« First...102030...2,0702,0712,0722,0732,074...2,0802,0902,100...Last »

NSA spying bill stalls in Senate vote

Posted on by

Erin Kelly, USA TODAY 8:02 p.m. EST November 18, 2014

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in Moscow. Snowden last year the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone data.(Photo: Uncredited, AP)

WASHINGTON The Senate on Tuesday failed to get the 60 votes needed to advance a bill that would stop the National Security Agency from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans who are not suspected of any crime.

Senators voted 58-42 in favor of a motion to allow the USA Freedom Act to come to an up or down vote in the Senate. The motion required 60 votes to pass.

The bill is effectively dead for this year and is unlikely to be revived when the new Congress convenes in January. However, the controversial NSA program will most likely be debated again next year as Congress decides whether to renew sections of the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law that are set to expire in June.

The Freedom Act would have brought an end to the NSA's mass collection of phone data more than a year after the program was revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden's revelations outraged both liberal and conservative lawmakers, who decried the NSA's "big brother" snooping on innocent Americans. But some analysts said that anger has lessened as terrorist threats against the USA by the Islamic State and other extremist groups have gained attention.

"In the past five or six months, we have witnessed heightened U.S. national security concerns with terrorist threats, geopolitical problems, and cybersecurity challenges from Russia and China," said David Fidler, professor of law at Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. "Addressing these concerns requires strong American intelligence and surveillance capabilities creating the potential for stronger opposition to the Snowden-inspired reforms today than existed only a few months ago."

The Freedom Act was sponsored by a rare bipartisan coalition of senators ranging from liberal Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, R-Texas. But it did not go far enough to satisfy some privacy advocates in both parties, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. And it was opposed by hawkish lawmakers who argued that it would hamstring U.S. intelligence agencies at a time when terrorist threats against the United States are rising.

Major U.S. tech companies pushed for its approval, complaining that the NSA controversy has made it hard for them to convince foreign customers that they will not be spied upon by the U.S. government if they use U.S. phone or Internet providers.

Go here to read the rest:
NSA spying bill stalls in Senate vote

Decrypting User-Side Encryption – a Tech/Policy Rising Discussion (p1) – Video

Posted on by


Decrypting User-Side Encryption - a Tech/Policy Rising Discussion (p1)
Major companies are responding to growing public pressure by building greater privacy and security features into their products, like default client-side device encryption. Federal agencies...

By: Access

Visit link:
Decrypting User-Side Encryption - a Tech/Policy Rising Discussion (p1) - Video

Encryption and Storage Performance in Android 5.0 Lollipop

Posted on by

As alluded to in our Nexus 6 review, our normal storage performance benchmark was no longer giving valid results as of Android 5.0. While Androbench was not a perfect benchmark by any stretch of the imagination, it was a reasonably accurate test of basic storage performance. However, with the Nexus 5 on Androids developer preview, we saw anywhere between 2-10x improvement to Androbenchs storage performance results with no real basis in reality. It seems that this is because the way that the benchmark was written relied upon another function for timing, which has changed with Android 5.0.

While we havent talked too much about AndEBench, it has a fully functional storage test that we can compare to our Androbench results. While were unsure of the 256K sequential and random read results, it seems that the results are equivalent to Androbench on Android 4.4 when a 1.7x scaling factor is applied. However, AndEBench results should be trustworthy as we saw no difference in results when updating devices from 4.4 to 5.0. In addition, the benchmark itself uses low level operations that shouldnt be affected by updates to Android.

As you can see, the results show a degree of improvement that is well beyond what could realistically be accomplished with any sort of software optimizations. The results for the random write test are the most notable, with a result that suggests the performance is over 17x faster on Android Lollipop, which could not be the case. This required further investigation, andit's one of the reasons why we were hesitant to post any storage benchmarks in the Nexus 6 review.

The other factor affecting the results of the benchmarks on the Nexus 6 specifically is Android Lollipop's Full Disk Encryption (FDE). Android has actually had this ability since Android 3.0Honeycomb, but Lollipop is the first time it's being enabled by default on new devices. When FDE is enabled, all writes to disk have the informationencrypted before it's committed, and all reads have the information decrypted before they're returned to the process. The key to decrypt is protected by the lockscreen password, which means that the data should be safe from anyone who takes possession of your device. However, unlike SSDs, which often have native encryption, eMMC has no such standard. In addition, most SoCs don't have the type of fixed-function blocks necessary to enable FDE with little to no performance penalty.

As a result, we've observed significant performance penalties caused by the use of FDE on the Nexus 6. Motorola was kind enough to reach out and provide a build with FDE disabled so we could compare performance, and we've put the results in the graphs below. For reference, the Nexus 5 (Lollipop) numbers are run using Andebench, while the original values are read out from Androbench on Android 4.4. The Nexus 5 is also running without FDE enabled, as it will not enable itself by default when updating to Lollipop via an OTA update.

As you can see, there's a very significant performance penalty that comes with enabling FDE, with a 62.9% drop in random read performance, a 50.5% drop in random write performance, and a staggering 80.7% drop in sequential read performance. This has serious negative implications for device performance in any situation where applications are reading or writing to disk. Google's move to enable FDE by default also may not be very helpful with real world security without a change in user behaviour, as much of the security comes from the use of a passcode.This poses a problem, because the users that don't use a passcode doesn't really benefit from FDE, but they're still subject to the penalties.

When the Nexus 6 review was published, I commented that there were performance issues that weren't present on the Nexus 5 running Android Lollipop. Many users commented that the FDE may have been to blame. Like I mentioned earlier, Motorola provided us with a build of Android with FDE disabled. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed any improvements to many of the areas where there are significant frame rate issues such as Messenger and Calendar. I speculated in the Nexus 6 review that the performance issues may simply be the result of insufficient GPU performance or memory bandwidth to drive the QHD display.

Read the original here:
Encryption and Storage Performance in Android 5.0 Lollipop

Apache Software Foundation reels from software development problems laid bare

Posted on by

When Linux and the open source software movement started making great strides 15 years ago, many detractors claimed open source would be a risky bet in the enterprise space, having to rely on a "community" to iron out bugs and advance features in software.

Those same detractors may have had worn a wry smile if they had attended one of the main keynotes at this week's ApacheCon event in Budapest, where the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) laid bare the problems it is now facing in driving open source software development forward.

The fact that Apache servers still underpin most of the internet infrastructure, that Linux owns a huge chunk in the server operating system market, and that CloudStack is carving out a niche for itself as a cloud orchestration tool, may well become slightly sullied if the ASF cannot straighten itself out.

Delegates at the keynote heard about a litany of failures and shortcomings at the ASF, seemingly mainly caused by the fact that the organisation remains a community organisation that relies on volunteers - who are rapidly disappearing.

David Nalley, VP of infrastructure at the ASF, outlined to delegates the problems the organisation is facing in his keynote titled 'Where is Apache Infrastructure Going?'

He said: "There are cultural issues and attitudes that need to change. We are the service provider and not the Foundation's policemen, we are there to simply serve the projects."

Nalley said his team could not be responsible for carefully overseeing everything and called for more automation and simplicity in developing and approving new open source software.

He said: "We attended a CIO and CTO event recently and they said to us they would have expected our budget to be 10 times what it was for developing the infrastructure we are involved in, that's why we are moving to more automation in publishing releases and other contributions."

He explained that the ASF's own infrastructure was creaking under the pressure from being responsible for a burgeoning number of software projects. The ASF is still struggling to recover from a major network and email outage this year, which Nalley said would still take months to fully rectify through the use of a contractor.

He said: "We have 10-year-old services that were built by people who for one reason or another are no longer with us, and that infrastructure was designed to support about 10 projects, not the 150 we are now dealing with, and the 200 I expect we'll have to deal with soon."

The rest is here:
Apache Software Foundation reels from software development problems laid bare


« First...102030...2,0702,0712,0722,0732,074...2,0802,0902,100...Last »