An Open Letter to Skype

I’ve known about security concerns related to Skype for quite some time, but I never really understood the details.  Thanks to this letter, signed by a large number of organizations and individuals, I now know quite a bit more.  For those as ignorant as me on this topic, here is some background:

In June 2008, Skype stated it could not eavesdrop on user conversations due to its peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques. Additionally, Skype claimed it was not required to comply with expanded CALEA rules on lawful interception as long as it was based in Europe. As a result of the service being acquired by Microsoft in 2011, it may now be required to comply with CALEA due to the company being headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Furthermore, as a US-based communication provider, Skype would therefore be required to comply with the secretive practice of National Security Letters.

Since Skype was acquired by Microsoft, both entities have refused to answer questions about exactly what kinds of user data can be intercepted, what user data is retained, or whether eavesdropping on Skype conversations may take place. In 2012, the FBI stated that it had issued a warrant for chats going back to 2007, and that it had utilized those chats as evidence as the basis for criminal charges. This contradicts Skype’s own policy stating that chats are retained for a maximum of 30 days.

The letter begins as follows:

Thursday January 24th, 2013;
Skype Division President Tony Bates
Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch
Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith

Dear Mr. Bates, Mr. Lynch and Mr. Smith,
Skype is a voice, video and chat communications platform with over 600 million users worldwide, effectively making it one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Many of its users rely on Skype for secure communications—whether they are activists operating in countries governed by authoritarian regimes, journalists communicating with sensitive sources, or users who wish to talk privately in confidence with business associates, family, or friends.

It is unfortunate that these users, and those who advise them on best security practices, work in the face of persistently unclear and confusing statements about the confidentiality of Skype conversations, and in particular the access that governments and other third parties have to Skype user data and communications.

Read the full Open Letter to Skype.

1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surviellience platform by DARPA.

Withdrawn: $114 Billion From Big U.S. Banks

More than $114 billion exited the biggest U.S. banks this month, and nobody’s quite sure why.

The Federal Reserve releases data on the assets and liabilities of commercial banks every Friday. The most current figures, covering the first full week of 2013, show the largest one-week withdrawals since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Even when seasonally adjusted, the level drops to $52.8 billion—still the third-highest amount on record, and one for which bank experts and analysts were reluctant to give a definitive explanation.

The most obvious culprit is the expiration of the Transaction Account Guarantee program, the extraordinary federal effort to shore up the country’s non-gigantic banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Big banks were considered “too big to fail,” while smaller ones were vulnerable to runs. The TAG program backstopped their deposit bases by temporarily offering unlimited insurance on money kept in non-interest-bearing accounts. That guarantee ended on Dec. 31, so a decrease in deposits would be expected first thing in January.

STORY: Wage Growth May Signal Inflation Ahead—and Fed Action

But hold on: The Fed data show $114 billion leaving the 25 biggest banks—about 2 percent of their deposit base. Only $26.9 billion left all the others, equivalent to 0.9 percent of their deposit base. Experts had predicted that the end of TAG would hurt the nation’s small banks because the big ones are still considered too big to fail. “I think [customers] are going to go back to the mega banks,” the head of a regional bank in Bethesda, Md., told The Washington Post in December. “They’ve been assured by the government that mega banks are too big to fail. It’s a horrible, bad, poorly-thought-out situation.” Small banks fearfully lobbied the Senate to extend TAG, with analysts telling the New York Times that they expected $200 million to $300 million—yes, with an m—to move from affected accounts into money market funds or elsewhere.

So if the missing $114 billion is not the result of the TAG program expiration—or at least not all related to TAG—what’s going on? Paul Miller, a bank analyst with FBR Capital Markets, cautions against reading too much into the Fed’s weekly data. “It’s a noisy database,” he says. Among large U.S. banks, there have been movements of greater than $50 billion (not seasonally adjusted) during 107 different weeks since 2000. It’s not uncommon to see 11-figure swings—that is, tens of billions of dollars—from positive to negative, or vice-versa, one week to the next.

Noise can increase near the start of a year. “The first quarter is always a wacky quarter,” Miller says. And January 2013 has seen an incredible amount of change. First, the fiscal cliff drama had companies shifting dividends and had bank clients guessing what their tax liabilities would be, which might explain the $60.4 billion pumped into the largest banks during the week ending Dec. 26. (Seasonally adjusted, it was the sixth-highest level on record.) Second, the payroll tax just went up, sticking most wage earners with paychecks that are 2 percent smaller.

VIDEO: 'Thank You, America': AIG to Launch This Bailout Ad

Third, ordinary investors may be ready to move out of federally guaranteed accounts and into investments. Stocks did very well in 2012. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Roben Farzad wrote on Jan. 16, equity mutual funds saw their second-highest inflows on record in the first week of the year. Economists are worrying that market exuberance is getting too high, with one measure of risk aversion at a three-decade low.

“If deposits are really trending down—and at the end of the month, we’ll be smarter than we are now—if that’s the case, it can tell us a few things,” says Dan Geller, executive vice president of Market Rates Insight. “And one thing that it could tell us is that the law of elasticity is finally catching up with deposits.” In other words, contrary to what economic theory predicts, deposits have been piling up at banks ever since the crisis, even though they offer pitiful yields. Geller says that may finally be ending—though like Miller, he says not to put too much stock in just one burst of Fed data.

“One week is just a very thin slice,” he says. Still, $114 billion is a big figure, and it’s one to keep an eye on in order to understand where the economy is headed in 2013.

Anonymous hacks US Sentencing Commission, distributes files

Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called "Operation Last Resort."

The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second - successful - attack came around 9pm PST that evening. 

By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it had been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returned the defaced site's contents.

Update January 26, 8pm PST: ussc.gov is restored.

It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be publicly released (thus releasing the as-yet unkonwn information held on the stolen files) if the U.S. government did not comply with Anonymous' ultimatum demands for legal reform.

Anonymous explained that they used this webiste for symbolic reasons.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission sets guidelines for sentencing in United States Federal courts, and on the defaced ussc.gov website Anonymous cited the recent suicide of hacktivist Aaron Swartz as a "line that has been crossed."

The statement suggested retaliation for Swartz's tragic suicide, which many - including the family - believe was a result of overzealous prosecution by the Department of Justice and what the family deemed a "bullying" use of outdated computer crime laws.

• See also: Hacker, activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide

Anonymous has not specified exactly what files they have obtained. The various files were named after Supreme Court Justices.

According to the statement:

Warhead – U S – D O J – L E A – 2013 . A E E 256 is primed and armed. It has been quietly distributed to numerous mirrors over the last few days and is available for download from this website now. We encourage all Anonymous to syndicate this file as widely as possible.

This appears to be Anonymous sending a threatening message to whoever knows what might be on the encrypted files.

Anonymous has encouraged anyone and everyone to distribute the files, so it is unknown who has the files or how many have been distributed. The files are useless without the encryption keys.

The contents are various and we won’t ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public.

At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.

Currently two of the mirrors are slow, and one has gone offline completely.

It is possible, as suggested by the file names, that Anonymous may have taken files pertaining to each of the Justices (all of whom were named on filenames at the bottom of the defaced page, such as "Scalia.warhead1") and put them in a file (named "Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256") and then appended a command to the file that would nuke the file. 

This suggests that Anonymous may have obtained files and nuked the compromised server.

Anonymous Tweeted that the group left a backdoor and made it editable in a way that encourages other hackers to come and shell the server.

Source: ZDNet

Coca-Cola admits Dasani is really just 'purified' tap water

(NaturalNews) As more and more people wake up to the dangers of fluoride, chlorine, pharmaceuticals, and the many other toxic compounds found in municipal water supplies, the market for bottled water has exploded. But in the process, some major food and beverage corporations have unwittingly begun peddling that very same tap water in bottles as "pure," a deceptive labeling term that is the subject of a new trade controversy in Europe.

According to a recent report by Occupy Monsanto, the Dasani water brand, which is owned by beverage giant Coca-Cola, is one such bottled water counterfeit, if you will, that contains purified tap water dressed in fancy-looking bottles. Like many other bottled water brands, Dasani is sold at a premium price, and many people perceive it to be superior to tap water, even though it actually is just tap water.

Even though the majority of the impurities have admittedly been removed from Dasani water, and minerals added back in, many people do not realize that the water contained in Dasani bottles is not actually from a natural spring. If you read closely the labels found on water bottles, it usually spells out the source where the water inside was derived. But this information is often overlooked by consumers who believe they are buying something superior.

"Figures from independent beverage research company Canadean show that at least two out of every five bottles of water sold around the world are, like Dasani, 'purified' waters, rather than 'source' waters which originate from a spring," explains Trevor Datson in an Occupy Monsanto piece. "Most of the supermarket own-label bottled waters consist of treated mains water. In short, they are subjected to many of the same treatments that source waters undergo to satisfy public health requirements after being pumped up from the ground."

The significance of this is that water specifically derived from a natural spring actually is superior to the water supplied by the local tap, at least in most cases. Many people who buy bottled water assume their water comes from a spring, because this is how the bottled water industry got its start. But today, brands like Dasani, Aquafina, and Sparkletts have captured significant market share by engaging in what some would called deceptive advertising.

Back in 2007, PepsiCo Inc., which owns the Aquafina "purified" water brand, announced it would begin printing the words "Public Water Source" on its labels to ensure that customers knew where Aquafina water actually came from. The move came in response to several nationwide campaigns launched at that time to combat deception in bottled water labeling.

Source: Natural News

Study accidentally exposes chemotherapy as fraud - tumors grow faster after chemo!

(NaturalNews) A team of researchers from Washington state had a giant "Oops!" moment recently when it accidentally uncovered the deadly truth about chemotherapy while investigating why prostate cancer cells are so difficult to eradicate using conventional treatment methods. As it turns out, chemotherapy does not actually treat or cure cancer at all, according to the study's findings, but rather fuels the growth and spread of cancer cells, making them much harder to stamp out once chemotherapy has already been initiated.

You might call it the "smoking gun" that proves, once and for all, the complete fraud of the conventional cancer industry. Not only is chemotherapy, the standard method of cancer treatment today, a complete flop, based on the findings, but it is actually detrimental for patients with cancer. Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the shock findings which, not surprisingly, are being ignored by the mainstream scientific community, highlight in full detail how chemotherapy causes healthy cells to release a protein that actually feeds cancer cells and causes them to thrive and proliferate.

According to the study, chemotherapy induces healthy cells to release WNT16B, a protein that helps promote cancer cell survival and growth. Chemotherapy also definitively damages the DNA of healthy cells, a long-term detriment that persists long after chemotherapy treatment is stopped. This combined action of healthy cell destruction and cancer cell promotion technically makes chemotherapy more of a cancer-causing protocol than a cancer-treatment protocol, by definition, a fact that should grab the attention of anyone personally familiar with having, or knowing someone else who has cancer.

"WNT16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumor cells and cause them to grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy," explained study co-author Peter Nelson from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, about the findings, which he dubbed "completely unexpected." "Our results indicate that damage responses in benign cells ... may directly contribute to enhanced tumor growth kinetics," added the entire team about what they observed.

Avoiding chemotherapy improves health outcomes, suggests research

What this means, for all intents and purposes, is that the entire process of chemotherapy is completely worthless, and is actually highly detrimental for cancer patients. Anyone searching for a real cure will want to avoid chemotherapy, in other words, and pursue an alternate route. This may include investigating alternative treatments like the Gerson Therapy (http://www.naturalnews.com/Gerson.html), or evaluating anti-cancer foods and nutrients like sodium bicarbonate, turmeric, high-dose vitamin C, and vitamin D.

"Whatever manipulations we're doing to tumors can inadvertently do something to increase the tumor numbers to become more metastatic, which is what kills patients at the end of the day," admitted Dr. Raghu Kalluri, author of a similar study published last year in the journal Cancer Cell. This particular study found that cancer drugs, which are typically pushed alongside chemotherapy, cause tumors to metastasize.

Source: Natural News

Google Glasses Beam Sound Into Your Skull without Headphones