Fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted permanent residency in Russia, his lawyer said on Thursday. wiredmikey writes: Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor who revealed in 2013 that the US government was spying on its citizens, has been living in exile in Russia since the revelations. The 37-year-old has said he would like to return to the United States….
Tag: contractor
Huawei Announces Last Major Phone Before US Ban Forces Rethink
Huawei introduced the Mate 40 smartphone series on Thursday, potentially its last major release powered by its self-designed Kirin chips. From a report: China’s biggest tech company by sales has been stockpiling chips to get its signature device out in time to compete with Apple’s iPhone 12 over the holidays. Huawei will have to overhaul its smartphone lineup after Trump administration…
Microsoft Says Iranian Hackers Are Exploiting the Zerologon Vulnerability
Microsoft said on Monday that Iranian state-sponsored hackers are currently exploiting the Zerologon vulnerability in real-world hacking campaigns. From a report: Successful attacks would allow hackers to take over servers known as domain controllers (DC) that are the centerpieces of most enterprise networks and enable intruders to gain full control over their targets. The Iranian attacks were detected by Microsoft’s Threat…
Safety Panel Has ‘Great Concern’ About NASA Plans To Test Moon Mission Software
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An independent panel that assesses the safety of NASA activities has raised serious questions about the space agency’s plan to test flight software for its Moon missions. During a Thursday meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, one of its members, former NASA Flight Director Paul Hill, outlined the panel’s concerns after…
Cory Doctorow Crowdfunds His New Audiobook to Protest Amazon/Audible DRM
Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) explains why he’s crowdfunding his new audiobook online. Despite the large publishers for his print editions, “I can’t get anyone to do my audiobooks. Amazon and its subsidiary Audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook sales, won’t carry any of my audiobooks because I won’t let them put any…
US Company Faces Backlash After Belarus Uses Its Tech To Block Internet
Senators Dick Durbin and Marco Rubio are criticizing Sandvine Inc., the U.S. company whose technology helped Belarus block much of the internet during a disputed presidental election last month. Bloomberg reports: The private-equity-backed technology firm demonstrated its equipment to a government security team in Belarus in May, two people with knowledge of the matter said, and its marketing materials boast of…
Court Rules NSA Phone Snooping Illegal — After Seven-Year Delay
The National Security Agency program that swept up details on billions of Americans’ phone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. From a report: However, the unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the role the so-called telephone metadata program played in a criminal terror-fundraising case against four Somali immigrants was so…
Ex-Apple Engineer Says U.S. Government May Have Built a Top-Secret Geiger Counter Out of an iPod
An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2005, before the iPhone, Apple purportedly helped a U.S. Department of Energy contractor modify a 5th-generation iPod to secretly record and store data. The exact reason why remains a mystery, but an ex-Apple engineer involved in the project thinks it could have been a surreptitious Geiger counter. This bonkers story comes courtesy of…
Should the U.S. Pardon Edward Snowden?
Long-time Slashdot readers 93 Escort Wagon and schwit1 both shared the news that U.S. President Trump is “considering” a pardon for Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who “leaked a trove of secret files in 2013 to news organizations that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations” carried out by the agency, according to Reuters: U.S. authorities for years…
US Government Contractor Embedded Software in Apps To Track Phones
A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter and documents it reviewed. From the report: Anomaly Six, a Virginia-based company founded by…