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FBI can remotely activate microphones in Android smartphones, source says
The Wall Street Journal
FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.
Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.
‘[The FBI] hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things.’
– a former official in the agency’s cyber division
People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with Read more…
The Climate Is Set to Change ‘Orders of Magnitude’ Faster Than at Any Other Time in the Past 65 Million Years
Some of the earliest clues scientists had that Earth’s climate has changed over time were mismatches between the fossil record and a current ecosystem. How could this palm tree have grown in Wyoming? Why have fossils of the tropical breadfruit tree been found as far north as Greenland? These cold places must have once been warm and wet. The world is not as it has always been.
And somehow, despite the tumult, species adapted, moving thousands of miles to habitats where they could survive. Won’t species today just do the same as temperatures rise in the years ahead?
It seems they may not have the chance. A new paper in the journal Science finds that Read more…
More than 1,000 fish killed by Alaska summer heat wave
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By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Alaska’s summer heat wave has been pleasant for humans but punitive for some of its fish.
Overheated water has been blamed for large die-offs of hatchery trout and salmon stocks in at least two parts of the state as hot, dry weather has set in, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Hundreds of grayling and rainbow trout died in June after being placed in a Fairbanks lake, the department reported. An unusually cold spring caused lake ice to linger much longer than normal, before the water quickly became too warm, department biologist April Behr said.
Surface temperatures in the lake rose to about 76 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius), she said. The precise number of dead fish was not yet known. “We picked up several hundred,” she said.
A similar incident occurred in Read more…
Edward Snowden: Solar-Flare ‘Killshot’ Cataclysm Imminent
Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower, speaking from Sheremetyevo Airport’s Hotel Novotel, revealed the CIA’s Project Stargate was a complete success. (Photo: The Internet Chronicle)
MOSCOW, Russia – Edward Snowden, hacker-fugitive and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, revealed Tuesday that a series of solar flares is set to occur in September, killing hundreds of millions of people. Documents provided by Snowden prove that, as of 14 years ago, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) remote viewers knew that the event was inevitable. Ever since, the world’s governments have quietly been trying to prepare for the sweeping global famine to result.
Speaking from his room at Sheremetyevo Airport’s Hotel Novotel, Snowden revealed that government preparations for September’s catastrophic solar flares have been “to only limited avail.” The flares’ results, he said, are known casually throughout the global intelligence community as “the killshot.”
Remote viewers employed by the CIA’s Project Stargate use their ability to perceive geographically and chronologically distant events to protect America. Since 1999 they have known about Read more…
Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone’ twice what it was last year, but not a record
This year’s so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area where a lack of oxygen kills sea life that can’t swim away, is twice the size of last year’s, according to scientists, but it’s not a record.
The recurring area of low oxygen covers 5,840 square miles of the Gulf floor this year. Scientists had expected a record zone area due to a wet spring.
The zone is created each year when farm fertilizer from the Mississippi River Basin washes into the Gulf of Mexico, feeding algae blooms that, in turn, die and sink to the bottom of the mouth of the river. There they decompose and use up the oxygen.
Scientists from Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan had expected a wet spring to bring record levels of nutrients to the Gulf, leading to a dead zone that could have approached or exceeded the largest ever recorded — the one in Read more…
Mexico and Canada declared part of US homeland by Senate maps (Video)
As an aide holds up a poster, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 31, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC (AFP Photo / Alex Wong)
Sen. Dianne Feinstein referred to the US, Canada and Mexico as “the Homeland” at an NSA Senate briefing on Wednesday, presenting a map that united the three nations as one.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting held to acquire details on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.) made a geographic mistake in which she united three large countries into one. The error went by without comment during the briefing, but generated a significant response upon Read more…
China endures worst heat wave in 140 years
A child cooks shrimp and an egg in a frying pan heated by a manhole cover on a hot summer day on July 31 in Jinan, China. It has been so hot that eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard burst into flames in one of the worst heat waves in 140 years. AP
SHANGHAI (AP) – It’s been so hot in China that folks are grilling shrimp on manhole covers, eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard has mysteriously caught fire by itself.
The heat wave — the worst in at least 140 years in some parts — has left dozens of people dead and pushed thermometers above 104 degrees F in at least 40 cities and counties, mostly in the south and east. Authorities for the first time have declared the heat a “level 2” weather emergency — a label normally invoked for typhoons and flooding.
“It is just hot! Like in a food steamer!” 17-year-old student Xu Sichen said outside the doors of a shopping mall in the southern financial hub of Shanghai while her friend He Jiali, also 17, complained that her Read more…
Next round of smartphones to incorporate biometrics
Biometrics Research Group, Inc. expects that biometrics will become integrated within a wide number of mobile devices in the near future. Integration will be driven by smartphone and tablet manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung Electronics, which we expect will add both fingerprint and gesture recognition functionality to their mobile devices within the next year.
In January, at the Consumer Electronics Show, a Samsung Android phone was demonstrated which included a fingerprint sensor underneath its screen. Developed by Validity, a firm that creates biometric authentication solutions for mobile devices, the sensor allowed a user to log into an Android-based smartphone with a single swipe of a finger. Using a fingerprint authentication system entitled “Natural Login”, Validity will not only enable security access to mobile devices, but will also allow validation of e-commerce transactions.
As extensively reported in BiometricUpdate.com, Apple is also undertaking incorporation of biometric technologies into its devices. Apple entered into an Read more…
Violence will rise as climate changes, scientists predict
Death Valley in July. (David McNew / Getty Images / July 14, 2013)
Long before scientists began to study global warming, author Raymond Chandler described the violent effects of dry, “oven-hot” Santa Ana winds gusting through the city of Los Angeles.
“Every booze party ends in a fight,” he wrote in his 1938 story “Red Wind.” “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.”
While social commentators have long suggested that extreme heat can unleash the beast in man, formal study of the so-called heat hypothesis — the theory that high temperatures fuel aggressive and violent behavior — is relatively new. Using examples as disparate as road rage, ancient wars and Major League Baseball, scientists have taken early steps to quantify the potential Read more…
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