TRENTON-The electronic spy agency in Canada is intercepting and storing millions of emails from citizens each year, according to top-secret documents obtained from U.S. whistle-blower Edward Snowden that were made public Wednesday.
2. The believers are only
those who, when Allah is mentioned, feel a fear in their hearts and when His
Verses (this Qur'an) are recited unto them, they (i.e. the Verses) increase
their Faith; and they put their trust in their Lord (Alone);
3. Who perform As-Salat (Iqamat-as-Salat) and spend out
of that We have provided them.
4. It is they who are the
believers in truth. For them are grades of dignity with their Lord, and
Forgiveness and a generous provision (Paradise).
5. As your Lord caused you
(O Muhammad ) to go out from your
home with the truth, and verily, a party among the believers disliked it;
6. Disputing with you
concerning the truth after it was made manifest, as if they were being driven
to death, while they were looking (at it).
7. And (remember) when
Allah promised you (Muslims) one of the two parties (of the enemy i.e. either
the army or the caravan) that it should be yours, you wished that the one not
armed (the caravan) should be yours, but Allah willed to justify the truth by His
Words and to cut off the roots of the disbelievers (i.e. in the battle of
Badr).
8. That He might cause the
truth to triumph and bring falsehood to nothing, even though the Mujrimun(disbelievers,
polytheists, sinners, criminals, etc.) hate it.
9. (Remember) when you
sought help of your Lord and He answered you (saying): "I will help you
with a thousand of the angels each behind the other (following one another) in
succession."
10. Allah made it only as
glad tidings, and that your hearts be at rest therewith. And there is no
victory except from Allah. Verily, Allah is All-Mighty, All-Wise. 8.
Surah Al-Anfal
The document was written by Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, analysts and shows that the agency watches visits to government websites and intercepts and stores high volumes of emails, which could include such private items as tax returns and letters to Members of Parliament.
The document, obtained by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in partnership with the U.S.-based Internet news website The Intercept, is dated 2010 and its existence raises serious questions about government invasion and the privacy of individuals.
“…(Y)ou should be able to communicate with your government without the fear that what you say … could come back to haunt you in unexpected ways,” Chris Parsons told the CBC. Parsons is an Internet security expert with Citizen Lab, a Toronto-based Internet think tank.
“When we collect huge volumes, it’s not just used to track bad guys,” he said. “It goes into data stores for years or months at a time and then can be used at any point in the future.”
Parsons, who read the CSE document, cautioned that there are some legitimate reasons for the Internet intercepts, such as protecting government computers from hackers, criminals and other countries, as well as malware.
But the top-secret document calls into question the massive scope of the email snooping and the retention of the emails for such long periods.
Using a tool called PonyExpress, the CSE combed about 400,000 emails in 2010 and the volume would be much higher today, given the explosive growth of the Internet.
About 400 are tagged daily as suspect and the system sends those so identified to CSE analysts who scrutinize the emails and decide if they contain any potential threat.
“It’s pretty clear that there’s a very wide catchment of information coming into (CSE),” said Michael Vonn, policy director at the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.
He said Canadians should be told about the agency’s collection of data.
“If we’re going to have trust that our agencies are acting responsibly, we need as much light shone on the architecture, the laws and the rules, as possible,” Vonn said.
Under Canadian law, the CSE is not allowed to monitor Canadians’ emails and phone calls, but it gets special exemption when it comes to protecting government IT infrastructure.
A CSE spokesperson told the CBC in a statement that the agency does eventually delete the intercepted and innocent emails but refused to comment on the amount collected or the length of time they are kept.
Cyber warfare is on the rise, experts warn.
"Cyber warfare is increasing in frequency, scale, and sophistication," the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress on Thursday.
Clapper said Russia is among the most sophisticated cyber warfare states.
"While I can't go into detail here, the Russian cyber threat is more severe than we've previously assessed," he added.
Chinese advanced cyber espionage is "a major threat" and is continuing despite U.S. pressure on Beijing, Clapper said.
But not only governments are threatened by cyber weapons. The financial industry, Clapper said, is facing increasing threats from cyber criminals. "Criminals were responsible for cyber intrusions in 2014 in JPMorgan, Home Depot, Target, Neiman Marcus, Anthem, and other U.S. companies," he said.
This year has seen a critical increase in the creation of cyber weapons, Oguz Yilmaz, chief technology officer of the Ankara-based Labris Networks, told The Anadolu Agency on Friday.
"We can say cyber weaponization has started and will continually increase in 2015," Yilmaz said.
He also said that terrorists, too, are getting cyber weapon technology.
"The Syrian Electronic Army and ISIS groups are examples, they have claimed responsibility for such incidents," Yilmaz said, using an abbreviation for the militant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as Daesh.
"At the moment, these incidents are at the level of getting control of some web pages and Twitter accounts; these and other non-governmental groups may increase the depth of attacks," he said.
"We see that specially crafted espionage malware and malware-based surveillance operations started to address countries other than the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia," Yilmaz warned. "We expect cyber espionage will be a standard method for non-war interstate espionage relations. The geopolitical landscape will interfere with cyberspace more."
- What is a cyber weapon
There have been a number of proposals at the United Nations and in international forums to control or regulate cyber weapons.
"A weapon is generally understood to be an instrument of offensive or defensive combat, and has been defined as a device that is designed to kill, injure, or disable people, or to damage or destroy property," explained Chatham House expert Louise Arimatsu in London.
“Although this definition might adequately encapsulate traditional weapons that have been designed, when utilized, to have a direct kinetic outcome, it fails to capture the essence of what are generally regarded as cyber weapons. This is because most of the malicious codes or malware that would fall within the parameters of a cyber weapon are not designed to kill, injure or disable people nor, necessarily, to damage or destroy tangible property," Arimatsu explained.
"A cyber weapon is malicious code that is intended to kill or injure people or to destroy property," Arimatsu said.
Since 2009, legal experts have been at work on a manual that defines the law governing cyber warfare. It is now referred to as the "Tallinn Manual," and is being refined by contributions from around the world.
The manual highlights many of the issues involving cyber warfare. When does a cyber war begin, and when does it end? How is a cyber attack defined (as opposed to hacking or just network penetration). When is a country attacked? For example, if a business in the country is attacked, is this war?
These kinds of questions still make controlling cyber warfare a challenge. But the U.S. Defense Department has, nonetheless, put together a classified list of cyber weapons which it considers clearly dangerous and threatening in the broadest sense.
A good example of a cyber weapon is the malware Duqu, a note from the Infosec Institute explained.
"It has a state-sponsored origin and mainly a cyber espionage purpose. Despite this characteristic, security firms have recognized that it has been developed using the same platform that created Stuxnet, the 'Tilded Platform.' The malware created the innovative platforms that are known to have a modular structure that specify their behavior. This means that Duqu equipped with proper components is also adoptable for offensive purposes," the note said.
- Responding to attacks
When Sony Pictures was attacked in November 2014, allegedly by North Korean cyber weapons, President Barack Obama said that the U.S., as a country, would respond to the attack.
In December, North Korea suffered a nine-hour Internet outage and the government blamed a U.S. cyber attack.
Without assuming that the attack on North Korea was a U.S. armed response, experts ask what kind of response would have been appropriate, and by whom?
In November, U.S. Cyber Command held war game exercises with the forces of the U.K., in an effort to nail down an answer to that question.
Navy Adm. Mike Rogers, who is also director of the National Security Agency -- said in a statement that the exercise "Cyber Flag" was "force-on-force" training, "fusing attack and defense across the full spectrum of military operations in a closed network environment."
This is a start from the point of view of national governments, but what should businesses do?
For now, cyber warfare theory dictates that attacks by sovereign states, even on private companies, should be responded to by sovereign states. Legal experts are still working this out, but the doctrine provides comfort for businesses who fear suffering the same fate as Sony Pictures.
"But businesses will also suffer attacks from gangs of cyber criminals who dispose of the same technology as countries," Yilmaz said. "This is the time for them to take the necessary measures for protection."
Turkey has rejected claims that it has been in negotiations with Russia over a long-range air defense system.
Speaking on Friday, Ismail Demir, Turkey’s undersecretary for defense industries, said: “There is no official talk with Russia.”
Demir was attending a conference on the country’s defense sector in Istanbul.
Local media had reported that Moscow renewed its interest in the missile project and said it previously revised a bid to sell Ankara its S-400 missile system.
“We announced which country won the tender of the missile defense system,” Demir added.
Turkey, a NATO member state since 1955, announced in September it had decided on an FD-2000 missile defense system – worth US$3.4 billion – from China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp over systems from the Italian-French and American companies.
However, CPMIEC faced sanctions by the U.S. government for its violations of the Iran, North Korea and Syria Non-proliferation Act. NATO and the U.S. are pressuring Ankara not to build a missile defense system in co-operation with a company from a non-NATO-member state, saying that the Chinese system is incompatible with NATO technology.
Demir stated that Turkey not only wants a missile defense system but a technology transfer as well. “Turkey wants that the missile system can be equipped with the latest technology after 10 or 15 years. That’s why we are seeking a technology transfer too,” Demir said.
SAN FRANCISCO
Apple hauled in 89 percent of global smartphone profit in the final quarter of 2014, according to a new report published Thursday by Strategy Analytics.
The numbers are impressive considering studies show more than 80 percent of smartphones shipped last year ran on Google’s Android mobile operating system
Global smartphone profit hit $21.2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, a 31 percent increase from $16.2 in the same period of 2013.
Android smartphone manufacturers’ race to the bottom appears to be severely hampering their bottom lines. Profits decreased more than half compared to last year, said the report.
“Android hardware vendors combined took a record-low 11 percent global smartphone profit share, down from 29 percent one year ago,” Linda Sui, director at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement. “In contrast, Apple iOS captured a record-high 89 percent profit share, up from 71 percent in Q4 2013.”
But what is bad for Android is fantastic for Apple.
“Apple iOS continues to tighten its grip on the smartphone industry,” noted Neil Mawston, executive director at the firm. “Apple's strategy of premium products and lean logistics is proving hugely profitable.”
The weak profitability for Android could cause rifts between Google and its hardware partners, like Samsung or Xiaomi. If manufacturers can’t turn a profit on Android, Mawston added, they might move away to software from Microsoft, Firefox or Tizen – Samsung’s in-house mobile platform.
While these alternative operating systems showed barely any traction in Strategy Analytics’ profit report, manufacturers must be wondering if Android’s continued dominance means anything if it doesn’t bring back revenue.
Apple, of course, is poised to take over another young market.
The company sent out invites for a March 9 product event, telling attendees to “spring forward.” Most likely, the event will be dedicated to launching its Apple Watch wearable.
A federal jury in Texas has ordered Apple to pay $532.9 million to patent licensing firm Smartflash over three patents relating to its iTunes music software.
Smartflash contended that Apple infringed on three patents and was seeking a total of $852 million in damages.
Apple claimed that the patents were worth $4.5 million at most.
The verdict was released late Tuesday after the jury deliberated for eight hours, with Smartflash announcing the decision Wednesday.
The jury concluded that Apple not only infringed on Smartflash’s patents, but did so knowingly.
Texas-based Smartflash originally sued Apple in May 2013, claiming Apple’s iTunes software infringed on patents relating to how users accessed, downloaded and stored music, games and video.
Apple has called Smartflash a “patent troll” that takes advantage of the American patenting system.
“Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no U.S. presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented,” Kristin Huguet, an Applespokeswoman, said in a statement following the verdict. “We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system.”
Apple has consistently claimed that Smartflash’s patents were already invalid because other earlier technology patents covered the same areas. The California company tried to convince a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, but failed.
Smartflash said that 15 years ago, a co-inventor of some of its patents met with Augustin Farrugia, who was an executive at European mobile phone SIM card manufacturer Gemalto at the time. Farrugia is now a high-ranking employee at Apple.
Apple vowed to appeal the ruling.
Smartflash has other patent infringement cases currently against tech giants Samsung and Google.
ISTANBUL
The idea of living on another planet has gripped the imagination of scientists and dreamers for centuries – now one Turkish architect is turning those dreams into reality.
Gulay Yedekci has designed an entire extraterrestrial community which could one day be home to human beings on Mars – over 54 million kilometers from Earth.
The red planet – so-called due to the red iron oxide existing on its surface – has made the headlines recently as NASA scientists and the Dutch-based Mars One foundation revealed plans to send people there for the first time.
Yedekci, associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul’s Yeni Yuzyil University, lectures in “Future Architecture.” She is the only Turkish academic working in this field.
Although Turkey currently has no space agency, officials have said it is preparing to build one in the future.
Yedekci began the “Mars Road” project in 2013 and, together with an eight-strong team, completed the concept in around two years.
“We’ve designed bell jar-shaped cities, which will include multistory buildings and underground places linked to each other,” says Yedekci.
“Underground places will be built in order to protect from meteor attacks or any threats,” she adds.
According to the draft project, shopping centers to green houses, farms to education centers and almost every kind of facility will exist in the living area, which is expected to cover 10,000 square meters.
Their first step is terraforming. The design envisages greenhouses and farms to produce oxygen to support life.
“There is a very small amount of oxygen and no nitrogen balance there. These two elements make things difficult for us,” Yedekci says.
Ninety-five percent of the planet’s atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide.
According to NASA, Mars has much lighter gravity (one-third of Earth norm) and a much thinner atmosphere. Humans cannot survive unaided on its surface.
It's also much colder on Mars than on the Earth; the average temperature is –64C.
For construction, 3D printers will be used. No materials are planned to be taken from the Earth, but will be provided by the red planet.
Yedekci calls on other Turkish scientists to join them. “Our project is open to everyone. We need scientists from every field, from chemistry to zoology.”
Within one year, Yedekci and her team will reveal three alternative projects to be selected.
The project, which Yedekci claims would cost approximately $30 billion, would enable 100 people to live on the planet for 18 months.
Mars has always loomed large in the human imagination: Named after the Roman god of war, the planet was the subject of Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio play about a Martian invasion of Earth, which caused a nationwide panic.
Now, if everything goes according to plan, a Turkish architect could have her name written on the famous red planet for the first time.
Istanbul-based Bogazici University has developed a new keyboard with Turkish letters, the university announced on Tuesday.
The new keyboard is called E keyboard, and will compete with the previous F and Q keyboards for Turkish writers.
Bogazici University said in a statement that a group of researchers under the leadership of Mahmut Eksioglu has worked for three years to develop the new keyboard.
The statement said that The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) supported the project, for which they will take also the patent.
Eksioglu said that the new keyboard was developed by studying the ergonomic layout of letters and so it is more optimal. He said that in the E Keyboard, letters were laid out taking into consideration the capacity of fingers and their moving space.
Turkish writers use the QWERTY or Q keyboard, which is nearly the same as the English version with some different buttons for the Turkish letters ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü.
However, the Turkish alphabet is different from its English counterpart, and is thus concentrated on the right side of the keyboard.
The FGĞIOD or F keyboard is another type of keyboard developed by Turks and that has nothing in common with the QWERTY or Q keyboard, which is the most internationalized keyboard. The F keyboard is hardly used among Turks.
With the new E keyboard, Eksioglu said performance in writing rises, and that it provides more healthy and comfortable usage.
In the framework of the project, Eksioglu said that there was research with participants of different ages, and that the ergonomic criterion was determined by experimental studies. The speed capacity for each finger was also determined according to the speed with which each finger types a single button.
Ekisoglu said that the F Keyboard is better than the Q keyboard to write Turkish with.
He added that they have not found any literature about the methods that were used to develop the F keyboard.
He said that while developing the F keyboard, the Turkish letter frequency of the Turkish National Corpus was not taken into consideration, but rather that of the 1950’s Turkish dictionary.
“The pointing fingers are overloaded,” Eksioglu said.
The Bogazici University team has studied the binary combinations of the fingers, the time needed to type two buttons one after another, and the letter combination of the Turkish language.
“Taking those into consideration we obtained 152 keyboard models,” Eksioglu said, adding that they had arranged performance and healthy experiments for the best three of them. He said that in experiments they had also used the electronic gloves to capture motion data and measure the tendon movements.
“To write a typical Turkish text, using the E keyboard makes you use much less tendon movements than with the F or Q keyboard,” he said.
Ekisoglu said that making too many tendon movements can raise the risk of hand-wrist musculoskeletal disorder.
He said that the E keyboard is developed based on experiments and mathematical calculations, while the F keyboard has no scientific basis.
BRUSSELS
A power line, which doubles the existing electricity interconnection capacity between France and Spain, has been completed, the European Commission announced on Friday.
The Santa Llogaia – Baixas power line doubles the existing electricity interconnection capacity betweenFrance and Spain from 1400 megawatts to 2800 megawatts, and will facilitate connecting the power system of the Iberian Peninsula to other European energy markets.
The project has received €255 million ($289 million) in EU support under the European Energy Programme for Recovery.
Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic said in a statement on Friday: "By connecting our Member States and energy markets, we will be stronger together. We will be less dependent, more competitive, and we will manage the transition to a low-carbon economy. "
In October 2014, the European Council called on all EU member states to achieve interconnection of at least 10 percent of their installed electricity production capacity by 2020.
Each EU member state should have electricity cables in place, which allow at least 10 percent of the electricity that is produced by their power plants to be transported across its borders to its neighboring countries, according to the European Commission.
Browsing the Google mobile app Thursday, users will notice the company has recalibrated its search engine app to quickly bring up the latest content from news sources relevant to a search.
With its self-driving cars and virtual reality headsets, it is easier to forget that Google also runs a search engine. Attempting to innovate on that very Web 1.0 feature is difficult, but the California company seems to be focused on bringing up answers sooner so that searchers don’t have to dig through links.
Google’s latest innovation brings up a “carousel” of news from outlets based on either a search for a topic or the outlet. This carousel displays a quick list of headlines to flip through – essentially taking the place of the outlet’s homepage.
“It can be hard to sift through all the great videos, articles and more out there to find what interests you,” wrote Ardan Arac, Google’s product manager of Search, in a blog post published Thursday. “Now, if you search on Google on your mobile, you’ll see the freshest, most relevant content from within a single website grouped together in one easy-to-scan place.”
Searching for “The Guardian” or “NPR,” for example, brings up a carousel of those sites latest headlines and videos, easily clickable straight from the app. Searching for a topic, like the “Academy Awards” or “Greece,” brings up a carousel of content all related to those subjects.
Right now, it appears the feature displays only news and videos from one outlet at a time – searching for “startups,” for example, brings up a carousel of stories, but the results might be all from TechCrunch.
Arac points out that the feature is still rolling out, so not every news outlet is represented, but the plan is to expand as soon as possible.
It’s 12am, and you’re surfing some favorite websites. You do a little shopping, post in a forum or two, and tweet about your day. At this point, if you sense someone peering over your shoulder, it will probably be your spouse looking for a midnight snack. You definitely won’t be thinking about electronic privacy and the personal information your computer leaves as it weaves from site to site.
Without filling in a single form, your struggle to pick between two laptops on one website is traced straight through to the final site where you purchase something else entirely. It’s easy to think of yourself as a small speck of sand in an invisible web of servers, but in order to protect your online reputation it’s important to know what traces your computer leaves on each website you visit.
This article will tell you how companies collect your private information, and how you can protect your digital privacy by explaining what sort of information websites obtain about their users, how they obtain it and ultimately what they do with that data.
Protect your Internet privacy while surfing the Web.
Most Internet users feel a certain anonymity as they browse online, yet websites can collect an extensive personal profile on you within mere seconds of your clicking on a site. Information such as your location, specific address, name, email address and even phone number is obtainable.
In addition, website owners can discover your specific shopping habits, what keywords you used to find their site and whether or not you were interested in advertisements on their pages. Web 2.0 programming allows site owners to acquire most of this information through IP addresses, Web browser cookies and tiny image files called Web beacons or Web bugs.
Monitor the information your computer sends out.
When a user clicks on a website, a “session” begins. A session tracks you from the first page you click on until you exit the site. Your session can be monitored in several ways. Your IP address, the binary digits assigned to your computer by your Internet provider, can provide website owners with your approximate location, including city, suburb and state, as well as your computer hardware and what type of operating system you run.
Although IP addresses can provide a fairly detailed summary of your computer, Web browser cookies provide a more complete profile of a user’s preferences. Three types of cookies are sent out when you surf the Internet.
A session cookie is a simple text file that expires once you close the website.
A persistent cookie exists as a text file as well, but it remains on your hard drive and either expires at a set time or remains until you delete it. Often used when someone logs in to a site and wants to remain logged in for a set amount of time, persistent or permanent cookies collect information about you and your Web browsing habits.
The important thing to note is that these types of cookies generally exist for only one domain.
Not all Internet cookies are created equally.
The last type of cookie is a third-party ad-serving cookie, which monitors your Web browsing to show you advertisements that relate to your interests.
The site owner places third-party ads on the site, but the actual ads are hosted by another site. If your computer accepts the third-party cookie, the company hosting the ad can access your information and compile detail-rich profiles, including your IP address, location, shopping preferences and in some cases the means and methods in which you pay online. In order to maintain your privacy, your Internet browser will allow you to decline all third-party cookies.
Although you may actively be diverting third-party cookies, they can also appear in the form of Web bugs. Web bugs are small graphics imbedded into a webpage. Web bugs are used to hide the fact that the page is being monitored. Information collected by Web bugs include IP addresses, times that the image was viewed and data from related cookies on your computer. Web bugs can track you as you move from site to site and create personal profiles of users.
You can check and see if Web bugs are planted within a page by viewing the page source. If you see images called “clear.gif” or find images linking to another site, you’ll have found Web bugs. This is one way how companies collect your private information.
Control your personal information online and offline.
In much the same way that companies gauge the strength of their personal branding by monitoring how you watch television, the way you travel through the deep Web is analyzed and tabulated into statistical data. This data allows businesses both large and small to develop new products, discover the shopping habits of their target markets and make important marketing decisions.
On one hand, without access to this information, you would find companies struggling to properly determine the interests of their mainstream online audience. On the other hand, having your Web browsing monitored can make you feel as though your personal privacy is being invaded. However you feel, there are distinct ways how companies collect your private information when you browse online, and it is important to know exactly how that works.
The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
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