Highway to hack: Sydney is Drowning in Juiciest Apple Rumours

Oh my. Peak Apple. Someone is queuing in Sydney before THEY HAVE EVEN ANNOUNCED ANYTHING!!!pic.twitter.com/G16X0ze8eN

— Seamus Byrne (@seamus)September 8, 2015

• Richard Murphy says:

  September 10 2015 at 5:36 am

  My commitment is to telling the truth

  Experience shows it is not always easy

  But I have some track record of delivering

  Professor Richard Murphy

Bogan’s biographer, Elizabeth Frank (1985), tells us she based the poem on Thoreau’s Feb. 21, 1855 journal entry: “How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals.”

"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens's last interview »

Highway to hack: Why we’re just at the beginning of the auto-hacking era

Ars Technica
August 23, 2015

Imagine it’s 1995, and you’re about to put your company’s office on the Internet. Your security has been solid in the past—you’ve banned people from bringing floppies to work with games, you’ve installed virus scanners, and you run file server backups every night. So, you set up the Internet router and give everyone TCP/IP addresses. 

Kay Bell, Tax fraud gangsters celebrate their crimes in song. IRS has made ID-theft fraud so easy, even a street gang can do it.

Russ Fox, Former Oklahoma State Senator Embezzled $1.2 Million & Committed Tax Fraud:

Over a ten-plus year period Mr. Brinkley had fraudulently obtained over $1.2 Million from the Better Business Bureau. Mr. Brinkley was President and CEO of the organization; he created phony invoices and used the money for personal expenses and to support his gambling habit. He also admitted to not reporting $148,390 in income on his 2013 tax return.

Elected officials don’t lose their human failings when they become elected officials. In fact, public office may attract people with certain kinds of failings.

Sydney SuperMoon from Doncaster Street - A plane flies under a supermoon, as seen just before dawn at Randwick Racecourse ...

Robert Wood, Bartender Finds $20, Buys Lottery Ticket, Wins $1M, Pays IRS.

TaxGrrrl, Citing Budget Woes, State Won’t Pay Up (Yet) On Big Lottery Winnings. The happy bartender doesn’t live in Illinois, fortunately for him. But if Illinois can’t pay its lottery winners, how should that make its bondholders and pensioners feel?

BitTorrent patched against flaw that allowed crippling DoS attacks

Ars Technica
August 27, 2015

The maintainers of the open BitTorrent protocol for file sharing have fixed a vulnerability that allowed lone attackers with only modest resources to take down large sites using a new form of denial-of-service attack. The technique was disclosed two weeks ago in a research paper submitted to the 9th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies.

Agora, the Dark Web’s Biggest Drug Market, Is Going Offline

The Dark Web’s biggest marketplace for drugs seems to have learned a lesson from the downfall of the Silk Road: When cracks start to appear in your anonymity’s armor, it’s time to quit while you’re ahead—or, at least, retreat and regroup. Agora, the reigning marketplace in the Dark Web’s bustling, bitcoin-based narcotics economy, announced Tuesday evening that it will go offline at least temporarily to shore up defenses against potential attacks that it believes might be used to identify the site’s servers and operators.

How developing and disguising software bugs can help cybersecurity

There's no question that software bugs are common. Typically, programs ship with at least one or two that researchers later find – or the public is surprised by. So, for a bug connoisseur such as Scott Craver, truly extraordinary vulnerabilities are things to be prized. Since 2005, Dr. Craver has been running Underhanded C, a competition in which entrants attempt to camouflage the best-hidden, most devious vulnerabilities into the most elegant looking source code in the programming language known as "C." This year’s challenge went live last weekend.