WINDOWS 10 Spying on Your Personal Data with Default Settings Enabled

""Americans are still waiting for a resolution to the controversy that erupted when it was discovered that the National Security Agency was spying on everyone’s telephones – lawsuits still are pending and Congress is working on making changes to the law.

Now they’re learning that while the NSA was collecting telephone data, the newest version of the ubiquitous Windows software, version 10, is watching everything that’s on their computer.

“From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information – name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics,” explains a new report from the online Newsweek.

“But it also digs a bit deeper,” the report says.

“Other information Microsoft saves includes Bing search queries and conversations with the new digital personal assistant Cortana; contents of private communications such as email; websites and apps visited (including features accessed and length of time used); and contents of private folders,” the warning explains.

“Furthermore, ‘your typed and handwritten words’ are collected.’”

All of the warnings come from the company’s software privacy statement, which includes the statement that Microsoft collects information “to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write.”

Alec Meer at the RockPaperShotgun blog warned it’s not something that should be ignored.

What’s America coming to? Find out in “Police State U.S.A.’

“Unless you pay close attention to the fluffy options offered when you first install Microsoft’s new operating system, it’s going to quietly track your behavior and use it to fire targeted ads at you, as well as keeping tabs on your location history, data from messages, calendars, contacts and God knows what else.”

The blog noted that “some of this stuff” can be turned off, but the key point is that people “aren’t so hot” about paying for tools to access the Web and such, so “the money comes from harvesting data and flogging it to advertisers and other organizations who want to know exactly what we’re all up to online.”

He continued, “If you ever wondered why they’ve made the Windows 10 upgrade free to Win 7 & 8 users, here’s one possible answer. Windows 10 has all sorts of user tracking baked right in.”

The Daily Mail reported another complication with the software.

The update to Windows 10, the report said, “automatically made [a man's] porn collection into a slideshow and used it as a screensaver. And to make matters worse, the malfunction was discovered by his wife, who was greeted by the explicit images first thing in the morning.”

The report said a user posted the story online so others would not repeat the mistake, which reportedly happened when the images were saved into the “My Pictures” folder. It is from that folder the software draws data to build slideshows, the report said.

“I have no idea how to shut that feature off and that computer is staying shut down until I do,” the man wrote, according to the Mail. “Free Windows and a free trip to the doghouse. Thanks Microsoft!”

Newsweek reported an estimated 14 million machines already are running Windows 10.

“The company says it uses the data collected for three purposes: to provide and improve its services; to send customers personalized promotions; and to display targeted advertising, which sometimes requires the information be shared with third parties.”

The report said Microsoft’s practices actually are similar to Google’s, which analyzes the content of users’ emails to provide a “more personalized product.”

Online privacy group European Digital Rights told the Times that the MS policy not only was bad news for privacy.""

“Your free speech rights can also be 

violated on an ad hoc basis,” the group said:

http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/windows-10-spies-on-emails-images-credit-cards-more/

Uber Laser Data Memory: "Transient Structures and Possible Limits of Data Recording in Phase-Change Materials"

""DVDs and Blu-ray disks contain so-called phase-change materials that morph from one atomic state to another after being struck with pulses of laser light, with data "recorded" in those two atomic states. Using ultrafast laser pulses that speed up the data recording process, Caltech researchers adopted a novel technique, ultrafast electron crystallography (UEC), to visualize directly in four dimensions the changing atomic configurations of the materials undergoing the phase changes. In doing so, they discovered a previously unknown intermediate atomic state--one that may represent an unavoidable limit to data recording speeds.

By shedding light on the fundamental physical processes involved in data storage, the work may lead to better, faster computer memory systems with larger storage capacity. The research was done in the laboratory of Ahmed Zewail, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics.

When the laser light interacts with a phase-change material, its atomic structure changes from an ordered crystalline arrangement to a more disordered, or amorphous, configuration. These two states represent 0s and 1s of digital data.

Using ultrafast 4-D imaging, the new UEC technique allows researchers to "film " the atomic mechanism behind the recording process in memories based on phase change materials. Credit: Jianbo Hu, Giovanni M. Vanacore, and Ahmed H. Zewail

"Today, nanosecond lasers--lasers that pulse light at one-billionth of a second--are used to record information on DVDs and Blu-ray disks, by driving the material from one state to another," explains Giovanni Vanacore, a postdoctoral scholar and an author on the study. The speed with which data can be recorded is determined both by the speed of the laser--that is, by the duration of each "pulse" of light--and by how fast the material itself can shift from one state to the other.

Thus, with a nanosecond laser, "the fastest you can record information is one information unit, one 0 or 1, every nanosecond," says Jianbo Hu, a postdoctoral scholar and the first author of the paper. "To go even faster, people have started to use femtosecond lasers, which can potentially record one unit every one millionth of a billionth of a second. We wanted to know what actually happens to the material at this speed and if there is a limit to how fast you can go from one structural phase to another."

To study this, the researchers used their technique, ultrafast electron crystallography. The technique, a new development--different from Zewail's Nobel Prize-winning work in femtochemistry, the visual study of chemical processes occurring at femtosecond scales--allowed researchers to observe directly the transitioning atomic configuration of a prototypical phase-change material, germanium telluride (GeTe), when it is hit by a femtosecond laser pulse.

In UEC, a sample of crystalline GeTe is bombarded with a femtosecond laser pulse, followed by a pulse of electrons. The laser pulse causes the atomic structure to change from the crystalline to other structures, and then ultimately to the amorphous state. Then, when the electron pulse hits the sample, its electrons scatter in a pattern that provides a picture of the sample's atomic configuration as a function of the time.

With this technique, the researchers could see directly, for the first time, the structural shift in GeTe caused by the laser pulses. However, they also saw something more: a previously unknown intermediate phase that appears during the transition from the crystalline to the amorphous configuration. Because moving through the intermediate phase takes additional time, the researchers believe that it represents a physical limit to how quickly the overall transition can occur--and to how fast data can be recorded, regardless of the laser speeds used.

"Even if there is a laser faster than a femtosecond laser, there will be a limit as to how fast this transition can occur and information can be recorded, just because of the physics of these phase-change materials," Vanacore says. "It's something that cannot be solved technologically--it's fundamental."

Despite revealing such limits, the research could one day aid the development of better data storage for computers, the researchers say. Right now, computers generally store information in several ways, among them the well-known random-access memory (RAM) and read-only memory (ROM). RAM, which is used to run the programs on your computer, can record and rewrite information very quickly via an electrical current. However, the information is lost whenever the computer is powered down. ROM storage, including CDs and DVDs, uses phase-change materials and lasers to store information. Although ROM records and reads data more slowly, the information can be stored for decades.

Finding ways to speed up the recording process of phase-change materials and understanding the limits to this speed could lead to a new type of memory that harnesses the best of both worlds.""

http://www.sciencecodex.com/better_memory_with_faster_lasers-161276

Social Security Identity Theft Data Breaches Bigger Issue than Most Expect

""As cyberattacks continue, analysts are seeing a new pattern: Hackers are focused on stealing personally identifiable information. That includes the security clearances of U.S. intelligence officers, with the reported theft of background information. It also includes information that's less sensitive but far-reaching — like Social Security numbers.

In an interview with NPR's Audie Cornish, NPR's Aarti Shahani took a look at just how many Americans' Social Security numbers have been stolen so far, and what's being done about it.

Let's start with stats. Following big data breaches like Anthem and, more recently, the federal government's Office of Personnel Management, how many Social Security numbers have been taken?

The question sent us on a wild goose chase.

The Social Security Administration says it does not have a count. So we turned to the Federal Trade Commission, which is the lead agency on identity theft for the federal government. FTC officials say they don't have anything approximating that number because they don't track data breaches. It's not part of their mandate from Congress.

The FTC suggested we contact Verizon. Their business unit, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, publishes a very popular annual report on breaches.

So, to get a tally on theft of Social Securitynumbers, the federal government sent NPR to a phone company?

Pretty much.

Verizon gets cyberattack data from dozens of organizations around the world, including federal agencies like the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team.

Jay Jacobs, lead data scientist at Verizon for the breach report, is a foremost expert who has been slicing and dicing this data for years. He estimates 60 percent to 80 percent of Social Security numbers have been stolen by hackers. NPR put the question to him multiple times and he stuck by this estimate.

That number is staggering. It's far larger than the estimate, by the federal workers union, that every federal employee is a victim.

Jacobs pointed out that while Social Security numbers have been stolen for decades, the scale of the problem is new. Before, socials were written or typed on a piece of paper, and breaking into one filing cabinet doesn't scale up. But now that everything is digital, if hackers compromise a server or data warehouse, that theft scales into the millions, quickly.

"It's gotten somewhat easy for the attacker," Jacobs says. "I think we're underestimating just how [many] records are out there."

So the problem of theft has changed by orders of magnitude, but just because your number was stolen doesn't mean you're a victim of identity theft?

Correct. The number of victims is definitely smaller. But we don't have a great estimate on how many people have actually been harmed. That'll unfold over time.

One key detail: The burden falls on you to vigilantly monitor if you are a victim. The Social Security Administration has a policy: You can't change your Social Security number just because it's been stolen. You need proof it's been abused. SSA is strict about it. In all of 2014, they replaced only 250 Social Security numbers based on misuse and disadvantage.""

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/06/15/414618292/theft-of-social-security-numbers-is-broader-than-you-might-think

CoinVault Ransomware an Unrelenting Maleware Blackmail Scheme Outed and Being Cured by Kaspersky Decryptor Tool

""Users that have found themselves as victims of the CoinVault ransomware now have the ability to have their files decrypted using a free tool that was uploaded by Kaspersky Lab, in cooperation with the Dutch police.

The tool, named the Ransomware Decryptor, utilizes decryption keys which were recovered by the Dutch police during their investigation of the CoinVault ransomware.

Ransomware such as CoinVault attacks by encrypting data stored within disks or by blocking users from accessing their computer systems. The ransomware is often installed through exploiting vulnerabilities in the computers of the victims through the propagation of phishing email messages and links leading to malicious web pages.

However, unlike other forms of ransomware, CoinVault allows victims to see the files that the ransomware has encrypted. One of these files can be decrypted for free, but for all the others, the victim will have to pay the hackers certain amounts to be able to access the PC and the user's files once again.

CoinVault has been infecting Windows PCs since November of last year.

The Dutch police's National High Tech Crime Unit was recently able to acquire a database from a command and control server of CoinVault, which included decryption keys. The information acquired from the database led to Kaspersky's development of the decryption tool that is now available to the public to use for free.

The Ransomware Decryptor is not yet 100 percent effective, as all the possible decryption keys were understandably not stored for safekeeping on that single server that the Dutch police recovered. However, officials hope that as the ongoing investigation into CoinVault progresses, more decryption keys will be discovered that would make improvements on the success rate of the decryption tool, said Jornt van der Wiel, a researcher for Kaspersky that was part of the team that created the Ransomware Decryptor.""

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/46111/20150414/kaspersky-outs-decryptor-for-coinvault-ransomware.htm

Three Billion Mile 9 Year Trip and Nasa's Spacecraft 'New Horizons' Focuses in on the Arctic-Rock Dwarf Planet Pluto

''After traveling nine years across more than 3 billion miles of space, a spacecraft the size of a grand piano is about to give humanity its first high-resolution view of Pluto, which is about two-thirds the size of our moon.

Nobody knows what the rendezvous will reveal. Pluto's icy surface may resemble an extreme version of Antarctica, with snow-capped mountains, steep crevasses and towering ice cliffs. The dwarf planet could be surrounded by rings of tiny ice particles, like its giant neighbor Neptune. There may even be evidence that once, long ago, there was an ocean beneath the frozen crust of its largest moon, Charon.

When it comes to Pluto, nothing is certain.

"Our knowledge of Pluto is quite meager," said planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the NASA mission known as New Horizons. "It is very much like our knowledge of Mars was before our first mission there 50 years ago."

New Horizons is poised to change all that. Sunday, the spacecraft's long-range cameras began snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons against a backdrop of stars. New Horizons has been taking detailed measurements of the dust and charged particles in the dwarf planet's environment since mid-January.

More data will be collected during the months leading up to the mission's big moment this summer: A close approach on July 14 that will take the spacecraft just 7,700 miles from Pluto's surface.

From that distance, New Horizons will be able to determine what the dwarf planet is made of, create temperature maps of its multi-colored surface, and look for auroras in its thin atmosphere. Scientists and the public will see the first high-definition images this summer.

Until now, the best pictures astronomers have managed to get consist of a few hazy pixels that were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope more than a decade ago. The resolution is so poor that if you looked at a comparable image of Earth, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the continents from the seas.

The instruments on New Horizons will take images so detailed that if they were pictures of Los Angeles, they would show individual runways at Los Angeles International Airport, said Stern, who is based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

"What I'm most looking forward to is taking this point of light and transforming it into a planet," he said.

The existence of a planet beyond Neptune was first hypothesized in the early 20th century after scientists noticed what they thought were disturbances in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Those wobbles turned out to be measurement errors, but decades of searching for the elusive "Planet X" led astronomers to Pluto in 1930.

Despite its great distance and diminutive size, scientists have been able to glean a remarkable amount of information from the anemic data gathered so far. By watching Pluto's movements across the night sky, they deduced that it takes 248 Earth years to make one trip around the sun. Because Pluto's brightness oscillates in a regular pattern, they think it makes a complete rotation on its axis every 6.4 Earth days.

Astronomers also noted that Pluto ventures far above and below the paths of the major planets in our night sky, leading them to conclude that its orbital plane has a distinctive tilt.

Close observations have revealed that Pluto has at least five moons - the biggest being Charon, which is about the size of Texas. After watching how Pluto's gravity affects the movement of these moons, scientists have a sense of what the dwarf planet's mass and volume might be and how much of it is made of rock and ice.

By examining the sunlight that reflects off Pluto through a prism, astronomers have been able to detect frozen methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide on its surface. They've also determined that water ice appears to be absent.

Astronomers can even get a rough approximation of the temperature on Pluto's surface by using large telescopes to look at the radiation emitted from its surface after it travels feebly across billions of miles of space.

"It is amazing what scientists can squeeze out of pathetic data," said Hal Weaver, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the project scientist on New Horizons.

But in the last few decades, scientists have hit a wall.

"At some point you get the maximum amount of information out of the data that you can, and the only way to advance your understanding is to send a spacecraft out," said Richard Binzel, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-investigator on New Horizons.

NASA has considered going to Pluto many times over the last 25 years, but three previous missions - Pluto Fast Flyby, Pluto Express and Pluto Kuiper Express - were shelved or canceled. New Horizons got the green light in 2001 with a relatively low budget of $700 million.

"It is going to be a huge advance over anything we've done so far with telescopes on the ground," said University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Dave Jewitt.""

Follow Link to Source:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-zooms-in-on-pluto-20150126-12y1u6.html

Unbreakable Quantum Encryption Entanglement Could Change World of Data Storage According to Latest Research

""There’s a current theory, backed by numerous tests, suggesting the notion of storing data in quantum entanglement is something highly feasible, and researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) are furthering its potential.

In the past, storing data this way only lasted for a short amount of time before the quantum entanglement failed; normally in a matter of milliseconds. But now, the aforementioned Australian research team has found a way to multiply the storage time and hold data for 100 times longer.

Lead author Manjin Zhong said:

We believe it will soon be possible to distribute quantum information between any two points on the globe. Quantum states are very fragile and normally collapse in milliseconds. Our long storage times have the potential to revolutionize the transmission of quantum information.”

According to their research, they can now store data through quantum computing for up to six hours at a time. The coherence time observed is long enough that nuclear spins travelling at 9 kilometres per hour in a crystal would have a lower decoherence with distance than light in an optical fibre. This enables some very early approaches to entanglement distribution (for example for quantum cryptography) to be revisited, in particular those in which the spins are transported rather than the light.

“Our storage times are now so long that it means people need to rethink what is the best way to distribute quantum data. Even transporting our crystals at pedestrian speeds we have less loss than laser systems for a given distance.”

What is Quantum Data Storage?

In July 2014, Microsoft released this video explaining quantum computing to showcase how the theory works. The video dumbs down the highly complex theory and explains it succinctly, splitting quantum computing and everyday computer science into two different subway systems.The idea of quantum computing is quite difficult to understand, but computer science researchers have been studying its capabilities for years. If harnesses correctly, quantum computing is far superior to the average computing we experience today on our laptops.

Storing data through this sort of computing offers unbreakable encryption, as particles such as photons of light are created in such a way that it naturally links them together.

Matthew Sellars, leader of the research team, said:

“We have never before had the possibility to explore quantum entanglement over such long distances. We should always be looking to test whether our theories match up with reality. Maybe in this new regime our theory of quantum mechanics breaks.”""

Reality Bender Source:

https://hacked.com/unbreakable-quantum-encryption-progress-change-world-data-storage/

'If the God Particle Exists We Will Find it by Next Year,' Says CERN Boss Rolf Heuer

""'I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist,' said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, whose LHC is at the focus of the search.  

He was echoed by KEK's Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off - after 26 years - its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions.""

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

""Reports in July seemed to indicate that the Higgs boson might have been detected among data the LHC.

But since then, those signals hinting it may have a mass between 120 and 140GeV look much less conclusive. 

Last month Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector, a huge particle detector at CERN, said that even if the LHR was able to rule out the existence of the Higgs boson, that would be a major achievement in itself.""

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2046537/If-God-particle-exists-year-says-CERN-boss.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet Cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper

 ""A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.""

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/