The state department on Friday defended its decision to censor plans for a working, three-dimensional handgun that anyone can create from plastic with a 3D printer.
Tag Archives: Feds
Feds defend decision to scrub 3D gun plans from Internet
Posted by Gsurface
on May 12, 2013
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ATM hackers stole $45M in ’21st century bank heist,’ feds say
Posted by Gsurface
on May 9, 2013
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Feds blame combination of parasite, virus, bacteria, pesticides for strange bee disappearance
Posted by Gsurface
on May 5, 2013
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A new federal report blames a combination of problems for a mysterious and dramatic disappearance of U.S. honeybees since 2006.
FOX News
Redesigned $100 bill to enter circulation in October, feds say
Posted by Gsurface
on April 25, 2013
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Twitter gives up user data to feds 69% of the time
Posted by Gsurface
on January 29, 2013
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Twitter has released new numbers showing that the social network complied with government data requests 69% of the time in the U.S., as government requests for user information worldwide continue to rise.
Computerworld News
Feds file charges in NY against 3 over virus that infected more than 1M computers globally
Posted by Gsurface
on January 23, 2013
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Federal authorities in New York say they’ve brought criminal charges against three people in connection with a computer virus that infected more than a million computers worldwide.
FOX News
Feds: MegaUpload was not entrapped
Posted by Gsurface
on January 15, 2013
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The U.S. government fires back at the file-sharing service’s claims that it was deceived by the feds. [Read more]
CNET News
Feds crack alleged narwhal tusk-smuggling ring
Posted by Gsurface
on January 4, 2013
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Feds investigating dinosaur fossil worth up to $400,000 that was seized from home in Jackson
Posted by Gsurface
on December 3, 2012
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Feds Continue To Consider Linux Users Criminals For Watching DVDs
Posted by Gsurface
on October 25, 2012
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An anonymous reader sent in a link to an article in Wired about the latest DMCA loophole hearing. Bad news: the federal government rejected requests that would make console modding and breaking DRM on DVDs to watch them legal. So, you dirty GNU/Linux hippies using libdvdcss better watch out: “Librarian of Congress James Billington and Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante rejected the two most-sought-after items on the docket, game-console modding and DVD cracking for personal use and ‘space shifting.’ Congress plays no role in the outcome. The regulators said that the controls were necessary to prevent software piracy and differentiated gaming consoles from smart phones, which legally can be jailbroken. … On the plus side, the regulators re-authorized jailbreaking of mobile phones. On the downside, they denied it for tablets, saying an ‘ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.’”
So you can jailbreak a phone, but if it’s 1″ larger and considered a “tablet” you are breaking the law.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cell phone location data not private, Feds argue
Posted by Gsurface
on October 3, 2012
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Individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell phone location data collected by phone companies, a federal prosecutor said in oral arguments Monday before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
Computerworld News
Feds Add 9 Felony Charges Against Swartz For JSTOR Hack
Posted by Gsurface
on September 19, 2012
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Last year Aaron Swartz was indicted on four felony counts for allegedly stealing millions of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Today, Federal prosecutors piled on nine additional felony charges. The charges (PDF) are mostly covered under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and are likely to test the legislation’s limits. According to Wired, “The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn’t provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network. Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account ‘Gary Host,’ with the nickname ‘Ghost.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds demand $1B from LCD maker for price-fixing
Posted by Gsurface
on September 13, 2012
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After a jury found AU Optronics guilty of colluding with other companies to fix pricing on LCD panels, prosecutors are seeking a fine of $ 1 billion and 10 years prison time for two former executives.
[Read more]
CNET News
Feds delay ICD-10 medical coding deadline for one year
Posted by Gsurface
on August 24, 2012
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the finalization of a rule that will delay by one year the deadline for healthcare providers to implement the ICD-10 medical coding system.
Computerworld News
Feds Ban ‘Buckyballs’ Magnets
Posted by Gsurface
on July 26, 2012
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SicariusMan writes “Looks like warnings and other precautions were not enough to save Buckyballs Magnets. According to this report, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is concerned about the increase in children swallowing the rare earth magnets, and has issued its first stop-sale order in 11 years. Amazon and others have already agreed to stop selling the toys. ‘Although the commission issued a safety alert in November, it has received more than a dozen reports since then of children ingesting the magnets, with many requiring surgery, it said. More than 2 million Buckyballs and at least 200,000 Buckycubes, a similar cube-shaped magnet, have been sold in the United States.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds to seize $1.1 million dinosaur Friday
Posted by Gsurface
on June 22, 2012
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Senators ask feds to probe Facebook log-in requests
Posted by Gsurface
on March 26, 2012
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Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer ask Justice Department to investigate whether requesting job applicants’ social network passwords is a violation of federal law.
[Read more]
CNET News
Antitrust experts: Feds should avoid enforcement in IT industry
Posted by Gsurface
on March 15, 2012
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U.S. government agencies should be wary of bringing antitrust complaints against tech companies such as Google or Apple, because of the ever-changing nature of the industry, some antitrust experts said Wednesday.
Computerworld News
Feds seize illegal sports-streaming sites
Posted by Gsurface
on February 3, 2012
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Just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, the federal agents announce they have seized and shuttered 307 Web sites that either live-streamed sports or sold fake NFL paraphernalia.
CNET News
Super Bowl Bust: Feds Grab 307 NFL Websites; $4.8M
Posted by Gsurface
on February 2, 2012
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coondoggie writes “Speaking at a National Football League press conference ahead of this weekend’s Super Bowl, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said special agents this week seized a total of 307 websites and snatched up 42,692 items of phony Super Bowl-related memorabilia along with other counterfeit items for a total take of more than $ 4.8 million – up from $ 3.72 million last year.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds shut down file-sharing website Megaupload.com
Posted by Gsurface
on January 19, 2012
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Feds Return Mistakenly Seized Domain
Posted by Gsurface
on December 8, 2011
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bs0d3 writes “Just over a year ago, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized dozens of domain names as part of Operation in Our Sites. Among them was DaJaz1.com, a site from which Special Agent Andrew Reynolds said he’d downloaded pirated music. But there was a problem. Persistent reports suggested that the songs had been legally provided to the site by record labels for the specific purposes of distribution to fans, a point later raised by Senator Ron Wyden. One ‘leak’ even came from a boss at a major music label. Today, a year later, their domain was returned. The reason was because there was no probable cause and the site had never actually broken any laws or warranted a seizure. They are back in business and are displaying an anti-censorship, anti-PROTECT IP, and anti-SOPA banner on their website.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds launch cloud security standards program
Posted by Gsurface
on December 8, 2011
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Federal agencies will soon have a government-wide security standard for assessing, authorizing and monitoring cloud products and services.
Computerworld News
Feds deny hacking caused Illinois water pump failure
Posted by Gsurface
on November 23, 2011
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Did a hacker or group of hackers, possibly in Russia, manage to physically destroy a water pump in Springfield, Illinois? That was the word last week, when reports spread that hackers had managed to take control of the water plant’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (or SCADA), which gave them the ability to repeatedly turn the pump on and off and eventually burn it out. Now, however, both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security say that their investigations have found no evidence of hacking or malicious activity, and that earlier reports were based on “raw, unconfirmed data.” As you might expect, that explanation isn’t quite being accepted by everyone, including Joe Weiss, the security researcher who first reported the incident. You can find his comments on Wired’s Threat Level blog linked below.
Feds deny hacking caused Illinois water pump failure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Engadget
Feds Helped Coordinate Occupy X Crackdowns
Posted by Gsurface
on November 16, 2011
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Lawrence_Bird writes “The Feds helped break up the Occupy protests by providing advice and assistance from the FBI and DHS. From the article: ‘Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said on Monday that her city and others across the country coordinated their crackdowns of Occupy Wall Street camps. Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” In related conspiracy news, apcullen wrote in with a story by Time Magazine guest columnist Naomi Wolf who claims: “Instead of imminent safety issues, the timing of the crackdown was far more likely to do with the fact that the Occupy movement was planning something media-savvy at last: a ‘carnival’ on Wall Street on Thursday in which protesters would telegenically tell their individual stories of hardship, job loss and disenfranchisement. It is that event that posed a ‘safety risk’ — to the efforts of Wall Street and the Bloomberg administration to manage the narrative.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds lead biggest botnet takedown ever, end massive clickjack fraud
Posted by Gsurface
on November 10, 2011
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The botnet takedown announced Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice was the biggest in history, according to a security company.
Computerworld News
Did Feds’ Use of Fake Cell Tower Constitute a Search?
Posted by Gsurface
on November 5, 2011
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hessian writes with this story in Wired: “Federal authorities used a fake Verizon cellphone tower to zero in on a suspect’s wireless card, and say they were perfectly within their rights to do so, even without a warrant. But the feds don’t seem to want that legal logic challenged in court by the alleged identity thief they nabbed using the spoofing device, known generically as a stingray. So the government is telling a court for the first time that spoofing a legitimate wireless tower in order to conduct surveillance could be considered a search under the Fourth Amendment in this particular case, and that its use was legal, thanks to a court order and warrant that investigators used to get similar location data from Verizon’s own towers.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds Take USAjobs.gov Back From Monster, Performance Tanks
Posted by Gsurface
on October 22, 2011
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dcblogs writes “Complaints about the performance of USAjobs.gov, the government’s central website for job applicants, are piling up after the U.S. took control this month of the site from Monster.com. The government’s official Facebook page has seen nothing but negative comments from users about lag time, search engine failures, and other problems since the U.S. Office of Personnel Management built a new site. The government employs more than 2.6 million people. Linda Rix, the co-CEO of Avue Technologies Corp., a federal contractor who has tested the site, said this about the federal effort: ‘They are a personnel management agency, they are not a technology company, and this clearly demonstrates that they don’t have the technology skills to be able to do this.’” They’re working it, though — one of their recent Facebook updates says “Quick update: The three new blade servers have increased our capacity and the system is running smoothly.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds expand data center closing goal
Posted by Gsurface
on October 7, 2011
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About 30% of the federal government’s IT spending is being used to support data center infrastructure and the U.S. hopes to save billions down the road as it moves to consolidate its data centers.
Computerworld News
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