geekosystem

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier today, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that the agency uses unmanned drones to conduct surveillance in the United States. The admission came in response to questioning from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). According to Mueller, drones are used by the FBI to carry out domestic surveillance missions "in a very, very minimal way, and seldom.”

Yesterday, when it became clear that the National Security Agency was once again gathering the phone records of millions of American citizens without warrants or cause, it seemed like...oh, let's be politic and call it "an overstep." Turns out, we didn't even know what an overstep was, as it has now become clear that the NSA's phone record gathering program is far from the only questionable activity the NSA has its fingers in. Take for example the PRISM program, which collects data on Internet users -- including emails, file transfer records, and voice and video chats -- by tapping directly into the servers of Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, just to name a few.

Considering the wide variety of products spam email acts as a barker for, you might assume that there are an equally diverse range of individuals, or at least programs, trying to sell you important goods like mirrors, plastic sheers, and of course medications for male stamina. (Also, wow, am I ever troubled by what my spam folder seems to think of me.) According to a recent look at the numbers, though, that's not the case. In fact, the study from the University of Twente suggests that just 20 of the more than 42,000 Internet service providers worldwide are responsible for nearly half of the emails that you get looking to sell you penis enlargement pills and various other high quality goods and services.

If you're one of those folks who is always on the lookout for the latest and greatest new advance in home security technology, we've got you covered -- or at least, we know who does. Japanese security firm Secom is preparing to launch a new service that will let home and small business owners rent a quadcopter drone that the company claims will launch automatically in the event of a burglary, snapping pictures of the invaders and even capturing live video of them as the crime is in progress.

A new method of cracking passwords hashed with SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) made the relatively unsecured algorithm even less secure by greatly decreasing the time and computing power necessary to crack it. The news came out of the Passwords^12 conference in Oslo, Norway, which focused on password and PIN code security. It might be a good time to change your password, or more importantly change the way your passwords are stored.

There's good news for those of you who just can't get enough of airport security this holiday season -- now, you can build your own backscatter X-ray machine, just like the one that ensures you're not bringing anything unsafe like nail clippers or a lighter onto the airplane. It's a little more cumbersome than a pair of X-ray specs, but as the video demonstrates, it's a pretty effective tool for seeing through things. Considering it was built entirely with parts purchased off of eBay, it's a pretty serious feat of DIY engineering, and we doff our caps to inventor Ben Krasnow, who will no doubt be scanning friends and family as they come through the door for his holiday party. Anything to avoid the Christmas pat down, right?

Shopping for clothes can be, for some of us, a private affair. Some people will only shop with their closest friends, others prefer to do it alone. One thing is certain: Nobody wants to get caught and judged after finding that a pair of pants doesn't fit the way it should. It may concern you, then, to find out that certain retailers have begun employing a new type of camera to keep tabs on their customers, hidden behind the eye-sockets of mannequins.

Microsoft typically gets a bad rap from the security community. To be fair, the company's history hasn't exactly been full of reasons for folks to think that they're terribly secure, but perhaps that's all about to change. Kaspersky Lab, one of the major worldwide IT security companies, just released their IT Threat Evolution report for the third quarter, and Microsoft's managed to not be included at all in the top 10 products with vulnerabilities. Seriously.

Nuclear plant security is one of those things that pretty much everyone agrees on. In essence, it's probably a bad idea to let just anyone wander around a nuclear facility without proper clearance. Just wanting security to be without faults doesn't make it that way, unfortunately. After around 70 Greenpeace activists swarmed two nuclear plants in Sweden, six managed to avoid security overnight by hiding out on rooftops. In fact, plant owner Vattenfall claimed that all the activists had been detained and their security measures had worked.

Science has finally cracked the code of ancient gypsy magic, making it possible to unlock your cell phone with just a quick digital palm reading, rather than typing in a password. Engineers are still working out kinks in the program that will also inform you of the winning lottery numbers, where you'll meet the love of your life, and the exact time and circumstances of your demise, but for now the unlocking the phone thing seems pretty good.

Mac users are still reeling from the Flashback, the nasty OS X malware which illustrated painfully that even Apple users are vulnerable to attack. Now it seems that Apple is following that up with the embarrassing revelation that the latest update, Mac OS 10.7.3, exposes passwords for certain users. The scenario where this information is exposed is very specific, but it is nonetheless disquieting.

The combination of a username and password seems like an inextricable part of using a secured computer. Sure, you can use biometrics, but username and password just seems like the most natural way to identify and authorize users without the bulk of extra, expensive, and specialized equipment. That being the case, it has become second nature to most of us, but is it really natural at all? Memorizing passwords, especially "strong" ones, involves remembering long, arbitrary strings of seemingly random numbers and characters, hardly natural. That's why DARPA has undertaken an initiative to eliminate passwords altogether and instead identify users in the background, as they work, by paying very close attention to the idiosyncratic way they type.

In response to the TSA confiscating a "cupcake in a jar," the Silver Spoon Bakery in Rhode Island decided that they could make the world a better, sweeter place with their TSA compliant cupcake. In addition to looking delicious, the cupcake is guaranteed (by the bakery, not the government) to pass swiftly through security checkpoints. Its secret? It contains exactly three ounces of icing, which the TSA classifies as a gel, and it comes in its own clear baggy.

Apple caters to an odd audience, the super techy and the complete opposite. Due to their mainstream resurgence, Apple's generally tight grip on their products, as well as their design strategy to simplify everything, Apple product users are somewhat seen as the casual audience. With that, one may assume the "casual audience" is either unaware, or doesn't quite care about, their phone's security. Well, Lookout Mobile Security and Column Five Media are here to tell us that isn't the case, and that iPhone users care about security too, 93 percent of them, in fact. Of course, one could flip that around and instead of declaring the iPhone audience aware of security issues, one could say iPhone owners are worried about security issues, changing a security conscious mindset to a commentary on a device's actual security. However secure iPhones actually are, the infographic below the break teaching you about iPhone security won't steal your credit card information.

In recent updates to some of its android devices, HTC enabled some pretty exhaustive data-logging. The purpose was likely to collect information for statistics or helping users troubleshoot. Now, if you're going to collect this sort of data, you're going to want to keep it locked up considering that users generally don't respond well to their data being leaked. Unfortunately, that's not the case with these new updates. In fact, the data -- all of it -- is pretty trivial for any app to collect.

Trevor Eckhart was the first to find the warning signs, after which he teamed up with Justin Case and Artem Russakovskii of Android Police to try and get to the bottom of the situation. It seems that the situation can be adequately summed up this way: Any app can get information like encoded texts, limited location history, and phone numbers from the call log if it is just given permission to access the Internet.