How Next Tech Lab of SRM AP University is enabling innovation for students – Siliconindia.com

Posted on January 3, 2020 by admin

What is common to the following- Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Biology, Electrical Systems, Cryptocurrency (leveraging blockchain technology and cryptography), Internet of things (IOT), Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?

Other than they being cutting edge technologies and/or tech applications, what is common across them is that those are some of the areas that students of SRM University-AP work on as part of the Next Tech Lab that is present in the university.

What is Next Tech Lab?

Next Tech Lab is a first-of-its-kind, student-run, multi-disciplinary lab by SRM University. SRM offers a rich selection ofgraduate and undergraduate programmes in Engineering, Liberal Arts and Business Management.It is housed at two locations: SRM University- AP and SRM IST. The NextTechlab has a board of advisors that includes professors and researchers from academia and industry. The organisations they have been part of include MIT, Google, Cambridge University, Harvard University etc.

The Next Tech Lab was first started at the SRM University in the town of Kattankulathur, in the Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu, close to Chennai and it has proven itself to be a very successful student-led innovation.

A feather in the cap of SRM University was when Next Tech Lab became the only organisation from India to participate in and win the QS Reimagine Education 2018 award for its work in pioneering the student-led innovation lab model in India. This prestigious award was presented to the student founders of Next Tech Lab by Nunzio Quacquarelli at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School.

How is Next Tech Lab different from labs present in other colleges in India?

The other interesting aspect of Next Tech Lab is that it is a student led initiative and has no faculty in charge of it. It is heartening to see students take the lead in exploring these technologies of the future by working on prototypes that use these bleeding edge technologies.

The Next Tech Lab also allows students to work on projects that use multiple technologies thus mimicking how technology is used in the real world, as opposed to theoretical experience that is usually limited to one technological discipline only,e.g.- a college course will only focus on machine learning (ML) so that the student understands the fundamentals of machine learning, but may not allow a student to work on, say, a crypto application that uses ML to detect fraud. Next Tech Lab is able to bridge that gap between only theoretical knowledge and practical work experience.

How did Next Tech Lab come into existence?

Some students from SRM University had gone to the USA for their internship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. While at MIT, Anshuman Pandey and Adithya Ramakrishnan were very intrigued by the deep research culture followed there by the students. They were inspired by a conversation with Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Kofi Annan about his hope for a reverse braindrain for developing countries. A few months later, Anshuman and Adithya penned down the initial concept of Next Tech Lab for the Indian academic environment.

What are some of the activities that students at Next Tech Lab have participated in?

Students who are a part of the Next Tech Lab in SRM University-AP have participated in numerous hackathons and research activities. Students from SRM University have also won hackathons (best way to showcase your tech and coding credentials), have published an article in top journals, prototyped interesting ideas and receiving guidance and various validations from the top professors in the world.

Next Tech Lab encourages students to participate in conferences and technical seminars around the world. Here are some of the past conferences and seminars that SRM University students participated in:

Student Members from Next Tech Labs Pauch, Extended Reality Lab attended the India HCI 2019 Conference held at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad on the 3rd & 4th of November 2019. The students projects were shown under the category of Late Breaking Workat the prestigious conference.

In May 2019, SRM University student and Next Tech Lab member,Aakanksha Chouhan, gave atalk at the PyCon Italia conference in Florence, Italy.

In March 2019, student members of the Next Tech Labhad been invited to participate in the 'TensorFlowDevSummit' at Google, USA. This two day conference had technical discussions, product demos, and deep conversations with the TensorFlow team and extended community.

Student members interacted with Mr Rajat Monga, who is the Director of TensorFlow, Mr Franois Cholletthe Creator of Keras and Mr Jeremy Howard, Founder at fast.ai among many other highly distinguished experts.

The Next Tech Lab at the SRM AP University provides an extensive platform for students of technology to deeply learn and widely research their ideas. If the ideas are found feasible, then the students can also implement them and gain practical experience that helps them in their technical careers or their further studiesin their chosen technical fields.

Author Bio:

I am Surbhi, in my twenties and based in Hyderabad, India, with interests across industries. Writing for me, I believe, relieves stress, helps me concentrate better, and let me reinvent myself. Over the past decade, I have written for big publications such as ElephantJournal, yoganonymous, SiteProNews, Jewellerista etc. Since completing my higher education, I am exploring more in business-related topics of start-ups. Diversity across various categories helps broadens my vision and make me learn more about my writing.

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The Top Five News Stories In Iceland Of 2019 – Reykjavk Grapevine

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

2019 was an eventful year for news, and some of it was actually good news, too. There were some stories, however, that stood above the restthey may have attracted international headlines, profoundly affected the political landscape, or proved lively and resilient in the public discourse.

While this list is by no means definitive, these were the stories that, from the point of view of this news desk, truly stood out in 2019.

WOW Air goes bankruptNobody goes bankrupt overnight, as one would-be passenger who got her flight cancelled told us. Thats on observation that still resonates as were still feeling the effects of Icelands discount airline suddenly ceasing all operations last March. There was great uncertainty, as these cheap flights dropped off the map just as the tourist high season began, with worries about how this might affect the economy. Looking back now, the economy did just fine, even if much-lauded announcements of impending budget airlines have yet to materialise.

SharkgateTwo fishermen start a Facebook Live video of them on the job.At one point, they caught what was obviously a juvenile shark and cut its tail off before dropping back into the sea with a mocking try and swim now you little bastard! Unfortunately for them, someone was recording the stream, and the subsequent video went viral. The backlash against them spread across international headlines, the fishermen lost their jobs, and then public discourse raised questions about proportionality of response.

Gender determination lawIn a major step for the rights of trans and nonbinary Icelanders, Iceland passed a law that was years in the making. It granted people the freedom to register their actual gender; not just the one they were assigned at birth. It also eschewed the tedious gatekeeping of having to endure half a dozen interviews over months or longer just to get access to hormone replacement therapy and other medical care that some trans people want. It was a major step forward for Iceland, even if some people got left behind: intersex children are still not protected from unnecessary cosmetic surgery on their genitals, and nonbinary folks will have to wait at least a year before they can register as X in the gender field at the National Registry.

The Fishrot FilesThis bombshell dropped in the last month of 2019 but still proved one of the most important stories of the year out of Iceland. A whistleblower who used to work for the Icelandic fishing giant Samherji handed over 30,000 documents to Wikileaks, detailing how the company bribed Namibian officials to get access to massive fishing quotas, and then subsequently squirreled the money into tax havens. In Namibia, this led to immediate sackings of the officials involved and the arrest of half a dozen people facing corruption charges. In Iceland, no such response has been forthcoming, but it re-ignited the debate about the importance of a new constitution, and shone a spotlight on the corruption within our own ranks.

Cyclone hits IcelandAnother December story, this story became very important for primarily two reasons. A literal cyclone touched down on Iceland, delivering snow and wind speeds unprecedented in this country. While Reykjavk escaped relatively unscathed, the countryside did not fare as wellpower outages, disrupted phone service, blocked roads, missing livestock and at least one death were reported across North Iceland. It was a sobering reminder of how the climate crisis is sparing nobody, no matter how remote. Also, as even the President of Iceland pointed out, it was a reminder that rural Icelanders often do not have access to the same resources that we Reykjavkings take for granted, and we need to do better.

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The Top Five News Stories In Iceland Of 2019 - Reykjavk Grapevine

Encrypting DNS: Year in Review 2019 – EFF

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

This February, with Venezuela rocked by economic collapse and a presidential succession crisis, an opposition party put out a call for volunteers. Juan Guaid, a political leader with the Popular Will party, called on supporters to register at the site Volunteers for Venezuela. Guaid announced that the call was successful, with over 100,000 supporters submitting their contact information to the site.

But according to researchers with Venezuela Inteligente, CrowdStrike, and Kaspersky Lab, bad actors used DNS response injection to route these visitors to a fake version of the site. The fake version of the site looked identical to the real one, but researchers believe that the information collected was sent to the attackers instead of to Guaids party. On February 17th, the identities of the activists were leaked by a media outlet supporting Guaids rival Nicols Maduro, which the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensics Research Lab believes had access to the database of phished information.

DNS is a part of the Internet infrastructure that serves as a directory to help Internet users find and connect to the servers for the domains they want to connect to, by letting the domain owners publish contact information about their services, and letting users query to receive that information. Ideally, the type of attack that took place in Venezuela should not be possible; we would hope that DNS would accurately tell users where the site theyre looking for is located, and not direct them to some other site.

Unfortunately, the DNS infrastructure was created in a more innocent era in which the Internet was often seen as comprised of trustworthy organizations and people. DNS remains highly vulnerable to monitoring, readily revealing what sites people are trying to visit (for purposes of advertising, commercial profiling, political profiling, network censorship, or espionage). Its also vulnerable to spoofing, whether by an Internet service providers own resolver service (which could give deliberately false replies to users queries) or by someone who has compromised Internet routers (who could observe queries and then quickly inject false replies even before the genuine ones arrive), among other possibilities.

The lack of DNS encryption is a serious privacy concern for all Internet users. But in countries where residents are targeted by their government for extrajudicial killings, unencrypted DNS is a safety issue that must be fixed.

Fortunately, volunteers working through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have made tremendous progress towards encrypting DNS. Two protocols have emerged to encrypt DNS queries: DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH). We think both protocols are progress over the unencrypted DNS query situation. DoT retrofits the classic DNS protocol with TLS encryption, while DoH wraps it inside web browsing so the DNS query and reply travel the Internet looking likeand protected likea web browsing session, which should make it harder for ISPs to block DoH queries. In the Venezuela case, for example, if the attackers had the cooperation of Venezuelan ISPs, they might have tried to force users to use vulnerable resolver services within the country, even if the users wanted to use more neutral and trustworthy services elsewhere. DoH will make it harder for ISPs to abuse their position to force their users to use a DNS service that the ISPs operate or can monitor or interfere with.

Nevertheless, plans for the imminent implementation of DNS over HTTPS received a tremendous amount of criticism this year, with the Internet Services Providers Association (a UK-based trade group for Internet service providers) going so far as to call Mozilla a villain for the latters plans to implement DoH.

Internet service providers in the US also lobbied against DoH through trade groups, raising concerns with Congressional committees that Googles Chrome browser would override the operating systems configured resolver to use Googles resolver instead. We agree that this would effect an alarming shift towards the centralization of DNS, but Google has never announced plans to implement DoH in the manner that the trade groups described. In Googles plan, most users will continue using their ISP-provided resolver services, with a DoH upgrade when the ISPs service offers it, which provides privacy benefits when the network connection is shared with others or monitored by a third party. Users who actively choose a different DNS service will also get better privacy.

Some DoH criticism focused on Mozillas plans to default users of its Firefox browser to Cloudflares public DNS servicesoften referred to as 1.1.1.1 after one of the IP addresses where Cloudflare makes its DNS resolver services available. Critics worried that this will inappropriately centralize some of the functionality of the DNS. Weve encouraged Mozilla to make sure that users have an easy, straightforward choice of DNS services.

EFF worked with Congressional staff members in the House Energy and Commerce Committee to address some of the concerns around DoH. Alongside Consumer Reports and the National Consumers League, we wrote an open letter to Congress explaining the important role that DNS encryption will play in protecting privacy and freedom of expression. We also talked to Congressional Research Service researchers who have been looking into the controversy.

Despite the concerns raised by some ISPs, technology companies have made substantial progress towards implementing support for encrypted DNS protocols over the past year. Comcast is currently testing support for both DoH and DoT in production, and the company has made strong public commitments to protect the privacy of their customers DNS queries. Microsoft has announced plans to support DNS over HTTPS in Windows.

We applaud the work being done by these companies to protect the privacy of their users, and encourage anyone who operates a resolver to implement support for encrypted DNS.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2019.

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Encryption Software Market 2019 | Analysis, Research, Share, Growth, Sales, Trends, Supply & Forecast till 2026 – Chief Analyst

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

New Jersey, United States Verified Market Research provides a credible report about the worldwide Encryption Software Market. The Encryption Software Market report passes on a through and through productive perspective of the information related to the Encryption Software Market.This market report utilizes well-examined market strategies such as SWOT analysis and Porters Five Forces analysis that convey deep market insights. The report includes a thorough investigation of different components impacting the market development. The report provides a complete assessment of present as well as future market prospects for the estimated period of time i.e. 2019-2026.

Global Encryption Software Market was valued at USD 3.32 billion in 2016 and is projected to reach USD 30.54 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 27.96% from 2017 to 2025.

This report includes factors such as market size, market share, market segmentation, significant growth drivers, market competition, different aspects impacting economic cycles in the market, demand, expected business up-downs, changing customer sentiments, key companies operating in the Encryption Software Market, etc. In order to deliver a complete understanding of the global market, the report also shares some of the useful details regarding regional as well as significant domestic markets. The report presents a 360-degree overview and SWOT analysis of the competitive landscape of the industries. Moreover, the report delivers a summarized assessment of the impact of federal policies and regulations on market operations. It also comprises detailed information pertaining to the Encryption Software Markets current dynamics.

The report concludes with the profiles of major players in the Encryption Software market are:

Dell, Thales E-Security, Eset, Symantec, IBM Corporation, Sophos, Ciphercloud, Pkware, Mcafee, Gemalto, Trend Micro, Microsoft Corporation

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Competitive Landscape:

Market players need to have a complete picture of the competitive landscape of the Encryption Software market as it forms an essential tool for them to plan their future strategies accordingly. The report puts forth the key sustainability strategies taken up by the companies and the impact they are likely to have on the Encryption Software market competition. The report helps the competitors to capitalize on opportunities in the Encryption Software market and cope up with the existing competition. This will eventually help them to make sound business decisions and generate maximum revenue.

Market Segment Analysis:

The report offers a comprehensive study of product type and application segments of the Encryption Software market. The sentimental analysis provided in the report is based on significant factors such as market share, market size, consumption, production, and growth rate of the market segments studied. Readers of the report are also provided with exhaustive geographical analysis to provide clear understanding of the regional growth of the Encryption Software market. Developed as well as developing regional markets for Encryption Software have been deeply studied to help market players identify profit-making opportunities in different regions and countries.

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Table of Content

1 Introduction of Encryption Software Market

1.1 Overview of the Market1.2 Scope of Report1.3 Assumptions

2 Executive Summary

3 Research Methodology of Verified Market Research

3.1 Data Mining3.2 Validation3.3 Primary Interviews3.4 List of Data Sources

4 Encryption Software Market Outlook

4.1 Overview4.2 Market Dynamics4.2.1 Drivers4.2.2 Restraints4.2.3 Opportunities4.3 Porters Five Force Model4.4 Value Chain Analysis

5 Encryption Software Market, By Deployment Model

5.1 Overview

6 Encryption Software Market, By Solution

6.1 Overview

7 Encryption Software Market, By Vertical

7.1 Overview

8 Encryption Software Market, By Geography

8.1 Overview8.2 North America8.2.1 U.S.8.2.2 Canada8.2.3 Mexico8.3 Europe8.3.1 Germany8.3.2 U.K.8.3.3 France8.3.4 Rest of Europe8.4 Asia Pacific8.4.1 China8.4.2 Japan8.4.3 India8.4.4 Rest of Asia Pacific8.5 Rest of the World8.5.1 Latin America8.5.2 Middle East

9 Encryption Software Market Competitive Landscape

9.1 Overview9.2 Company Market Ranking9.3 Key Development Strategies

10 Company Profiles

10.1.1 Overview10.1.2 Financial Performance10.1.3 Product Outlook10.1.4 Key Developments

11 Appendix

11.1 Related Research

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Finally, Encryption Software market report gives you details about the market research finding and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage. Supported by comprehensive primary as well as secondary research, the Encryption Software market report is then verified using expert advice, quality check and final review.

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Verified market research partners with clients to provide insight into strategic and growth analytics; data that help achieve business goals and targets. Our core values include trust, integrity, and authenticity for our clients. Our research studies help our clients to make superior data-driven decisions, capitalize on future opportunities, and optimize efficiency and keeping them competitive by working as their partner to deliver the right information without compromise.

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Encryption Software Market Size, Encryption Software Market Analysis , Encryption Software Market Growth , Verified Market Research

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Cyber Attacks are the Norm – Security Boulevard

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

As we 2019, its time to have a look at the year 2020 and what it would have in store for enterprises.

Since we are in the business of securing our enterprise customers infrastructures, we keep a close eye on how the security and encryption landscape is changing so we can help our customers to stay one step ahead.

In 2019, ransomware made a comeback, worldwide mobile operators made aggressive strides in the transformation to 5G, and GDPR achieved its first full year of implementation and the industry saw some of the largest fines ever given for massive data breaches experienced by enterprises.

2020 will no doubt continue to bring a host of the not new, like the continued rash of DDoS attacks on government entities and cloud and gaming services, to the new and emerging. Below are just a few of the trends we see coming next year.

Ransomware will increase globally through 2020Ransomware attacks are gaining widespread popularity because they can now be launched even against smaller players. Even a small amount of data can be used to hold an entire organisation, city or even country for ransom. The trend of attacks levied against North American cities and city governments will only continue to grow.

We will see at least three new strains of ransomware types introduced:

To no surprise, the cyber security skills gap will keep on widening. As a result, security teams will struggle with creating fool-proof policies and leveraging the full potential of their security investments

Slow Adoption of new Encryption Standards

Decryption: Its not a Choice Any Longer

TLS decryption will become mainstream as more attacks leverage encryption for infection and data breaches. Since decryption remains a compute-intensive process, firewall performance degradation will remain higher than 50% and most enterprises will continue to overpay for SSL decryption due to lack of skills within the security teams. To mitigate firewall performance challenges and lack of skilled staff, enterprises will have to adopt dedicated decryption solutions as a more efficient option as next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) continue to polish their on-board decryption capabilities

Cyber attacks are indeed the new normal. Each year brings new security threats, data breaches and operational challenges, ensuing that businesses, governments and consumers have to always be on their toes. 2020 wont be any different, particularly with the transformation to 5G mobile networks and the dramatic rise in IoT, by both consumers and businesses. The potential for massive and widespread cyber threats expands exponentially.

Lets hope that organisations, as well as security vendors, focus on better understanding the security needs of the industry, and invest in solutions and policies that would give them a better chance at defending against the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.

Encryption Key Management Software Market 2020 Major Players, Industry Size, Share, Applications, Recent Developments, Product, Services and Forecast…

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

The report Global Encryption Key Management Software Market 2020 offers an extensive and finest overview including definitions, classifications, and its applications. The Encryption Key Management Software industry foresee a decisive expansion in forthcoming years. The report analyzes necessary driving forces trailing the growth of the market in detail. It interprets the new Encryption Key Management Software industry data and market forecast 2020-2024. To clarify the Encryption Key Management Software market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the various segment. It also includes business tactics, development plans, import/export details.

Encryption Key Management Software market forecast report provides a valuable source of knowledgeable data for business strategists. Likewise, it gives the overview with growth analysis, Encryption Key Management Software futuristic cost, revenue, demand/supply data. Similarly, it elaborates the Encryption Key Management Software value chain and analysis of its distributor. This Encryption Key Management Software market study presents thorough data which enhances the understanding, scope, and application.

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Furthermore, it describes the extensive analysis of key Encryption Key Management Software market segments and sub-segments. Especially, includes evolving industry trends and dynamics, challenges, and competitive insights. Opportunity mapping in terms of technological breakthroughs for Encryption Key Management Software business development. The report analyzes the Encryption Key Management Software industry potential for each geographical region accordingly.

The report enlists the main competitors and displays the insights of vital world Encryption Key Management Software market Analysis of the key factors influencing the global industry.

Key Manufacturers of Encryption Key Management Software market are

Netlib SecurityFortanixAvery OdenAWSMicrosoftOpenBSDHyTrustGnuPGHashicorpGemalto

Different product types include:

Cloud BasedWeb Based

Encryption Key Management Software industry end-user applications including:

Large EnterprisesSMEs

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What was the historic Encryption Key Management Software market data? What is the global Encryption Key Management Software industry forecast from 2020 to 2024? Which are the leading worldwide Encryption Key Management Software industry companies, how are they positioned in the market in terms of competition, sustainability, production capacity and strategic outlook? What are the Encryption Key Management Software technology & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2024? Which are the leading Encryption Key Management Software market products, applications & regions and how will they perform by 2024? A detailed analysis of Encryption Key Management Software market size, regulatory trends, industry pitfalls, drivers coupled with challenges and growth opportunities for participants

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The First-ever "Unhackable" Encryption System is Finally Here! – Digital Information World

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

After problem comes solution. Hacking has emerged as a major issue over the years. Well, it looks like the right solution for it has arrived. As per the researchers from the University of St Andrews, they have devised an encryption system that is completely unhackable and saves data in the form of light.

Diving into the details, once the data is sent through the chip, it issues a one-time-only key. The data (retained as light) passes through a carefully designed chip that mixes up the information by bending and refracting light.

As the bending and refraction of light is different each time depending on the data being transferred via chip, this tech is a physical embodiment of the OTP (One-Time Password) mechanism, known for validating countless services.

The chips in question are capable of delivering 0.1 Terabit of different keys for every single mm of the input channels length.

According to St Andrews Universitys Professor Andrea Di Falco, the new tech can be best explained with the analogy of talking to someone with two paper-cups attached by string. If the cups are crunched while someone is speaking, their sound would be masked. But the crunch would be different every time. This makes the new tech seemingly unbreakable.

The systems security is assessed on the basis of the Kerckhoff principle. The tech uses the second law of thermodynamics and the exponential sensitivity and chaos in order to stop bad actors from getting their hands on any piece of information on the key being traded by the user.

If everything goes right, this invention can put an end to all cybersecurity issues across the world. It remains to be seen if these chips get used in the future to authorize the communication channels.

Nature.com has published a relevant research paper in which you can discover more about the new technology.

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The First-ever "Unhackable" Encryption System is Finally Here! - Digital Information World

The Irish Merlin Old Moores Almanac makes its predictions for 2020 as part of two-and-a-half century-old tradition – Extra.ie

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

The mists of time have been parted by the folks from Old Moores Almanac, which is packed from cover to cover with juicy predictions.

The Almanac, a two-and-a-half century-old Irish tradition, was founded by Theophilus Moore known as the Irish Merlin and is published annually.

Last year it successfully predicted events such as Dublin mens Gaelic football triumph, J-Los engagement/marriage, and an Irish ferry making the news.

In November, 16 people were found in a shipping container on-board a Stena Line ferry heading from France to Ireland.

So get your notepad and pen ready, heres what Old Moores Almanac believes is going to happen in 2020.

We hope some of the more ominous predictions are wide of the mark

Yup, the 45th president of the US President will not get a second term, according to the publication. Theres no word on who will replace him could it be Sanders, Warren or Biden?

Interestingly, the change in power does not run smoothly and the almanac forecasts violent clashes between opposing sides during the US election campaign.

After a turbulent year that saw her first marriage break up, pop star Miley Cyrus finds love again with singer Cody Simpson.

The couple have been dating for several months, after Mileys marriage to Luke Hemsworth ended.

While it might be early days for the loved-up pair, Old Moores Almanac thinks wedding bells are in the air for 2020.

After seeing manager Jim Gavin step down, Dublin wont win a historic six-in-a-row All Ireland Gaelic football title.

Instead, the Kerry mens team will claim the All Ireland, while Cork is the predicted winner of the womens competition. In hurling, Kilkenny will go all the way in the chase for the Liam MacCarthy Cup.

The feisty rock duo have been getting in each others faces since their childhood days. But since the band split in 2009, the brotherly banter has turned into something of a feud.

While Noel Gallagher recently said a reunion is unlikely due to his moron brother Liam, there could be hope for Oasis fans. Old Moore mystics say reconciliation is on the cards.

After years spent exiled in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities earlier this year. The incident sparked debate over whistleblowing and freedom of speech.

However, the Wikileaks editor now faces extradition to the US regarding classified material leaked to the organisation by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Could 2020 be the year Assange is taken into US custody?

The last time Icelands unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in 2010, there was travel chaos throughout Europe and put it on the global map.

Well, 2020 could be the year that the volcanos fiery power returns to haunt us all over again.

According to Old Moores Almanac, it is time for another Icelandic eruption.

Not a prediction anyone would want to see come true. Drones are increasingly (and perhaps annoyingly) becoming a ubiquitous part of the technology landscape.

Maybe its only a matter of time before a publicly available drone is used to harm. We certainly hope Old Moore has this one wrong.

WikiLeaks: UN official accuses UK and US of torture over treatment of Assange and Manning – The Independent

Posted on January 1, 2020 by admin

A top UN official has accused the British and US governments of torture over their detention of whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who between them embarrassed the West over its military operations in Iraq.

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said Ms Manning, who is being held in a jail in Virginia after refusing to testify about Mr Assange, was being being subjected to an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

He added: The practice of coercive detention appears to be incompatible with the international human rights obligations of the United States.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

In regard to Britains treatment of Mr Assange, who is being held in Londons Belmarsh prison, where supporters say his health is fading, he said: Mr Assanges continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering which, in light of the circumstances, clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The condemnation of the governments treatment of the two prisonerswas made in separate letters, that Mr Melzer, 49, made public after he said he received no response to concerns he raised with US and British authorities.

REUTERS

The continued detention of Ms Manning is not a lawful sanction.and should be discontinued and abolished without delay, he said on Twitter.

Of the letter released about Mr Assanges treatment, he said: My official findings, supported by medical experts, unquestionably provide reasonable ground to believe UK officials contributed to Assanges psychological torture or ill-treatment.

Though they have never met, the lives of Ms Manning, 32, and 48-year-old Mr Assange, became inextricably linked after the one-time army intelligence analyst provided a wealth of materials about the US-led invasion and military operation in Iraq to Wikileaks, the whistleblower organisation Mr Assange founded in 2006.

Among the most damning material was video footage that showed two USAH-64 Apache helicopters attacking buildings in Baghdad in 2007, and then closing in a group of people. Among the people were children and journalists.

Chelsea Manning: Jailed US analyst walks free after refusing to testify to WikiLeaks grand jury

Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards, one US airman can be heard to say. The attack killed at least a dozen people.

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Ms Manning served seven years for leaking the video, much of that time spent in solitary confinement. She was detained again in the spring of 2019 after refusing to testify against Mr Assange at a grand jury that was established in Virginia to support a prosecution of him.

I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech, she said.

Mr Assange was arrested on April 11 at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, after US prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed a criminal case against him, alleging he conspired with Ms Manning to commit computer intrusion.

Mr Assange, whose organisation also published information about Guantanamo Bay, the US state department and Democratic Party emails allegedly obtained by Russian hackers, is preparing to fight his case at an extradition hearing, due to begin in February.

The US has charged him with 17 offences, most of the them under the Espionage Act. The US alleges he helped Ms Manning hack a Pentagon computer network, something his supporters have denied is true.

After he was arrested, a lawyer for Mr Assange, Barry Pollack, said: These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavour to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the US government.

Mr Assange, whose health is said to be worsening according to friends and supporters who have visited him in jail, faces up to 175 years in jail if convicted.

An arrest warrant from Sweden, relating to allegations of sexual assault, has since been dropped.

The US state department did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Independent. A spokesperson for the British foreign office said: We strongly disagree with any suggestion that Mr Assange has experienced improper treatment in the UK. The allegation Mr Assange was subjected to torture is unfounded and wholly false.

The rest is here:
WikiLeaks: UN official accuses UK and US of torture over treatment of Assange and Manning - The Independent

The Most Dangerous People on the Internet This Decade – WIRED

Posted on January 1, 2020 by admin

In the meantime, Facebook has been used again and again to spread mass disinformation, from hate speech that fueled the massacre of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar to WhatsApp propaganda that helped elected far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to troll armies tasked with attacking the enemies of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump. In almost every instance, Zuckerberg has been slow to react, or even initially dismissive of concerns. The result has been a decade of disastrous effects, for both privacy and politics, across the globe. As Facebook has claimed a near-monopoly on social media, there's little sign that Zuckerberg is willing to slow his company's rapacious growth to prevent the next catastrophe.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange first came on the general public's radar in a 2010 WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder. It represented a radical new model of secret-spilling that empowered whistleblowers by offering them a digital dead drop, one that protected with their anonymity with strong encryption. WikiLeaks would follow up with one blockbuster leak after another, with hundreds of thousands of classified files from the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, followed by a quarter million secret cables from the State Department. With those megaleaks from his tiny group, Assange successfully upended parts of the global order, hastening the US pullout from Iraq and helping to touch off the Arab Spring with its revelations about the Tunisian dictator Ben Alieven as WikiLeaks was accused of also endangering innocents like State Department sources whose names were included in the files. But Assange would have another, unexpected second act in 2016, when Russian agents would exploit WikiLeaks to launder documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. After all, Assange never cared much for distinctions between whistleblowers and hackers. Throughout those years, Assange always maintained that the US intended to imprison himthat US hegemony considered him too dangerous to be left free. When Assange was pulled out of the Ecuadorean embassy in April and put in a British prison awaiting extradition to face US hacking and espionage charges, he was proven right.

ISIS

Violent Islamist group ISIS integrated terrorism with the internet like no one else in history. From its initial takeover of Mosul in 2014, ISIS both horrified the world with its acts of barbarism and also carried out a deeply effective online recruiting campaign. With grisly propaganda videos and lies about the Islamist paradise it sought to create posted to YouTube and other social media, it convinced many young Muslims across the globe to rally to its cause, turning Iraq and Syria into magnets for juvenile, misguided bloodletting and forcing every tech company to consider how the most violent humans in the world might misuse their services. But ISIS also successfully turned the internet into a means of distributing its violence physically, persuading lone wolves to carry out unspeakable attacks from Paris to Nice to London to New York. Even as ISIS's caliphate has been dismantled and its founder killed by US forces, that placeless call to violence still rings out across the internet, and may yet pull more troubled young men under its sway.

Lazarus

North Korea may have largely cut off its populace from the internet. But it makes a few very notable exceptions, including for the North Korean hackers broadly known as Lazarus, which has carried out some of the most aggressive hacking operations ever seen online. Lazarus first shocked the world with its attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for its Kim Jong-un assassination comedy, The Interview. Under the cover story of a hacktivist group known as "Guardians of Peace," they breached the company, spilled thousands of its emails online, extorted the it for cash, and destroyed hundreds of its computers. Since then, Lazarus has shifted its tactics in part to purely profit-motivated cybercrime, stealing billions of dollars around the world in bank fraud operations and cryptocurrency thefts. Those cybercriminal operations hit a new low in May of 2017, when Lazarus released WannaCry, a ransomware worm that exploited the leaked NSA hacking tool EternalBlue to automatically spread to as many computers as possible before encrypting them and demanding a ransom. Thanks to errors in its code, WannaCry didn't make much money for its creators. But it had a far larger effect on its victims: It cost somewhere between $4 and $8 billion globally to repair the damage.

NSO Group

At the beginning of this decade, hacking contractor firms and sellers of techniques known as "exploits" were barely heard of. The few known cybermercenaries were subjects of scandal and accused of digital arms dealing. Today, the Israeli firm NSO Group has made them all look tame by comparison. The company has sold techniques for remotely breaking into iPhones and Android phones with little or no interaction from the victim. In some cases, the company and its customers were able to plant malware on a target phone simply by calling it on WhatsApp. And despite the company's repeated insistence that it doesn't sell its hacking services to human rights abusers, the targets of its hacking have shown otherwise: Activist Ahmed Mansour, one of the first high-profile victims of NSO's exploits, is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates. NSO malware targets in Mexico have included activists who have lobbied for a soda tax and the wife of a slain journalist. When WhatsApp sued NSO in October, it accused the firm of helping to hack 1,400 victims across the globe, including dissidents, diplomats, lawyers, and government officials. All of that makes NSO's spying-for-hire operation just as dangerous as many of the world's most brazen state-sponsored hackers.

Xenotime

In August of 2017, a piece of malware known as Triton or Trisis shut down an oil refinery owned by petrochemical firm Petro Rabigh, on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. That was, in fact, a lucky outcome. The malware had actually been intended not to stop the plant's operations, but to disable so-called safety-instrumented systems in the plant designed to prevent dangerous conditions like leaks and explosions. The malware, planted by a mysterious hacker group known as Xenotime, could have easily been the first cyberattack to have cost a human life. Xenotime's motivations aren't clear, nor are its origins. Though the usual suspect for any attack on Saudi Arabia is Iran, FireEye in 2018 found links between its Triton/Trisis malware and a Russian university. Since the Petro Rabigh incident, Xenotime's target list has grown to include North American oil and gas operations, and even the US power grid. By all appearances, the group has only displayed a fraction of its destructive potential.

Cody Wilson

Over the last 10 years, Cody Wilson has developed a talent for incubating nightmares in the space between new technologies and the laws that control their most dangerous applications. In 2013, he released blueprints online for the world's first fully 3-D printable gun, allowing anyone with a 3-D printer to create a deadly, unregulated weapon in the privacy of their home. But Wilson soon traded the sci-fi shock value of that idea for practical lethality: He sold thousands of Ghost Gunner machines capable of carving away aluminum to finish fully metal AR-15s and Glocks from fully unregulated parts. In the meantime, Wilson's side projects have been just as controversial. He founded Hatreon, a Patreon-type donations site that funded extremists and white nationalists, as well as a bitcoin wallet designed for perfectly untraceable transactions, unlocking powerful new forms of money laundering. (That cryptocurrency project was halted only when his partner, Amir Taaki, unexpectedly smuggled himself into Syria to fight ISIS alongside the Kurds.)

Last year, Wilson was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a minor. But by September 2019, he was already released on probation. Given how Wilson has thrived on controversy and negative press, don't expect his bomb-throwing career to be over just yet.

Peter Thiel

Once, Peter Thiel was simply a rich libertarian eccentric, dreaming of seasteading, advocating against college education, and watching the fortune he made cofounding PayPal multiply as a major investment in Facebook. This decade, however, it's the politics of his businesses, not their profit-making, that has raised the most eyebrows. Palantir, another company he cofounded, has become the world's most active embodiment of Silicon Valley's partnership with surveillance agencies, controversially offering up its data-mining software and services for undocumented immigrant-hunting at ICE, and reportedly stepping in for the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven after Google bowed out under employee pressure. Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey with an investment from Thiel, sells surveillance technologies designed for the southern border to Customs and Border Protection. Even earlier, starting in 2012, Thiel notoriously bankrolled a series of lawsuits designed to destroy Gawker as an apparent act of vengeance, although Thiel himself described it as "deterrence." Regardless, his libertarian ideals seem to find their limits at press freedom, surveillance, and rights for US immigrants.

Anonymous

The faceless hacker collective known as Anonymous came into being in the late 2000s. But it hit its peak in the first years of the 2010s, with hacking operations that hit Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal with waves of junk traffic as vengeance for their financial blockade of WikiLeaks, as well as waves of hacking that tormented Sony for suing George Hotz for reverse engineering the Playstation. Anonymous' anarchistic hacktivism peaked in the summer of 2011, when an offshoot of the group known as LulzSec went on a months-long rampage, hacking security firms, defense contractors, media, government, and police organizations. It turns out, however, that young hackers without the backing of a government nor a comfortable geographic remove from their victims isn't exactly a sustainable form of protest. Virtually all of the most active Anonymous hackers were arrested. Some, like Jeremy Hammond, received lengthy prison sentences, while others like Hector Monsegur became informants against their former colleagues. Since then, Anonymous has largely petered out as a movement, and hacktivism has faded from the headlines, more often used as a cover story for state-sponsored hackers than a tool for idealistic agents of chaos.