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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – California may become the first state to issue digital license plates that can be registered electronically and record tolls. Privacy advocates are concerned the plates could become tracking devices for law enforcement. Instead of a metal license plate, the digital plate would be a computer screen, slightly larger than an iPad. Registering the plates could be done wirelessly.

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...

Following the death of Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed contributor Michael Hastings in a fiery car crash, and the subsequent revelation of a panicked email he sent to his colleagues just before he died, this question has arisen: could someone have hacked his car? That's unlikely, and here's why. P Hastings' 2013 Mercedes C250 coupe crashed into a tree on Highland Ave. in Los Angeles around 4:30 am on June 18. The car burst into flames, and it took the coroner two days to positively ID Hastings' body. P It sounds like perfect fodder for a good conspiracy theory. After all,...

Has anybody experienced this lately? I will go to a webpage on my office computer then later during the day that very same page will open up on my cellphone in Safari. Mind you I didn't visit that web page on my cell phone at all and didn't sync it with my computer either. I'm wondering if someone has hacked my work computer, is capturing the webpage addresses then has my cellphone number and access to the account to make it open up on my cellphone remotely. I know how part of that could be done but it would take...

O'REILLY: "Personal Story" segment tonight. CBS News announced on Friday that Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's computer was hacked into late last year. This, combined with the James Rosen situation here at Fox News and the A.P. snooping, causing a lot of concern. With us now on a Factor Cable Exclusive is Ms. Attkisson. So, when did you know that somebody was messing with your computer. SHARYL ATTKISSON, INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, CBS NEWS: Well, there were signs probably around 2011 but I don't think I recognized exactly what was going on until perhaps the fall of last year when so many things...

Via the Right Scoop, a follow-up to Friday’s post. Forgive me for a possibly stupid question but when she says that her computers were turning on and off, she means they were powering on and then powering down, not that they were merely “waking up” from sleep mode, right? When I tweeted the link to this, a bunch of people tweeted back that a computer might “wake up” automatically due to Windows Update. But Attkisson has had professional computer forensics people investigate, though; obviously she knows the difference by now between a computer updating itself and doing something freaky weird...

Classified US government data shown to the South China Morning Post by whistle-blower Edward Snowden has provided a rare insight into the effectiveness of Washington's top-secret global cyberspying programme. New details about the data can be revealed by the Post after further analysis of information Snowden divulged during an exclusive interview on Wednesday in which the former CIA computer analyst exposed extensive hacking by the US in Hong Kong and the mainland. The FBI said yesterday it had launched a criminal investigation and was taking "all necessary steps" to prosecute Snowden for exposing secret US surveillance programmes. FBI Director Robert...

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed in May that her computer had been compromised. When asked about the situation, CBS News responded with a statement that it was conducting an investigation. That investigation has reached the following conclusions, according to CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair: “A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed...

Former U.S. spy Edward Snowden on Wednesday vowed to fight any bid to extradite him from Hong Kong and promised "explosive" new revelations about Washington's surveillance targets, The South China Morning Post reported. Specifically, Snowden reportedly showed the newspaper "unverified documents" describing an extensive U.S. campaign to obtain information from computers in Hong Kong and mainland China. "We hack network backbones, like huge Internet routers, basically, that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he told the newspaper. Officials have confirmed that Snowden may have more secret material....

Combined with compliant media they seem to.Daniel Duquenal (a pseudonym), my favorite blogger there even before he became the last significant English language blogger in Venezuela, offered some comparisons between the current Venezuelan regime and the regimes in Turkey and Syria. The entire article is interesting and well worth reading. However, I found this paragraph fascinating: Chavez never was a model except for its methods to ensure that gangs of thugs seize and retain power while killing democracy with its own weapons. We did have a Taksim of sorts with Plaza Altamira in 2002-2003 but this is over as the reality...

U.S. intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged a prominent al-Qaeda online magazine last month in an apparent attempt to sow confusion among the group’s followers, according to officials. The operation succeeded, at least temporarily, in thwarting publication of the latest issue of Inspire, the English-language magazine distributed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it appeared online, the text on the second page was garbled and the following 20 pages were blank. The sabotaged version was quickly removed from the online forum that hosted it, according to independent analysts who track jihadi Web sites. It’s unclear how the hacking occurred, although U.S....

Bradley Manning proved that massive amounts of the government's most secret data was vulnerable to being dumped on the open Internet. A single individual achieved that unprecedented leak. According to the Washington Post, "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances." And this week, we learned that the FBI, CIA and NSA were unable to protect some of their most closely held secrets from Glenn Greenwald, Richard Engel, Robert Windrem, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras. Those journalists, talented as they are, possess somewhat fewer resources than foreign governments! So...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper.</p> <p>The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.</p>

Chinese hackers gained access to some of the top weapons systems in the United States military, especially those that project American power in the Pacific, according to a Pentagon report prepared by a Defense Department advisory council, a topic that President Obama’s spokesman said would be discussed at his next meeting with Chinese leaders. “I’ve seen the report,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said during the press gaggle today. “I would refer you to the Pentagon for specifics about the potential hacking of weapon systems.

Anonymous Members Arrested for Hacking Vatican Site Law enforcement officials in Italy have reportedly arrested four members of Anonymous. The suspects allegedly carried out attacks on a number of prominent Italian websites and online services. The suspects are all aged between 20 and 34 and were placed under arrest in the Italian cities of Turin, Venice, and Bologna. One suspect was arrested in the southern community of Lecce. According to police, the suspects were part of Anonymous Italy, which carried out hacks of prominent commercial and government websites. Some of those sites were owned by the Vatican, Italy's prime minister's...

Several months ago, the Pentagon's network and e-mail system fell victim to computer hacking. After an internal investigation, Pentagon officials declared that the hack was perpetrated by the Chinese military. In particular, officials said the attack "was by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) and that it led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates." Now, a Chinese company with ties to the country's military, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger.According to a story in the Washington Times, Huawei Technologies...

A Middle Tennessee company is at the center of a mystery that could turn the political race upside down. The Secret Service wants to know if a group hacked into Price Waterhouse Cooper's computer system in Franklin and got Mitt Romney's tax records. "Right through here and it was just lying on the floor there," Peter Burr recalled.

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

Associated Press says its Twitter account has been hacked, as the Twitter feed falsely said that there had been two explosions at the White House.

This has not been a very good cyber war for Anonymous hackers against the Jews of Israel. As we reported earlier, their own site was humiliatingly hacked just hours after declaring their cyber war, dubbed #OpIsrael. Now, the apparently not so Anonymous hacktivists have been arrested in Jordan. Weasel Zippers has the story. Jordanian security forces arrested several youths who are suspected of attacking Israeli internet sites as part of the large scale cyber attack on Israel declared by the group called Anonymous. This has really upset the hacker community, who is now threatening to attack Jordan. They’ve also declared...