Islam Times - The Financial Times, a renowned British newspaper reported that the British Security Services had broken into a London apartment following concerns that the residence was used for terrorist activities, only to found that the premises were used for prostitution.
The apartment which is owned by non-other than Salwa Hamad bin Jassim, the Qatari Prime Minister’s daughter, raised some serious question marks over the young woman’s moral standards and the nature of her activities when in the United Kingdom. According to witnesses Salwa was actually at the apartment in the company of a westerner.
Although the Qatari embassy tried to prevent the scandal from seeing the light of day by offering $50 million to the paper, the Financial Times refused.
In a city of boundless bling, Dubai Police also are in hot pursuit after adding a nearly $550,000 Lamborghini to its fleet.
The sports car, painted in green-and-white colors of the Dubai force, will not likely be roaring after law breakers. Instead, it will be mostly dispatched to tourist areas to show - in the words of Major General Khamis Mattar Al Mazeina, Dubai Police’s Deputy Commander General - “how classy Dubai is.”
The two-door, two-seater sports car, which can reach speeds of up to 217mph, has been painted in the green-and-white colors of the Dubai Police force. It can go from 0 to 62mph in 2.9 seconds.
The Aventador was described by Lamborghini on its website as “a one-of-a-kind piece of art.”
Moroccan football hooligans rampaged through Casablanca, mugging pedestrians and smashing up carriages of the city’s new tram system, cars and public buses. Nearly 200 people have been arrested.
Fans from the capital Rabat paraded through Casablanca before Thursday’s match between clubs from the two cities and attacked people and property. No one was reported injured.
Police said Friday that 193 people were charged with vandalism and the destruction included eight tram carriages, seven public buses and 13 cars. People described on national television being attacked in the streets and mugged by the fans as well.
An inquiry has been launched to discover why more security forces weren’t present.
There is a fierce rivalry between Moroccan football clubs and there have been outbreaks of violence outside games in the past. alarabiya
Last year, a Googler named Dr. Elie Bursztein noticed that Apple's App Store protocols weren't very secure.
Much of the interaction your iDevice had with the App Store was conducted via plain old HTTP.
Apple should really have been using HTTPS, or secure HTTP.
HTTPS, as you probably know, is HTTP traffic carried inside a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transaction Layer Security (TLS) wrapper.
→ SSL/TLS uses public-key cryptography to create a secure data channel, even between users or websites that have never corresponded before. Conventional encryption, like a doorlock, relies on a single key that can lock or unlock. How to share that one-size-fits-all key before you start using it is a security problem all of its own. Public key cryptography relies on an algorithm that uses two keys. One is kept private, and the other made public. What the public key locks, only the private key can unlock.
The problem with HTTP is that if you're on someone else's network, whether it's wired or wireless, they can probably listen into all your web traffic.
Likewise, if someone else is on your network, they can do the same thing, eavesdropping undetectably.
Worse still, it's very likely that they'll be able not only to watch what you're doing, but also to modify the traffic you send and receive.
So, in an ideal world, there would be HTTPS only, since the encryption layer inhibits both eavesdropping and unauthorised modification. Nobody would use HTTP for anything.
And why not? SSL/TLS encryption can be made largely transparent both to the programmer and the user, so the difference in online experience between encrypted and unencrypted web sessions is pretty modest.
In practice, however, HTTPS isn't quite as convenient for your IT department as HTTP.
You need to get certificates signed, your private keys stored securely, and more.
That means an operational change, which means paperwork, implementation time and (you can guess what comes next) money.
Also, because every HTTPS download is encrypted uniquely for each user each time they fetch it, it's much harder to cache HTTPS traffic.
If 2000 users from the USA pull down the same image file from your database in New Zealand, you can't rely on a web cache on the USA side to serve up an identical copy of the file to 1999 of them, because each download is individually negotiated and encrypted.
That means an operational change, which means paperwork, implementation time and (you can guess what comes next) money.
As a result, a sort-of HTTP/HTTPS hybrid evolved.
You use HTTPS for the parts of the transaction that really have to be secret, such as sending passwords, credit card numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
For everything else, you use HTTP.
That was the model used by many online services, including webmail providers and social networks, until fairly recently.
Implemented as a Firefox plugin, Firesheep listened on the network until the HTTPS-protected part of your social networking session was complete.
Then it sniffed out your session cookie, the magic token embedded in your post-authentication HTTP requests that tells Facebook, Twitter and others that you're an authorised user.
Firesheep could then pretend to be you, posting status updates, links, tweets and more from your accounts as if you had done it yourself.
Of course, even without actively hijacking your social networking accounts, an eavesdropper can learn an awful lot about you from your HTTP traffic.
After all, not everything you upload to Facebook or Twitter is inevitably intended for public consumption, so it oughtn't really to be uploaded without being wrapped in an SSL/TLS session.
Facebook, Twitter and others, bless them all, eventually bit the bullet and simply switched to HTTPS for everything. (At least, they did for web-based clients. Special-purpose mobile apps were, and some still are, a different story, but we shall ignore that issue here.)
But Apple, it seems, didn't bother with HTTPS everywhere, even for its own App Store, until 2013.
Since there's no other place to shop when you're buying or selling iDevice software, and since Apple likes it that way, you might think that Cupertino would have set the bar a bit higher.
You might also have expected Apple to react a bit more quickly after Dr. Bursztein's fairly detailed explanations of why the bar reallyneeded to be higher.
In July 2012, he explained several problems, which he's now made public, including active attacks (that's where you change HTTP content en route between server and client) by which a malcontent could steal your password, trick you into buying the wrong App, deliver you a bogus update, or quietly prevent you from applying a needed update.
Burzstein also showed that the App Store routinely uploaded an unencrypted list of already-installed Apps from your device.
That doesn't sound like much, but it is.
Firstly, some of those Apps will identify aspects of your life that would be handy for a social engineer to know: the bank you use, the newspapers you like, the games you play, the share-trading services you invest with, and more.
Secondly, the complete selection of Apps on your device may very well be unique to you, thus making it a handy form of digital fingerprint for an attacker.
Earlier this year, Apple finally made a start towards the change that many of its web traffic competitors like Google, Facebook and Twitter made some time ago, and bumped all the App Store's active content to HTTPS:
Good. (Better yet would have been to serve everything using HTTPS, but let's be thankful for what we've got.)
If you're a web developer and your web services rely on users sending you traffic that contains anything at all that oughtn't to be public, you should be doing the same.
Even data that isn't legally considered PII can be pure gold to cybercrooks, and so leaking it could be putting your customers at risk.
And you wouldn't want that, would you?
Learning more about SSL/TLS
Would you like to know more about SSL/TLS?
Here's a quarter-hour Sophos Techknow podcast, featuring Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski as they explain the S in HTTPS:
Yesterday was a challenging day for the double X-chromosomed - or, really, for anybody who doesn't want to be spied on.
First, there was this Ars Technica pieceabout ratters: hackers who use remote administration tools (RATs) to gain access to (primarily) women's webcams, files and PC microphones to steal files and surreptitiously spy on victims, whom they refer to as "girl slaves."
While we wait, there's time to ponder the privacy invasions Google's glasses portends.
For one, it will be a boon to those who don't have the technical acumen to actually hack into somebody's computer and take it over like the ratter crowd.
As ReadWrite pointed out, Google's device removes the social awkwardness, and obviousness, of pointing a camera or smartphone at somebody to snap their photo or grab some video of them.
Taking the phone or camera out of the equation means that stalker types can just look and snap, or leer and record, as the case may be.
Of course, it's not only attractive women who'll be potentially targeted by creeps. It's could be children, or anybody, for that matter.
Google hasn't included facial recognition for their first iteration of Glass. I tried to find thoughts from them on whether it would be included in future versions, but I came up short. Enlighten me, please, if you've seen such.
Given the social networking giants' attraction to this technology up to this point, it's hard to imagine Google will refrain from including it in the long term.
In the meantime, the Glass-clad will have the option of quietly muttering voice commands to their Android-enabled face gear so as to do a bit of Google stalking on whomever they just met.
The invasion of privacy this promises to usher in is reminiscent of "Girls Around Me," the stalking app that tied in to Foursquare to enable users to access women's specific location, photos, Facebook details including birthdays or relationship status or schools attended, and whatever else Facebook and Foursquare's check-in functions had broadcast about its targets.
Thankfully, at least one business has already banned Google Glass.
If you’re one of the few who are planning on going out and spending your savings on Google Glasses – what will for sure be a new fad for the fanny-pack wearing never removing your bluetooth headset wearing crowd – plan on removing them before you enter The 5 Point. The 5 Point is officially a No Google Glass zone.
Nicely done, 5 Point. Thank you for protecting your patrons' privacy, particularly in your gadget-savvy city.
ZDNet's James Kendrick predicts that when public awareness of Google Glass reaches a critical mass, and when people understand that the devices can record photos, video and audio of the wearer's surroundings, we'll see more such bans.
Don't be surprised if within weeks of the Google Glasses general release we start seeing bans of it cropping up all over the place.
I hope he's right.
I'd suggest that as we await the availability of what admittedly sounds like insanely fun gadgetry, outside of the scary privacy bits, you practice the same caution with regards to your privacy around Google Glass as I recommended with Girls Around Me.
To wit: Check your applications. Stay safe. Check what they're beaming out about you. Check your children's applications. Be aware of the information your kids' apps beam out about them.
French telecom regulators have suggested that Skype could face charges for failing to register as a telecom and do all the things that French telecoms are supposed to do - for example, let police eavesdrop on calls.
ARCEP, the French telecom authority, on Tuesday posted a notice stating that they have informed the Paris public prosecutor that as Skype provides French internet users with the ability to make phone calls, it is thereby obliged to comply with regulations that include routing emergency calls and "implementing the means required to perform legally ordered interceptions."
Skype's failure to declare itself an "electronic communications operator" after being "requested several times" by ARCEP could be classified a criminal offense, ARCEP says.
Here's a statement Skype sent to Ars Technica about the désaccord désagréable:
Skype is a globally known and used software app that seamlessly enables millions of people to communicate every day via their Internet connection. We have engaged with ARCEP in discussion over the last several months during which we shared our view that Skype is not a provider of electronic communications services under French law. We will continue to work with ARCEP in a constructive fashion to seek agreement on a resolution that ensures people, wherever they are, can continue to rely on Skype as they do today.
As the Washington Post reported last July, Skype has been sharing more and more data with law enforcement authorities since Microsoft purchased the company in May 2011.
That includes making online chats and other user information such as addresses and credit card numbers available to police.
At any rate, Skype may never have deserved its former reputation as a safe harbor for activists to communicate without fear of interception.
Christopher Soghoian, a tech policy analyst and privacy advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote this about Skype last year:
Skype has always been rather evasive when it comes to discussing this issue. Whenever questions come up, the company makes it a point to mention that it provides end-to-end encryption, but then dodges all questions about how it handles encryption keys.
Skype's strategy is genius - most journalists, even those that cover tech, know very little about the more granular aspects of cryptography. When Skype says it provides end-to-end call encryption, journalists then tell their readers that Skype is wiretapping proof, even though Skype never made that specific claim. Conveniently enough, Skype never bothers to correct the many people who have read a tad bit too much into the company's statements about security.
So it would seem that if France does put the collar around Skype's neck and get it to heel, not much will change.
It appears that Skype has long been going along with law enforcement's request to intercept communications.
If French citizens ever inhabited a safe zone outside of that type of surveillance, it sounds like that bubble will likely get popped soon.
Things started to change after the release of Firesheep, security researcher Eric Butler'smildly controversial effort to push the envelope of web encryption.
Since there's no other place to shop when you're buying or selling iDevice software, and since Apple likes it that way, you might think that Cupertino would have set the bar a bit higher.
Google hasn't included facial recognition for their first iteration of Glass. I tried to find thoughts from them on whether it would be included in future versions, but I came up short. Enlighten me, please, if you've seen such.
Nicely done, 5 Point. Thank you for protecting your patrons' privacy, particularly in your gadget-savvy city.
