And on the subject of NDAA...

Very quick addition blog post.

Big Congrats to Gary for not being extradited to the US. Whether he did or didn't do what he is accused of is a different matter, but hopefully he can be tried here in the UK, his home country.

What were the chances of him bring NDAA'd in the US anyway?

The last bit of news to cover is regarding the recent news of the suicide of the 15yr old girl Amanda. She killed herself a few days back after posting a very emotional video, detailing her suffering of online bullying.

Today Anonymous got wind of the story, and decided to take action. They published a paste in doxing a person who they claim is Amanda's stalker.

There have been any opinions on this from different people, but the main question is should we be allowed to name and shame the individual? Personally yes - if anonymous has the correct information then people can learn from this and better protect their children online and prevent this from happening again.

Here's a part that caught my eye. The police and FBI say this also is a crime, a form of online vigilante. I guess it might be, but at the same time, does that mean naming and shaming, and bringing awareness of the dangers from a certain individual is a crime?

Posting names and pictures of pedo's online is a crime? That makes lots of sense.

Pointless Debate

Even though I'm not American, I'm gonna post this anyway.

I try not to follow the presidential debate between Obama vs Romney too much, nor do I follow politicians too closely anyway, a lot of them eventually backtrack on promises they make and sooner or later, greed and corruption starts to appear.

After reading my Twitter timeline last night regarding the debate, many of the people I'm following all say the same thing - holding out for comments regarding matters the US govs don't want to discuss isn't going to happen. Thanks to @ioerror for this tweet:

I wish that the #debate would cover #NDAA, #assassinationbydrone and #NSAWarrantlessWiretapping - I guess I won't hold my breath.

I'm mainly referring NDAA and drone strikes. If you don't know what they are, I covered NDAA in a past blog post so feel free to read that or Google for more information.

I think its sickening how US media is just refusing to cover some of the biggest issues and problems in US politics today, and its frankly shocking how if the people want information that they have to turn to people like David Seaman, or RT. Not that I'm complaining or anything, David and the Russian Gov/RT are doing an awesome job in putting out information the govs would rather see kept silent, I just think its so twisted - the shit job Obama managed to do - turn the US into a police state.

I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who thinks along the lines of "fuck this I have better things to do" when it comes the the debates. I'm not discouraging you from watching/listening to the debates, but neither of them are in it "for the people" so to speak.

Anyway I'll end this by saying vote Romney or don't vote at all, I guarantee neither is a good choice, they are both gonna make the US a worse place to live.

Trapwire & NDAA

I known I've written about Obama and his wrong doings to the US before about attacking Iran, but I am totally sick of him now, NDAA has been fairly low news compared to the other bills like SOPA but this has to stop now.

NDAA in short, allows the gov to hold people/imprison people indefinitely without any evidence at all, and is pretty much Obama's way of silencing people like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning without a fair trial.

This is truly sickening, the US was founded and based on freedom and allowed everyone the same rights, the right to a fair trial and what I thought was "innocent until proven otherwise", guess not anymore?

Trapwire

Trapwire recently made headlines originating from the Stratfor emails obtained by Anonymous hackers. It uses advanced facial recognition technology to track people, and is said to be ahead of it's time. So far the companies using such things don't cooperate with the other companies using it but is said that they might consider sharing details.

I like many refuse to ignore this thinking it will just go away, how can the (corrupt) governments say they want to keep us safe by violating our privacy and constantly wanting to know where we are and what we are doing.

For more information, follow @d_seaman on Twitter.

Cyberwar & Encryption

This first article from last week about several hacking, Phandroid forums, Nvidia and Yahoo.

Yahoo mostly stood out from the others for 1 reason. Yahoo stored their passwords in plain text - its 2012! Have we learnt nothing about password encryption? An idea proposed by blogger Brian Krebs about naming and shaming companies that fail to practise proper encryption on passwords stored in databases.

The second article I read is mostly is about cyber warfare, with the likes of Stuxnet and Flame, and we all have seen the news that Obama and his trained monkeys are behind them both.

There have been several article across a few different sites that suggest an opinion that these attacks will come back to haunt the US and put the US people in danger - guess it's coming true.

With this article posted by the BBC News say Obama is warning the US people of future cyber attacks. Saw that coming a mile off.

Way to go Obama, you've endangered millions of people by attacking Iran. Its not likely Iran will retaliate right? Hey Obama, guess what? Big mistake.

This is just my opinion, so don't take my word for it, but in the bigger picture, this kinda helps Obama in the upcoming elections, people don't want to change leader in time of "war" but honestly we need to get rid Obama, he's not doing any good for US and only out for his own good.

Adding TOR Into Chrome

On this independence day, here is a quick tutorial on how to add TOR into Google Chrome.

TOR will allow you browse the internet privately & anonymously.

For this to work, you will need the Tor Browser bundle installed, you can find that here

Download and install, save the folder it extracts to somewhere you can access easily like the Desktop.

You will also need Proxy Switchy addon for Chrome, which you can find here

Once both are installed, make sure you are connected to the TOR network.



Once you are, open the Proxy Switchy options (should automatically open once the addon is installed). Make the profile name TOR like you see in the image below.



Make sure you are set to manual configuration, set your HTTP Proxy to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 8118 & tick the box that says Use the same proxy server for all protocols and press Save.

Now jump over to the General tab, tick the box to activate Quick Switch. Next, Binary Switch will already be ticked, but both drop down boxes below will be set to [Direction Connection]

Set Profile 2 to your TOR profile & press Save.



Now in Chrome, you can switch between normal browsing, or browsing under TOR using the addons button in your top right.

Independence Day!

Even though I'm not American - Happy Independence Day to all US people.

Now that's out of the way, just a quick blog post to celebrate the victory over ACTA.

Today the European Parliament ruled ACTA out and democracy in following all the protests on ACTA running up till today.

ACTA as a bill is far too vague and would put freedom of information on the internet at risk.



More on the whole story here

State Sponsored Malware

Obama just dug himself into a serious hole. A very deep hole. After the past two weeks of state sponsored malware news, I want to have a quick take on it.

As much as I hate the US govs, you have to say Obama has really fucked up attacking Iran with Stuxnet, and now it was confirmed Flame was written by the US govs too, and to make it worse, US intelligence agencies have infiltratered Microsoft to write Flame.

I'll keep this short, but does Obama think Iran won't react to this? That they won't develop their own malware?

This can only end well for Obama. The people he's supposed to protect are now in danger on the highest level, attacks from countries with nukes - well done Obama.

Microsoft Digging Their Own Grave?

Saw this article posted at ComputerWorld last week and just got round to posting this now.
Microsoft are going to disallow Firefox *and* Chrome on Windows 8, and Mozilla respond by saying "it probably isn't worth it to build a W8 version of Firefox as it would be "crippled".

I can only see it ending badly for MS, and pulling a stunt like this makes me think just how do Microsoft propose to attract consumers to windows 8? I myself use Ubuntu and it really makes me think, are Microsoft digging their own grave? Take note in the mobile device world, Android is dominating due to its open source nature.

Now look at MS - UEFI/Secure Boot that may disable users from dual booting with Linux, and now locking out Firefox and Chrome? Well done MS, keep alienating what customers you have left.

I sense a lot of anti-competitive and anti-trust lawsuits heading their way, although other 3rd party developers may go with Mozilla on this and just don't bother with MS and Windows anymore. Sure MS and Windows will always be the bigger OS, but they are slowly pushing their more techy customers away.

Facebook & Censorship

Facebook is starting to become more trouble than its worth - the thing that made me want to wrote this blog post is the whole thing with employers wanting access to employees personal Facebook accounts. I know I'm not alone when I say that is a total violation of a persons right to privacy, and thankfully congress is passing a new bill/act that will prohibit employers from doing this.

 On a similar subject, news also appeared recently of school teachers wanting to know what students are up to outside of school grounds, again using Facebook to do so. Again this is in violation to students privacy and has nothing to do with teachers once students are outside school grounds.

Something else I saw on the BBC News website, an article about bouncers wanting to check peoples phones to logon to Facebook as a way of ID. I can't be alone when I say that Facebook has had its day and needs to just roll over and die, its becoming far more trouble than its actually worth.

Anyhow, that's just my view on Facebook, its creating far too many messy legal situations and I think it needs to stop. Now, onto my second subject of this blog post - internet censorship.

Its been all over internet news websites about ISP's being ordered to block their users from accessing The Pirate Bay, so far its mostly started happening in the UK, so far Orange and Virgin Media have blocked users from accessing TPB.

TalkTalk apparently have also blocked it but this has yet to be confirmed. Its still early to tell what effect this will have on TPB long term but so far the only effect its had is increase traffic surge on TPB. However there are a few sites out there sharing tips and tools that can be used to circumvent censorship - the high courts are also trying to censor sites that help users circumvent these censors which is wrong. I can understand "maybe" wanting to block TPB due to piracy, bit blocking sites that fight for internet freedom is wrong, these sites are not doing any wrong, so I'll be this blog post on this note.

To all ISP's & the high court, as long as things like VPN's exist and TOR browser then you will NEVER censor everyone no matter how hard you try.

Android Fragmentation & Secure Android

News broke today that the Vodafone SGS2 ICS update is rolling out, and it kinda hit close to home with it since I'm still using the slightly older (original) SGS phone on Vodafone.

To say Samsung are leading the Android world, they are so slow when it comes to updates. The 1 thing that is killing off stock roms is how bloated they are, and how stubborn carriers are. TouchWiz is so bloated that the TouchWiz in ICS can only be run on GS2 and not Galaxy S, yet both can run CyanogenMod9 perfectly fine. I love Samsung devices, they are of very good quality, but Samsung suck when it comes to supporting their devices. If they'd listen to what the people want and get rid of TouchWiz instead of thinking about only themself, LOTS of other Samsung devices could already have Ice Cream Sandwich right now. Think about it, the original galaxy tab 7 & 8.9 & 10.1 can ALL run CM9 without problems, even lower end phones like Galaxy Ace CAN run CM9.

To me, all they do with this is push people away from stock roms and push them over to CyanogenMod. Stock is just so bloated with TouchWiz it's beyond stupid. I've seen posts like this across several other forums and the main reason companies like Samsung aren't doing this is the whole money issue. If they supported EVERY device, then they wouldn't make as much as they could with upcoming future devices and I agree, but this is nothing but greed.

Some of the devices released recently like the Galaxy Nexus and a few other phones rocking the NFC chip is a good move forward, but NFC has yet to be adapted around the UK so it's not much use, only in a minority of places.

However, Samsung should still adapt their slightly older devices, the original Galaxy S is only 2yrs old and it's been proven it can run CM9 ICS (Team Hacksung CM9 build 17, Team ICSSGS 4.0.3 , etc) perfectly fine minus a few bugs from missing kernel code, but again, Samsungs fault. Samsung should be adapting their the OS to their devices, not forcing customers to upgrade needlessly.

There is absolutely no reason why companies can't adapt current CM9 builds around their devices, Android is open source so theres no copyright issues to worry about. I KNOW for a fact XDA & the Cyanogen team would happily work with carriers to make ROM's better, that's what the Android community is all about.

In more recent news, Boeing are moving forward to develop a "super secure Android phone" for military use. There isn't much detail so far, but I would love to know what they mean exactly when they say "super secure" - I assume this means it will have some kind of root protection, but when it comes to Android, no phone is secure against being rooted. As quoted in a thread on XDA, "it CAN and WILL be rooted".

Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that US military are adopting to the Android system, but "super secure"? hardly. A military level secure phone might be harder to tinker with, but it is possible with all the various Android hacking tools out there.