3D Printer Hype for Multitudes of Libraries in the States

""At hundreds of libraries across the U.S., 3-D printers can sometimes be heard whirring in the background, part of an effort to encourage interest in the new technology and foster DIY "maker spaces."

In some libraries, officials have begun to set restrictions on the 3-D printers amid concerns about how they'll be used.

At the University City Public Library in St. Louis, Patrick Wall recently printed a green plastic sword from the game Minecraft.

He runs this library and was demonstrating its new 3-D printer for a group of kids and adults. The play sword took close to 1 1/2 hours to print, Wall says.

The printer is roughly the size of a microwave with an open space in the middle. A coil of filament feeds an extruder that moves back and forth inside, dabbing molten plastic into layers that harden.

The 3-D printer, a 3-D scanner and filament cost about $4,500, Wall says.

University City was the first of two public libraries in the St. Louis area to set up 3-D printers for public use. But, according to the American Library Association, more than 250 libraries across the country that have one.

"It's actually part of a larger trend," says the ALA's Sari Feldman. 3-D printers are just the newest example of the interactive spaces that libraries are becoming for their communities, she says.

"So, where once we thought of libraries as places where we had things for people, now we really do things for people — or do things with people," Feldman says.

She says libraries large and small across the U.S. are setting up so-called "maker spaces," offering increasingly sophisticated hardware and software, including studio production equipment, design software and in some cases, even laser cutters.

But Feldman says the possibilities that come with cheap, user-friendly 3-D printers have also created a new gray area in setting library policy.

"There are many legal and intellectual freedom issues that need to be addressed when you make 3-D printers freely available for public use," she says.

For instance, the same technology that can print a plastic Minecraft sword is also capable of printing plastic gun parts or other items.

The ALA has recommended guidelines for libraries to address concerns about safety, access and liability. But some local libraries have established rules on their own.

At the Pope County Library System in central Arkansas, new restrictions have been placed on its two printers. They include printing objects that are prohibited by law, or deemed obscene or otherwise inappropriate.

Adult and Teen Services Librarian Sherry Simpson says there were just too many unknowns.

"We want to inspire their interest in design and we want them to bring their creations to life. However, some creations probably don't need to see life through the library," she says.

Like most other libraries, University City's currently has no specific limits on using its 3-D printer. Director Patrick Wall says it falls under the library's general policy that applies to 2-D printers and other services and materials.""

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/04/29/401236656/libraries-make-space-for-3-d-printers-rules-are-sure-to-follow

Moratorium on American Cash Notes Paves Way for Cashless Society Agenda

""Paul Joseph Watson: Some JPMorgan Chase customers are receiving letters informing them that the bank will no longer allow cash to be stored in safety deposit boxes.

The content of a post over on the Collectors Universe message board suggests that we may be about to see a resurgence of the old fashioned method of stuffing bank notes under the mattress.

The letter, entitled “Updated Safe Deposit Box Lease Agreement,” was sent out to customers at the beginning of the month.

“Hide your wallets, the banksters are on the move,” warns the Economic Policy Journal.

As of last month, Chase has also instituted a new policy which, “restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans,” writes Professor Joseph Salerno of the Mises Institute.

The news arrives on the back of comments by Citi’s Willem Buiter, who recently advocated abolishing cash altogether in order to “solve the world’s central banks’ problem with negative interest rates”.

Last month we also reported on how the Justice Department is ordering bank employees to consider calling the cops on customers who withdraw $5,000 dollars or more.

Efforts to impose restrictions on the use of cash by banks are seen by many as an attack on anonymity and an example of how financial institutions are positioning themselves to handle the fallout of the next economic crash – at the expense of customers.

According to reports which emerged last year, HSBC is now interrogating its account holders in the UK on how they earn and spend their money as well as restricting large cash withdrawals for customers from £5000 upwards.

Banks in the U.S. are also making it harder for customers to withdraw and deposit cash, with Chase imposing new capital controls that mandate identification for cash deposits and ban cash being deposited into another person’s account.""

http://etfdailynews.com/2015/04/22/war-on-cash-intensifies-jpmorgan-chase-to-prohibit-the-storage-of-cash-in-safety-deposit-boxes/2/

FBI Selling the Old/New Brand of Malware to the Public for the Sake of 'Security' as Policy Change

""The FBI’s bespoke surveillance malware—called Computer and IP Address Verifier (CIPAV)—is designed to track criminal suspects by logging their IP address, MAC address, computer programs running, operating system details, browser details, and other identifying computer information.

As far as spyware goes, it’s unusually circumscribed—unlike consumer keylogging and social media snooping surveillance tools, CIPAV isn’t able to spy on the entire computer at will, just a narrow list of identifiers. That means it’s a weirdly weak invader, but that’s a deliberate, built-in privacy protection, a way to keep the FBI’s spyware ostensibly legal.

Despite limitations, the FBI’s spyware capabilities are hugely powerful. As the Washington Post pointed out:

The most powerful FBI surveillance software can covertly download files, photographs and stored e-mails, or even gather real-time images by activating cameras connected to computers, say court documents and people familiar with this technology.
Yet there’s been zilch in the news about this government malware since 2013.

The FBI’s basement baby

The FBI keeps its malware deployment on the down low low. The few official documents available that provide spyware details use take care to reveal as little as possible.

“The exact nature of these commands, processes, capabilities, and their configuration is classified as a law enforcement sensitive investigative technique, the disclosure of which would likely jeopardize other ongoing investigations and/or future use of the technique,” an FBI agent’s affidavit reads.

So the FBI says it can’t explain exactly how CIPAV works because then the bad guys will figure it out and get away. If this argument sounds stale, it’s because it’s the same wobbly rationale the FBI uses to keep its heavy-handed cell phone tracking practices secret.

What we do know about CIPAV largely stems from court documents from one 2007 case. The FBI installed its malware on a teenaged bomb-threat suspect’s computer by tricking him into clicking on a phishing message on MySpace by impersonating Associated Press journalists. The FBI created a fake news article that contained malware about the bomb threats and sent it to the suspect in hopes that he’d click on it.

And the first and only semi-confirmed CIPAV attack discovered “in the wild,” before it was documented in a court case, happened in 2013, when researchers fingered the FBI as the source of a malware attack on Freedom Hosting, the anonymous hidden service notorious for hosting child porn. (The FBI later confirmed this.)

Another FBI spyware was used in 2013 to inject surveillance malware into a Colorado bomb threat suspect’s Yahoo email account. We know that the spyware allowed the FBI to see the webpages the suspect was visiting, which means it had a wider range of capabilities than CIPAV.

You may be wondering, who cares about the privacy of bomb threat suspects and pedophiles? It’s not exactly a sympathetic clan. The issue here isn’t that known pedophiles shouldn’t be tracked or that there’s a general problem with the FBI using warrants to narrowly track suspects of terrible crimes—that’s what it’s supposed to do! The issue is that the FBI’s current setup leaves too much room for to violate the privacy of people who aren’t suspects, and too many unanswered questions about its powerful spy tools.

Take the Freedom Hosting case for instance. All of the sites that used the anonymous server, including many that had absolutely nothing to do with child porn, were hit with the FBI’s spyware. In the case of the Colorado bomb threat, the FBI screwed up and originally received a warrant to spy on the wrong email address thanks to a typo, meaning some random person whose only crime was accidentally choosing an email address similar to a wanted criminal had their computer vulnerable to intensive FBI spying. The FBI saw no reason to fess up to spying on innocent people in those cases.

And since the FBI can use spyware to go after “zombified” computers infected with botnets, it could end up putting spyware on peoples’ computers just because someone else had already infected them with malware. This is like the FBI searching your house without telling you because a criminal had already broken in earlier.

We want to know more

What little we know about the FBI’s history with spyware raises questions. For instance, there was internal confusion about how to deploy spyware that suggests that the FBI hasn’t been sure how much it intruded on privacy. While the agency now requires a warrant and a Pen/Trap order to use CIPAV, documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show several FBI agents discussed deploying the spyware without warrants before finally asking for clarification in 2007.

Since we know the FBI has been using spyware since 2001, that’s six years before the FBI cemented its policy. How many other lingering privacy questions are still being debated about legal spyware use internally? And shouldn’t Congress and the general public be able to participate in these privacy debates? Shouldn’t people have the right to know if their computer has been accidentally snooped on, or if they’ve acquired government-issued spyware as collateral damage?""

http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-has-its-own-secret-brand-of-malware-1694821520

United States of America is it's Own Worst Enemy Troll: Edward Snowden Chimes in on International Government Surveillance Cyber Warfare Against the Public Globally

""After a year punctuated by hacks and data breaches, most notably a cyberattack against Sony, President Barack Obama used part of his State of the Union address on Tuesday to mention the growing threat to cybersecurity. “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” he said.

The president’s speech came a week after the White House outlined a cybersecurity policy proposal that calls for more information sharing between the private sector and government, an increase in penalties for hacking and an update in the standards for when companies have to report that their customers’ data has been compromised.

Yet in a recent interview on PBS’s Nova, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked a large number of classified documents about government surveillance, argued that one of the biggest threats to American cybersecurity may actually be ourselves.

“When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future,” Snowden said, “we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.”

In the interview, Snowden argued that Stuxnet, a digital virus that the U.S. and Israel allegedly used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in 2007, was a tipping point in the history of cyberconflict and led to a proliferation of attacks. “I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which these cyberattacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world,” he said. “We really started this trend in many ways.”

It’s impossible to know how many cyberattacks have been carried out by or against the U.S. But the numbers appear to be rising. In 2013, U.S. military and federal government computers were invaded 46,605 times, up from 26,942 in 2009, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Underscoring Snowden’s point: Der Spiegel released a trove of documents earlier this week, which revealed that the NSA broke into North Korea’s computer network in 2010, out of fear of the country’s growing cybercapabilities. That’s why the FBI was quick to accuse North Korea of carrying out the Sony hack, which eventually led to the leak of sensitive internal documents and partially canceled the release of The Interview.

When “we start engaging in these kind of behaviors,” Snowden said, “we’re setting a standard. We’re creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do.”""

Continue Story:

http://www.newsweek.com/snowden-cyber-war-america-its-own-worst-enemy-301175