Security

In January 2013 Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited North Korea with an aide and his daughter, as well as frequent DPRK visitor, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. He was of course given VIP treatment by his hosts in Pyongyang, and taken to Kim Il-song University to view students studying on the Internet. It was a private visit and the U.S. State Department did not endorse it any more than it endorsed Dennis Rodman’s trip the following month.

RT | December 25, 2014 Despite claims by the FBI that North Korea was behind the massive hack against Sony, several cybersecurity experts have come forward to raise questions about the allegation, with some suggesting that insiders at the company could be to blame. One such expert, Kurt Stammberger from the Norse cybersecuirty firm, told […]

It was Saturday night (Dec 6th), and I was about to watch a video when a noisy helicopter started whirling overhead where I live in north Berkeley. This is a quiet residential neighborhood; the chopper was really noisy, and it didn’t go away. Finally I went outside to look. It was flashing a bright spotlight downwards. So what might that be about? A robbery in progress? Maybe someone held up a liquor store over on University Avenue; that’s where the spotlight kept pointing.

At a recent American Antitrust Institute (AAI) symposium in Washington, D.C., I asked the presenters about the ability of cash and checks to compete with the credit card industry and its strict controls on merchants. This obvious point becomes less obvious when one takes into account the expanding exclusion of cash/check payments due to the overwhelming expansion of goods and services that you cannot buy unless you have a credit card or a friend with one whom you can reimburse.

RT | November 24, 2014 A sophisticated malware dubbed Regin has been used to spy on governments, infrastructure operators and other high-profile targets, security company Symantec has revealed. It also targeted private individuals and businesses, particularly in Russia. A back door-type Trojan displays a “degree of technical competence rarely seen,” Symantec said in a press […]

The British Prime Minister was evidently enjoying the backslapping as he strode into the Australian parliament.  David Cameron felt at home before members he could count on, so much so the weak jokes seemed to have effect.  The UK-Australian relationship was discussed.  Like a long union, it had gathered some dust, losing its frisson perhaps, but never its presumption of friendship.  “It is extraordinary to think that no British Foreign Secretary had visited Australia in nearly 20 years.  I was determined to change that.”

“The Berlin Wall, this symbol of state abuse cast in concrete, took millions of people to the limits of what is tolerable, and all too many beyond it.”

What we’ve seen [tonight] is, I think, a scary, disproportionate and unnecessary expansion of coercive surveillance powers that will not make anybody any safer but that affect freedoms that have been quite hard fought for and won over a period of decades.
— Senator Scott Ludlam, Australian Greens, Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 2014

Image: 69th United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New York, September 24, 2014 (Reuters / Mike Segar
 

TRNN hears from both sides of the debate on whether to vote for independence from the United Kingdom.