Dark5 – Page 17

Crystal Castles – Magic Spells

Which Chat Apps Are Truly Secure?

Which programs and tools actually keep your messages safe? Check out the Secure Messaging Scorecard from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In the face of widespread Internet data collection and surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products – but how can users know if these systems actually secure?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released its Secure Messaging Scorecard, evaluating dozens of messaging technologies on a range of security best practices.

You can read the full Secure Messaging Scorecard here.

“The revelations from Edward Snowden confirm that governments are spying on our digital lives, devouring all communications that aren’t protected by encryption,” said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. “Many new tools claim to protect you, but don’t include critical features like end-to-end encryption or secure deletion. This scorecard gives you the facts you need to choose the right technology to send your message.”

The scorecard includes more than three dozen tools, including chat clients, text messaging apps, email applications, and technologies for voice and video calls. EFF examined them on seven factors, like whether the message is encrypted both in-transit and at the provider level, and if the code is audited and open to independent review. Six of these tools scored all seven stars, including ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal/Redphone, Silent Phone, Silent Text, and TextSecure. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime products stood out as the best of the mass-market options, although neither currently provides complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms of surveillance. Many options—including Google, Facebook, and Apple’s email products, Yahoo’s web and mobile chat, Secret, and WhatsApp—lack the end-to-end encryption that is necessary to protect against disclosure by the service provider. Several major messaging platforms, like QQ, Mxit, and the desktop version of Yahoo Messenger, have no encryption at all.

“We’re focused on improving the tools that everyday users need to communicate with friends, family members, and colleagues,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. “We hope the Secure Messaging Scorecard will start a race-to-the-top, spurring innovation in stronger and more usable cryptography.”

The Secure Messaging Scorecard is part of EFF’s new Campaign for Secure and Usable Cryptography, and was produced in collaboration with Julia Angwin at ProPublica and Joseph Bonneau at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy.

Read the full Secure Messaging Scorecard here.

This article first appeared on Electronic Frontier Foundation and is republished under Creative Commons license.

Ritualz – Psychic Teens

Ancient Stone Circles Baffle Archaeologists

Huge mysterious stone circles in the Middle East have been aerially imaged and categorized for the first time. Their creators and purpose are still unknown.

Huge mysterious stone circles in the Middle East have been aerially imaged and categorized for the first time.

Although first discovered in the 1920s, early accounts of the ancient structures were largely ignored. It is only in the last 10 years that archaeologists have initiated a wider investigation into the number and purpose of the stone circles.

The results of the survey were surprising: there were more giant stone circles, many more, than previously known. They were made of rock and about a meter in height. In all, 12 circles were found in Jordan, another in Syria and two more in southeastern Turkey. Despite the distance separating the circles, they’re strikingly similar, said David Kennedy, the archaeologist for the Aerial Photographic Archive For Archaeology in the Middle East.

Where did they come from? What purpose did they serve and for whom? “I can’t even pretend to know what the answers are,” he said. It is likely that the forms at least pre-date the Roman empire and could possibly even be prehistoric. See more at Live Science.

[via Live Science]

mr. kitty – XIII

Alabama School District Caught Spying on Students

A disturbing report has emerged that Alabama school district paid a former FBI agent $157,000 to monitor the social-media accounts of students.

A disturbing report has emerged that Alabama school district paid a former FBI agent $157,000 to monitor the social-media accounts of students, resulting in 14 expulsions last year.

The program targeted 600 of Huntsville’s 24,000 students over the past year through a program called SAFe, Students Against Fear. Teachers or students could anonymously tip Chris McRae, the ex-FBI agent, about alarming things, and McRae would then scour their social-media accounts for signs linking them to drugs, weapons, gangs, or sex.

McRae was working under a $586,000 contract that the Huntsville school district paid to T&W Operations. AL.com noted that the school spying was not the only suspicious activity being conducted by T&W:

Jeannee Gannuch, co-founder of the South Huntsville Civic Association, said after the online program came to light, she noticed T&W was following her civic group on Facebook. Gannuch, who has at times been critical of city officials, said she blocked the consulting firm.

“My tax dollars are paying for a hired hand to watch a political organization? That doesn’t seem right,” said Gannuch.

T&W claims they are unaware of the allegations.

[via AL.com]

Arca – Thievery

5 Most Mysterious Photos from the Moon

UFO sightings, aliens, a secret moonbase and a NASA conspiracy theory… presenting the 5 most mysterious photos from the moon.

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The five most mysterious pictures from the Moon, including a UFO sighting during NASA’s Apollo 16 mission, an alien colossus spotted on the surface of the moon, a secret extraterrestrial colony or military moonbase, a strange employee photo taken when NASA bombed the moon, and curious lunar sprites that appear to be an underground power station captured by the Apollo space missions

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Dig Deeper:
Apollo 16 UFO: http://1.usa.gov/1ttpgwT
Google Moon Colossus: http://exm.nr/1twtXrB
Moonbase: http://huff.to/1zqtuuc
LCROSS Moon Bombing: http://bit.ly/1rOlbQ8
Lunar Sprites Image: http://bit.ly/1zqtEBD

Music: “Searching for Life” by Rafalkulik

Intro: “The Machine Thinks”
by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Trentemoller – Miss You

Meteor Explodes in Brilliant Ring of Fire

Watch an amateur astronomer’s time-lapse video of a large meteor exploding dramatically in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Meteor explosion Milky Way Timelapse from Soulcrate Music on Vimeo.

Possibly a rare “fireball” or “bolide.” From NASA:

Fireballs and bolides are astronomical terms for exceptionally bright meteors that are spectacular enough to to be seen over a very wide area. Ground-based observers sometimes also witness these events at night, or much more rarely in daylight, as impressive atmospheric light displays.

A meteoroid is generally defined as an asteroid or comet fragment that orbits the Sun and has an approximate size between ten microns and a meter or so. Meteors, or “shooting stars,” are the visible paths of meteoroids that have entered the Earth’s atmosphere at high velocities. A fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a visual magnitude of -3 or brighter when seen at the observer’s zenith. Objects causing fireball events can exceed one meter in size. Fireballs that explode in the atmosphere are technically referred to as bolides although the terms fireballs and bolides are often used interchangeably.

During the atmospheric entry phase, an impacting object is both slowed and heated by atmospheric friction. In front of it, a bow shock develops where atmospheric gases are compressed and heated. Some of this energy is radiated to the object causing it to ablate, and in most cases, to break apart. Fragmentation increases the amount of atmosphere intercepted and so enhances ablation and atmospheric braking. The object catastrophically disrupts when the force from the unequal pressures on the front and back sides exceeds its tensile strength.

Objects causing fireballs are usually not large enough to survive passage through the Earth’s atmosphere intact, although fragments, or meteorites, are sometimes recovered on the ground.

[via Reddit]