A bipartisan group of senators questioned the Justice Department this week regarding how the government’s treatment of cellphone-generated location data in national security cases has changed in lieu of the Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States last June.

The Carpenter case addressed the application of the Fourth Amendment to cell-site location information, or CSLI, which are geolocation records produced by users’ cell phones communicating with cell towers and stored by wireless providers. The court held that because CSLI provides “an intimate window into a person’s life,” police must obtain a warrant to collect it.

The virus, distributed from the tech maker’s official website, could potentially affect 1 million computers, the cybersecurity firm says.

The software update service for Taiwan-based tech manufacturer Asus was hacked and exploited to disseminate malware from June to November 2018, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab says. The firm discovered the "chain attack" in January 2019.

The malware was signed with the official Asus digital certificate and in general appeared to be a genuine software update, one marked as "critical," at that, the Kaspersky Lab said, Motherboard reported Tuesday.

It appears that, despite being distributed globally, the malware was targeted at a relatively small pool of some 600 machines with specific media access control (MAC) addresses. Should the malware discover the MAC it was looking for, it would then open the door for more malicious programs to further compromise the system.

A fierce struggle over automation has erupted at the Port of Los Angeles, as local union officials representing some 12,000 dockworkers demand that one of the world’s largest shipping firms abandon a plan to introduce driverless electric cargo trucks.

Shouting, whistling and jeering, more than 1,200 union members, local business owners and community activists packed a four-hour hearing Thursday before the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners. The board voted to postpone a construction permit for the automated system after an offer by Mayor Eric Garcetti to mediate the dispute.

“The decision before the board may have far-reaching impacts on the pace of automation at our port and could define how the port will compete and sustain jobs into the foreseeable future,” Garcetti wrote in a letter unveiled at the hearing.

Authored by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Under the directorship of torture and black site maven Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency has returned to its traditional roots of conducting “black bag” operations and disrupting electrical grids through cyber-attacks.

The planned changes would require, in part, that tech giants such as Facebook and YouTube take responsibility for copyright materials users upload to their platforms. Though the measure is claimed to be aimed at protecting copyright holders, many note that it can easily be used to restrict freedom of speech.

The Southern Poverty Law Center - the "vicious left-wing attack dog" used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify "hate groups" - is unraveling.

A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims - with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism," the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization's legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday.

FEMA mishandled the personal information of 2.3 million people driven out of their homes by wildfires in 2017 and hurricanes, an Inspector General report released Friday found.

During our ongoing audit of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program, we determined that FEMA violated the Privacy Act of 19741 and Department of Homeland Security policy by releasing to [contractor] the PII and SPII of 2.3 million survivors of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria and the California wildfires in 2017.

Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.

People are emailing me about these bans.

I just now browsed (on a remote machine under my control) ZeroHedge, Gab and Dissenter without any problems on Spark, the largest ISP in NZ. Also, my small, regional ISP has not blocked any of these sites.

Whatever is happening with regard to sites being blocked in NZ, it’s definitely not consistent for everyone here.

Since I’m not experiencing any bans, I can’t say how to bypass this for sure, however, it might be as simple as changing your DNS settings to use any of several public DNS services. I recommend CloudFlare’s public DNS.

If you’re more technically adept, or if your ISP is using a transparent DNS proxy and won’t let you use an alternate DNS, you might want to check out DNSCrypt.

As a top Huawei executive, I’m often asked why the US has launched a full-scale assault on us. The Americans have charged us with stealing technology and violating trade sanctions and largely blocked us from doing business there. Mike Pence, US vice-president, recently told Nato of “the threat posed by Huawei,” and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, warned allies that using our telecommunications equipment would make it harder for the US to “partner alongside them.”

On Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest trade show, a US delegation including Ajit Pai, Federal Communications Commission chair, repeated the call to keep Huawei out of global 5G networks.

Washington has cast aspersions on Huawei for years. A 2012 report by the House Intelligence Committee labelled us a threat. But, until recently, these attacks were relatively muted. Now that the US has brought out the heavy artillery and portrayed Huawei as a threat to Western civilization, we must ask why.

Though Facebook's AI-powered censors managed to "mistakenly" flag Zero Hedge as a repeat violator of the social network's "community standards", when it comes to livestreamed videos depicting horrific and extreme violence, the company is still working out some kinks in its ability to immediately identify and remove livestreams depicting horrific acts of terror and violence like the video published Friday by the Christchurch Shooter.

In a blog post mea culpa published Thursday, Facebook's VP of Integrity Guy Rosen explained why the company failed to immediately remove the horrifying livestream of the attacks that the shooter, a 28-year-old Australian who also published a manifesto laying out his violent, islamophobic ideology, posted to Facebook Live, and which was viewed 4,000 times before being taken down.

In its quest for global, and galactic monopolistic domination, Amazon had focused mostly on legacy businesses with low margins which had little operational leverage, high debt and were losing market share to the online retail giant; one thing the world's richest man refused to do was to aggressively go after his online tech giant peers.

Until now.

In its quest to expand into yet another vertical and grab a piece of the $130 billion digital advertising market dominated by Google and Facebook, Amazon will start selling video spots on its smartphone shopping app.

A senior source at Uber has confirmed to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners programme that Uber Australia illegally deployed an in-house piece of spyware called Surfcam in order to spy on drivers for a rival rideshare company called Gocatch; Uber was able to compile lists of drivers' emails, car registration numbers and other details and it used these to poach Gocatch drivers and turn them into Uber drivers.

Uber was previously caught using Surfcam illegally in Singapore. A company spokesperson reported that they have "conducted an audit of the use of Surfcam and it has been prohibited," and blamed the tool's use on the previous CEO, the disgraced and ousted Travis Kalanick.

Gocatch was notable for not launching until after the Australian government had created a regulatory framework for the lawful operation of rideshare systems; by contrast, Uber entered the market before the practice was legalized.

Developers who want to use machine learning on homemade gadgets or prototype appliances just got a powerful new low-cost option, with Nvidia revealing the Jetson Nano.

The $99 Jetson Nano Developer Kit is a board tailored for running machine-learning models and using them to carry out tasks such as computer vision.

Commercial 5G networks are barely operational in the United States right now, but that hasn’t stopped engineers from thinking ahead to 6G — and the U.S. government wants to facilitate their experiments over the next decade. After a unanimous vote, the FCC is opening “terahertz wave” spectrum for experimental purposes, creating legal ways for companies to test and sell post-5G wireless equipment.

Over recent months, the US has tried to steer Germany away from letting the Chinese tech giant participate in building the country’s next-generation 5G network infrastructure, citing security threats, and even threatened to downgrade intelligence sharing.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has opposed excluding the Chinese manufacturer Huawei from the development of the country’s 5G mobile network, or any other company just because it is from a certain country while speaking at an annual Global Solutions Summit in Berlin. Besides this, she also spoke against public discussions of sensitive issues in what could be seen as a rebuke to Washington’s recent warning to cut sharing intelligence info if Berlin allows the Chinese company Huawei to develop its 5G network.

“There are two things I don’t believe in. First, to discuss these very sensitive security questions publicly, and second, to exclude a company simply because it’s from a certain country”, she said, as cited by Bloomberg.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford issued a statement Monday denying weekend media reports that the US plans to leave around 1,000 troops in Syria, saying the reports are “factually incorrect.”

Dunford presented the current planned “residual force” as 200, saying that this hadn’t changed since February. The US announced 200 would stay on February 21, but on February 22 officially increased that number to 400.

It’s not clear from Dunford’s statement where the “incorrect” aspect of the new report, which came out of a Wall Street Journal, exists. That report suggested that the 1,000 figure was not yet finalized, but was being discussed. Dunford’s comments didn’t include any details on what is actually being discussed, but just that nothing was finalized.

A U.S. government-led group is working with chipmaker Intel Corp and Cray Inc to develop and build the nation's fastest computer by 2021 for conducting nuclear weapons and other research, officials said on Monday.

The Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago said they are working on a supercomputer dubbed Aurora with Intel, the world's biggest supplier of data center chips, and Cray, which specializes in the ultra-fast machines.

Needless to say, Journofa/ politicians are demanding more tech censorship following last week’s tragic shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. The alleged killer, Brenton Tarrant, appears to have been a frequent 8chan user, he livestreamed his attack on Facebook, and his manifesto was quickly disseminated across a variety of platforms. So they must be shut down: “[T]he tech giants have a more profound responsibility than simply trying to censor offensive material after the event. They need to consider how the openness of their platforms allows the spread and reinforcement of racist hatred and violent ideologies,” editorialized the London Independent. [Tech giants must now use their power to fight racist hate online, The Independent, March 16, 2019]Big Tech censorship, combined with the rise of illiberal Cultural Marxist totalitarianism in the West’s intellectual elites, is the biggest threat to free speech, and immigration patriotism, in America.

Norsk Hydro, one of the world's largest aluminium producers, revealed today that it "became victim of an extensive cyber-attack" that crippled some of its infrastructure and forced it to switch to manual operations in some smelting locations. The cyber-attack was later identified as an infection with the LockerGoga ransomware strain, the company said during a press conference.

News of the cyber-attack broke earlier this morning in a message the company sent to investors and stock exchanges.

"Hydro became victim of an extensive cyber-attack in the early hours of Tuesday (CET), impacting operations in several of the company's business areas," the company said. "IT-systems in most business areas are impacted and Hydro is switching to manual operations as far as possible."

The most common subject lines used in phishing emails targeting businesses show how cyber criminals are exploiting urgency, personalisation and pressure in order to trick victims into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware or otherwise surrendering confidential or sensitive corporate information.

Cyber criminals are well aware that people respond to dozens if not hundreds of emails a day – and this is reflected in the most common subject lines used when conducting business email compromise attacks.

Social networking company MySpace, popular in the good old days of the early 2000s, has lost about 50 million songs that were uploaded to the platform by 14 million artists between 2005 and 2015, as well as a bunch of other files.

"As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace," the Los Angeles-based company said in a statement Monday.

"We apologize for the inconvenience."

A massive power outage occurred again in various parts of the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and nearby localities, eyewitnesses of the incident told Sputnik on Monday.

The blackout is reported mainly by the inhabitants of East Caracas, namely the districts of Altamira, La Urbina, El Cafetal, El Rosal, Los Palos Grandes, and others.

In the municipality of Chacao, where a number of foreign embassies and large hotels are located, power outages were registered on Sunday evening. According to a Sputnik correspondent, as of 10.30 a.m. (14.30 GMT), there was no electricity in this part of the city either inside houses or on the street.

A new poll by AAA reveals most Americans have a negative impression of self-driving cars — almost three-quarters to be exact.

The survey shows public trust in autonomous vehicles has declined by 11 points over the last year.

“Whenever there are high-profile incidents involving self-driving vehicles or the testing of them, we see that consumers then…their level of fear as far as these vehicles are concerned, increases,” said Ragina Cooper Averella, AAA Mid-Atlantic.

Last May, a driverless Uber hit and killed an Arizona woman crossing the street. And though incredibly rare, crashes like this have changed perceptions nationwide.

In Maryland, drivers have serious doubts about letting a computer take the wheel.

Remember the good ol’ days when just Big Brother kept tabs on what you did and where you went? These days, thanks to the proliferation of report-your-neighbor cellphone apps, a coworker, resentful ex-husband or that woman with the yappy Pomeranian who thinks you take too many photos at the dog park might be using their phone to quietly drop a dime on you. Thus ensuring that your local police department doesn’t miss a chance to decide if your afternoon stroll with Fido warrants further investigation.

The situation in and around Venezuela continues to be extremely tense. Following the failed attempt at the end of February. of the so-called “humanitarian” invasion, and the unceasing provocative activity of the self-proclaimed “interim president,” this week a serious disaster came to Venezuela that has cost the lives of Venezuela’s citizens.

And it came about, unfortunately, the way we talked about during our previous briefing on March 7, through sabotage, just a few hours after our warning. Like the absolute majority of the troubles that have befallen independent Venezuela in recent years, this trouble came from outside. According to the legal Government of the country, led by President N.Maduro, as well as information from other reliable sources confirming this information, the Venezuelan power sector has been attacked from abroad.

The U.S. Army recently awarded QinetiQ North America a contract worth up to $152 million for special robots that are light enough to be carried in a backpack into combat.

The Common Robotic System Individual, or CRS (I), is the Army's first "small-sized" robotic program of record, according to a recent press release from the service's Maneuver Capability Development Integration Directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia.

"CRS (I) is a remotely operated, highly mobile, unmanned ground vehicle that is light enough for a dismounted soldier to carry in a backpack," the release states.

The Trump administration has made it clear to Berlin that if it did not bar Huawei Technologies Co. from building Germany's 5G next-generation mobile networks, Washington would limit the country's access to US intelligence. Speaking to Sputnik, Patrick Berger, a spokesman for Huawei's German branch, commented on the US' campaign against the firm.

On 11 March, The Wall Street Journal reported that US Ambassador to Germany Richard A. Grenell had written a letter to German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, warning him about the potential negative consequences of using Huawei equipment.

However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded that Berlin would observe its own security standards.

"Security, particularly when it comes to the expansion of the 5G network, but also elsewhere in the digital area, is a very important concern for the German government, so we are defining our standards for ourselves," the chancellor emphasised.