andrea Mazziotti, Chairman of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, Stefano Dambruoso, a well known anti-terrorism prosecutor, and Stefano Quintarelli, an italian internet pioneer and entrepreneur - has recently introduced a bill on the matter.It took nearly two years of work to draft the proposal, with the involvement of many experts and stakeholders; among them: a former speaker of the Parliament, civil rights activists, law enforcement officers, computer forensics researchers, prosecutors,law professors, IT security experts, anti-mafia and anti-terrorism departments and politicians.This complex law proposal tries to address most of the technical issues related to the use of trojans, while guaranteeing individual rights and protecting the public from the possible abuse of government trojan.The main concept behind the law is that a trojan shall not be allowed to do everything, but only what has been specifically authorized by a judge’s signed warrant.For instance:* A Telephone Wiretapping Warrant is required to listen a Whatsapp call .* A Remote Search and Seizure Warrant is required to acquire files on remote devices.* An Internet Wiretapping Warrant is required to record web browsing sessions.* The same kind of warrant that would be required for planting a physical audio surveillance bug is required to listen to the surrounding environment with the device’s microphone.The proposal aims to update the framework of guarantees and limitations already provided by the criminal code, in light of the quick development of computer science, and the consequent threats to citizens’ privacy.For example, according to the bill, if a device is searched and seized remotely during an investigation, the owner must be notified when the investigation ends. In fact, a similar provision already exists for “physical” house searches.However, there are also very complex technical challenges that this proposal try to address, by specifying many technical and operational requirements that have to be met to legally use trojans in an investigation:a. The source code must be deposited to a specific authority and it must be verifiable with a reproducible build process (like the Tor Project and Debian Linux are doing)b.Every operation carried on by the trojan or through its use must be duly documented and logged in a tamper proof and verifiable way, using cryptographic time-stamping and digital signing, so that its results can be fairly contested by the defendant during the inter partes hearing.c. The trojan, once installed, shall not lower the security level of the device where it has been activatedd.Once the investigation has finished, the trojan must be uninstalled or, otherwise, detailed instruction on how to self-remove it must be provided.e.Trojan production and uses must be traceable by establishing a National Trojan Registry with the fingerprint of each version of the software being produced and deployed.f. The trojans must be certified, with a yearly renewal of the certification, to ensure compliance with the law and technical regulation issued by the ministry.g.Extracted data must be stored in the prosecutor’s servers and must be protected from third-party access with encryption.h.Trojans have to be directly operated by police, and not by private contractors.One would ask: how would that impact companies that develop and sell such kind of trojans?Should the proposal become a law, they would need to update their software to comply with the new technical regulations and they would have to deposit their source code to the competent authority, in order to keep their business going on in Italy (and in any other country that adopted a similar regulatory framework).The proposal is under public consultation. . There, judical and technical conversations are being held to further collect input from a wider public.The Law Proposal, along with it’s Technical Regulation Proposal, is online. Of course, it is written in Italian, but an English summary is available: “Rules governing the use of government trojan with respect for individual rights”.Fabio Pietrosanti and Stefano Aterno.Fabio Pietrosanti and Stefano Aterno(Image: calflier001, calflier001, CC-BY-SA)

By delaying federal aid for days while he partied at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump failed evacuees threatened by a failing spillway in Northern California's Oroville Dam complex. Some 188,000 people from counties that mostly supported him were evacuated when authorities said the risk of a sudden and dramatic overspill became too high, but Orange Julius remained silent for days after California governor Jerry Brown requested he declare a federal emergency in the state.(more…)

Papercraft master Aliaksei Zholner made this exquisite pipe organ entirely from paper products. Here are his build notes, written in Russian.(via Laughing Squid)

As Mike Flynn departs amid Russia blackmail suspicions, the dysfunction inside Trump's regime is boiling over. There's talk of multiple investigations into multiple staff members, even blaming Obama 'sleeper cells' inside the White House.Today's New York Times includes yet another exposé of what an increasingly hobbled hot mess Team Trump is. The piece includes a whopper of a quote from one of our nation's senior-most defense officials. Get a load of this.(more…)

Instagram is now challenged with determining the gender of decorated nipples so it can enforce its very serious and important policy of forbidden the display of women's nipples.Previoulsy: Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram

In olden times, kings and queens had royal poisoners on hand to get rid of inconvenient people. They were good at what they did. For example, they could lightly dust a letter or page of a book with a powder that would kill whoever touched it.Politically-motivated poisoning is back in vogue. New York reports that "Kim Jong-nam, the older half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was killed in a Malaysian airport Monday after he was sprayed in the face with an unknown liquid, police said Tuesday."

Gallup, New Mexico state senator George Munoz is not pleased that a group led by Christopher Dyer, CEO of University New Mexico's Gallup campus, went on a Bigfoot research expedition and racked up $7,000 of expenses that were ultimately paid by taxpayers. The expedition was part of a Bigfoot conference Dyer organized on campus last year that he says "was the largest and most well-attended event in the history of this campus,”.From KRQE:

UK betting site Paddy Power is taking bets on a number of Trump related possibilities, including suspending the 1st Amendment (40-to-1), repealing Obamacare (1-to-2), banning abortion (3-to-1), re-opening Alcatraz as a prison (14-to-1), outlawing the theory of evolution (50-to-1), and banning stairs (500-to-1).

This week's edition of the always, always-excellent On the Media podcast featured an interview (MP3) with notorious (and self-confessed) media manipulator Ryan Holiday, whose book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator describes his career in PR, in which he perfected the art of making terrible people rich by getting decent people to hate them. (more…)

Zoom – just one look and then my heart went boom.

For more than 100 years, NECCO has cranked out its iconic Sweetheart candies. Some of them are still emblazoned the original statements of "Be Mine," Be Good," and "Kiss Me." The company says that "to meet the high demand for Sweethearts, NECCO continuously produces them from late February through mid-January of the following year."I prefer learning how they are made to actually eating them.

Oklahoma Rep. Justin Humphrey is pushing for the passage of House Bill 1441, "prohibiting abortion to be performed without consent of the father; requiring pregnant woman seeking to abort pregnancy to provide identity of father." It might as well be called the Handmaid's Tale Law.Rep. Humphrey explained his reasoning behind the bill to The Intercept:

Tim from Grand Illusions shows off the neat puzzles he picked up at the 2017 toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany.

In a new report, Amnesty International summarizes the security research they did on the victims of a sophisticated phishing attack aimed at Qatari labor activists, dubbed "Operation Kingphish." (more…)

Robbie Barrat is president and founder of their high school computer science club; they created Rapper-Neural-Network, a free software project that uses machine learning trained on a corpus of 6,000 Kanye West lines to autogenerate new rap songs. (more…)

Gamer star PewDiePie was set for the big-time: 53m subscribers to his YouTube gamering channel and a hot deal with Disney to take his clean-cut mug to mass culture stardom. But then he started posting about the Jews.

Two assassins used poisoned needles to off the disfavored half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, reports South Korean media. Kim Jong-nam was attacked in Kuala Lumpur airport by the women, who then escaped in a taxi and remain at large.

In Out of Control: Ransomware for Industrial Control Systems, three Georgia Tech computer scientists describe their work to develop LogicLocker, a piece of proof-of-concept ransomware that infects the programmable logic controllers that are used to control industrial systems like those in power plants. (more…)

The Intercept "obtained a copy" of the FBI's 48-question, 2015 "Indicators of Mobilization to Violence" protocol, a list of 48 questions that FBI investigators can use to determine if a subject is at risk for committing terrorist acts. (more…)

All of the GOP's bluster about election fraud couldn't save the budget for the Election Administration Commission, the federal agency that deals with software security risks in America's creating, Windows-2000-based voting machines. (more…)

Civil asset forfeiture is the bizarre American practice of seizing peoples' property without charging its owner: instead the property is charged with being the ill-gotten gains of a crime, and if the owner doesn't pay their property's legal bills, the police get to keep or sell the property. (more…)

After being a major contributor for many years, I've cringed as Wikipedia slowly devolves like a dying coral reef. Today's example is hemovanadin, an innocuous article deleted through a mix of vandalism, bots, and incompetent humans. (more…)

If the mayhem caused by 11Foot8 bridge was not enough, imagine shaving another 1Foot2 off the clearance, et voila! The 10Foot6 Bridge in Westwood, Massachusetts. (more…)

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Managing servers is complex and expensive—that’s why countless businesses have switched to Amazon Web Services over in-house infrastructure. With so much demand for this cloud platform, mastery of AWS administration has become a valuable skill set. This Certification Training course can be your first step towards proficiency.This extensive course packs everything you need to know about the AWS Management Console in just 7 hours of instructional video. You’ll learn all the necessary terminology and capabilities of Amazon’s Storage and Computing options to help make the right hosting choices for applications and organizations. As you progress, you'll deploy two actual projects with managed services like the Amazon Relational Database, and test your accumulated knowledge with simulated certification exams.AWS expertise will continue to be a critical need for any cloud-embracing businesses for the foreseeable future, and for a limited time, you can get the Amazon Web Services Technical Certification Training for 86% off—just $39 for 12 months of access.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:

“For all those that don't have a valentine date or partner, here is some doggies for you to fall in love with instead.” (more…)

Jonathan Peltz at the Miami New Times: “'Donald Trump' and 'protecting patients’ access to health care' are two phrases that aren't generally associated with each other. But that fact didn't seem to bother the American Cancer Society (ACS), which hosted its fundraiser Rock Palm Beach at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago [on February 10].”(more…)

Sally Q. Yates is looking more like a hero each day. Before she was fired by Donald Trump, the then-acting attorney general told the incoming administration in late January that she believed then-NatSec-advisor General Michael Flynn “had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”The Washington Post reported the story just hours before Flynn resigned in disgrace.(more…)

He's out. Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn resigned Monday night after revelations he misled VP Mike Pence and other senior White House officials about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the United States.(more…)

CBS News is reporting that Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has resigned.(more…)

The Humble Freedom Bundle will take $30 or more and in return give you more than 50 games, ebooks audiobooks and comics, including two never-before-heard audiobook titles from me: a newly mastered edition of the audiobook of my book on copyright, the internet and artistic integrity, Information Doesn't Want to be Free, featuring both Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer reading their introductions; and, the first 18 minutes of the forthcoming audiobook of my novel Walkaway, read by Wil Wheaton (the full book also features many other fine readers, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Amber Benson and Amanda Palmer from the Dresden Dolls). (more…)

When I was in college I read and greatly enjoyed Raymond Smullyan logical puzzles books, especially What Is the Name of This Book? He died last week at the age of 97.From the NYTimes:

Cassie is a two-legged robot that walks like an ostrich. It was developed by Agility Robotics.From Quartz:

The final show in my three-part series about the pitfalls associated with trying to debunk myths, battle fake news, and correct misinformation is up. In this episode I interview scientists who have great advice on how to both avoid the backfire effect and eventually overcome it.If you ask a social scientist familiar with motivated reasoning and the backfire effect if there is any hope to ever reach people who refuse to accept facts – is there any chance to change people’s minds with evidence, reason, or scientific consensus – they will usually point you to a 2010 paper titled: “The Affective Tipping Point: Do Motivated Reasoners ever ‘Get It’?”Like most of us, political scientists David P. Redlawsk, Andrew J.W. Civettini, and Karen M. Emmerson wondered if, when confronted with challenges to their erroneous beliefs, do the people who resist efforts at correction ever come around, or are we just causing more harm than good by trusting in facts instead of using some time-tested technique from the emotional manipulation toolkit?To test this, Redlawsk and his team created a mock presidential election in which people would gradually learn more and more terrible things about their preferred virtual candidates from a virtual news media. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the news stories they read included a precise mix of negative information about their chosen candidates so the effect of those messages could be measured as the negativity increased in intensity.The scientists thought that surely, at some point, after a person had chosen one candidate over another, a constant flow of negative information about that person would persuade them to reconsider their choices. They expected to see the backfire effect at first, of course, but they believed with enough persistence they might also discover its natural limit.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud—This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first

These holiday messages, from 1963 and 1964, courtesy of the Fab Four are just great! Their voices always cheer me up.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bWmbhILN8I had never heard them, but driving the California coast this Christmas day and caught the tail end of one.Fun!

Sidd Bikkannavar, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), still doesn't know why he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol and compelled under duress to give agent's the access PIN to his NASA-owned mobile phone.From The Verge:

This would suggest that people who hide beneath white sheets while cowardly attempting to scare the rest of us are no pleasure to live with. Frank Ancona, a self-proclaimed imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was shot to death in his bed while sleeping. His wife and step-son have been arrested for his murder.Via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

How do you remove the hidden coin from the Lotus Box? Fleb knows!

This entertaining video is a good way to learn what the Amazon Echo can do.

Artist J.S.G. Boggs died on January 22. He drew money and convinced people to accept it in exchange for products. He sold the receipts as his works of art. He didn't sell the bills themselves.

From Tara at Dangerous Minds: "Donald Trump’s tweets are super emo and turned his Twitter meltdowns into a perfectly shitastic emo song."

The Anonymous activists behind "OpKKK" -- which infiltrated and unmasked Klan members, including many in US military and police departments -- began by creating thin-but-plausible fake identities on Facebook that signalled support for "Blue Lives Matter." By friending other accounts that indicated support for Blue Lives Matter, they found themselves being auto-suggested friendships with KKK members. (more…)

Ingrid Burrington thought of domain names as "a very niche genre of experimental poetry, one in which radical constraints (availability, brevity, the cadence of an interrupting “dot”) produce small, densely packed pockets of internet magic." At a conference for domainers--the dot.whatever squatters and salesfolk and speculators--she learned that it's more a matter of alchemy.

After a day of engaging in the most irresponsible activity a president can undertake (according to Donald Trump, anyway), President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to the Mar A Lago dining room with Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, when Trump got a phone call about North Korea's missile tests. (more…)

Liam Williams was given money by the BBC to explain the success and culture of YouTube vloggers.

JM Porup's long, thoughtful article on the W3C's entry into the DRM standardization game gives a sense of the different forces that are pushing one of the open web's staunchest allies into a disastrous compromise: the competition that siloed apps present to open-web browsers, the debts of the W3C, the relentless pressure from the entertainment industry to redesign browsers to do a corporation's bidding, rather than the user's. (more…)

Otonomaki, or "Adult wrapping," sees the subject swaddled cosily, even tightly, in a muslin-like cloth. The aim is to "alleviate posture problems and stiffness," reports the BBC, and it's exploding in popularity in Japan.

An orange alligator has taken up residence in a pond near Charleston, reports the Associated Press, baffling experts and locals alike. The most promising hypothesis for its unnatural color is that it wintered in a rusty culvert. The timely 5-foot metaphor for mindless aggression, complete with tiny stumpy extremities, will shed its skin "soon," assuming it survives long enough to do so.Photo: Steve Tatum