AT&T will offer the 16GB Samsung Galaxy S4 for $200 and the 32GB S4 for $250. It can be pre-ordered from the AT&T website on April 16, 2013.

Alleged Staples document showing Samsung Galaxy S4 release dates and details.

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New ICBM models aren’t like iPhones; you don’t just take them out of the box and expect them to function properly. They have to be rigorously, painstakingly tested. Markus Schiller, an expert in the North Korean military, told Global Security Newswire that it was “totally impossible” for the KN-08 to be operational without tests. Even countries that have successfully built and launched ICMBs before, which North Korea has not, wouldn’t expect a new model to work perfectly on the first try. The KN-08 was just unveiled last April in a military parade in Pyongyang and has never been test-launched. Analysts aren’t even sure that it’s real.

The most bullish analysis of the KN-08′s potential threat  this week, published in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, speculated that North Korea had only moved them to the coast so that, in the event of a test launch, they would be less likely to fall onto North Korean soil.

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But in so doing, because the word “six” is shorter than “five,” and word and line breaks being what they are, everything thereafter shifts up a little, and the thing that previously appeared at the top of page six now appears at the bottom of page five.

Without changing other aspects of the document, I am unable to correctly reference the thing being referenced.

I shut my laptop, find a seat on the floor in the corner of the room, focus on an indistinct point on the opposite wall while hugging my legs, and rock backwards and forwards as tears stream down my face.

(Original source plus some grammatical changes of my own)

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The U.S. Secret Service is looking into claims that this unknown person has hacked PriceWaterhouseCooper (PWC) to obtained the tax returns of the presidential nominee and the threats to release them. The agency is still investigating but has given no comment yet.

The claim was made on a PasteBin post and details how copies were sent and how they can be verified. In short, it reads that a team gained access to the third floor of a PWC office in Tennessee, went downstairs to the second floor, and throughout the night managed to make copies (paper and digital) of Romney’s 1040 tax returns. Copies of the tax returns were distributed on flash drives to Republican and Democratic county leaders as well as to the PWC office.

Yesterday, another PasteBin post indicates that news outlets will be given encrypted copies of the tax returns. If Romney does not pay the $1 million dollars (to be transferred into a BitCoin account), the key will be made public on September 28. Similarly, for the immediate release of the encryption key, another BitCoin account has been setup for anyone else to contribute a $1 million equivalent.

PricewaterhouseCoopers released a statement saying it had not found evidence of a system breach. “We are aware of the allegations that have been made regarding improper access to our systems,” the statement said. “We are working closely with the United States Secret Service, and at this time there is no evidence that our systems have been compromised or that there was any unauthorized access to the data in question.”

Romney’s campaign headquarters in Fairfax, Va., did not respond to a request for comment.

Both the Democratic and Republican party offices in Williamson County where the PWC office is located received packages late last week with thumb drives, but it is unknown what was on the storage devices.  A package containing a sheet of paper with the hackers’ message and a thumb drive arrived at the offices of the Williamson County Democratic Party in Franklin, Tennessee, last Thursday afternoon or early evening, Peter Burr, chairman of the county Democratic Party, told CNET today.

“I opened it and found inside a piece of paper folded into quarters and a black Cruzer 4 gig thumb drive,” Burr said. He said he handed over the package, letter and thumb drive to the Secret Service without making any copies or looking to see what was on the thumb drive.  “Unfortunately, I have nothing in the way of evidence that I can give you other than a representation of what the letter said,” he added. “We almost threw the letter away. We passed it around and it drew some laughs.”

Jean Barwick, executive director of the Williamson County Republican party, similarly described the package and contents that workers in her office found on the ground outside the front door last Friday morning.  “It didn’t look credible,” she said, explaining why she didn’t report it to authorities until today. “It was handwritten with magic marker.”

Burr also said he received a phone call from a Secret Service agent on Wednesday morning after county GOP officials reported their drive to the authorities. But he lost his chance to have a look when he handed over the documents.

“I asked them if they would be able to get back to us and let us know if anything came of it from their end and they said ‘no,’” he said.

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CMAS Live in DC: 7:35 PM 7/18/12

CMAS allows public safety authorities to use FEMA’s IPAWS Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS-OPEN) to send geographically targeted, text-like Wireless Emergency Alerts to the public. WEAs will relay Presidential, AMBER, and Imminent Threat alerts to mobile phones using cell broadcast technology that will not get backlogged during times of emergency when wireless voice and data services are highly congested.

Interestingly, DC is not an approved Alerting Authority yet so the fact that I saw this message yesterday is unexpected. (Update: Page taken down. Copy of Google Web Cache of previously referenced page here.) Screenshots from my girlfriend‘s phone are shown. It came in yesterday at 5 PM while a block from the Farragut North Metro station. The phone is a Motorola Droid Pro on Verizon. The message was regarding a flash flood warning to be in effect until 7 PM.

There are three different kinds of alerts one can receive:

1. Presidential Alerts – Alerts issued by the President or a designee
2. Imminent Threat Alerts – Alerts that include severe man-made or natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc., where an imminent threat to life or property exists
3. AMBER Alerts – Alerts that meet the U.S. Department of Justice’s criteria to help law enforcement search for and locate an abducted child

National Weather Service Flash Flood Warning

There’s actually been quite a bit of back-end work necessary to get this going. Carriers had to agree to upgrade their systems so they can pass along the messages; those that did not — usually smaller carriers where the cost would be prohibitive — are required to notify their customers that they won’t get them. Carriers cannot opt out of sending the Presidential broadcasts though.

There has been some controversy over the usefulness of CMAS. The 90 character limit is barely more than half of a Twitter message (140 characters) or SMS text message (160 characters), so the specificity of the warning and suggested course of action is likely to be limited. Ultimately, this limitation is a result of two factors: first, the need to support all phones and second, the priority of SMS-style messages.

To support all phones and not just smartphones (where data plans and fast data speeds would allow for more information to be conveyed), the technology has to utilize the lowest common denominator: text messaging. Every phone made in the past decade, no matter how basic, has text messaging capability. Not every phone has a data connection or the software necessary to display longer messages.

The original reason for the character cap on SMS was to limit its length to the size of a potentially unused network packet that gets sent back and forth between phones and towers. While technically not an SMS/”text message,” the CMAS alert follows the same principle. In a time of crisis, that packet size will be significantly easier to transmit during decreased capacity (if some towers go offline) and increased load (everyone is calling/texting/emailing friends and family) and receive increased priority in transmission. For more information, see this Cell Broadcast article. (Ironically, for years now Cell Broadcast has been featured rather prominently on my phone when I insert a European SIM card while traveling abroad.)

Different alert from a coworker’s phone the next day

Ultimately, despite the limitations, it is arguably better to have some warning and direction rather than none at all. The service is still rather nascent in the United States and has lots of room to improve (e.g. sending multiple pages of messages). Moreover, completing initial development of the system getting the agreements complete is half the battle. From here, CMAS can improve on itself to provide better warnings to the public and complement the Emergency Alert System as well as other services in notifying the public of important announcements.

Lastly, want to make sure your new phone is CMAS ready? Check for this label:

Update #1 7/20/12 3:05 PM: The CMAS website must have gotten a lot of hits after Wednesday, specifically to the page that says DC is not an approved publishing authority. According to this updated page, it now is.

Update #2 7/20/12 3:25 PM: It was pointed out that while the message was received in DC, the National Weather Service (NWS) was actually the publisher and they have publishing authority to the entire nation. Thus, DC’s previously in-process publishing authority would be a non-issue for the messages shown above.

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1. Click “About” on your profile and scroll down to your email address. Click “Edit” to change them.
2. Click on the circle next to your Facebook email address and change its setting to “Hidden From Timeline”.
3. Click on the circle next to your other email addresses and change their settings to “Shown On Timeline”.
4. Click the Save button at the bottom of the Edit popup (Don’t forget this step).

Facebook’s automatic email change on your profile (pre-Timeline profile)

I’m usually a big fan of Facebook and a defender of most of their unilateral actions. I can always rationalize it, “Hey guys, this is really in the best interests of everyone, you just don’t know it yet,” like a good parent would do or an interested developer (yeah, programmers are invested in their apps and can treat them like their kids). This move though? Seems like the corporate types called the shots on this and not the Zuckerberg brain trust.

Apparently this silent email migration has been going on since April.

After changing email settings (Timeline profile)

Facebook released its own email two years ago with some fanfare and then it was promptly forgotten. It was also a terrible implementation and nowhere close to the GMail killer people thought it would be. Every email/message is listed under one thread (anti-Gmail), Facebook tends to keep things walled off (unlike Google) which translates to poor data portability, and it’s the second most blocked site by employers so checking email at work is unlikely (no one’s going to block Google.com).

I understand where Facebook is coming from (cue rationalization). They want you to spend more of your time on the social network and to make it, as much as possible, the only site you visit on the web.  By monopolizing your time, their advertising dollars will come in much, much faster. Why go to Flickr or Picasa if your friends post all their photos on Facebook? Who needs Twitter when you have Facebook posts? And … Why bother with multiple separate email accounts if Facebook can being your single point of reading? Well sure, if you do it well that’s great.

Unfortunately, they’re pushing a half-baked product and forcing it on people rather than making it an opt-in (obviously, since the voluntary method didn’t work). That’s not a recipe for success. If they have made great strides in the product and had something to tout, that would be a completely different story. On the other hand, look at Google’s Gmail — it was engineered to almost perfection and people flock to it because they want to.

In light of their public IPO recently, things like corporate revenue, quarterly profits, and the bottom-line are becoming more important. In this case, there is a tradeoff between revenue and user satisfaction; when the latter starts to dip, so will the former. Unfortunately, what Facebook just did is more likely to push people away rather than pull them in. I support many of Facebook’s decisions but, to date, this seems like the least planned and most poorly executed move they’ve done.

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To cover themselves, social networking sites have already been removing sex offenders from their sites for years but this law goes the extra step of criminalizing it. Violators of the new law could face imprisonment with hard labor for a term between two and 10 years without parole and a fine up to $1,000. A second conviction carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment with hard labor for a term between five and 20 years without parole and a fine up to $3,000.

This brings up the more fundamental issue of whether a sex offender registry is even a good idea. Some would argue about only the small fraction of offenders who are actually sexual predators whereas the rest are minor offenders (e.g. “romeo and juliet” high school kids). However, the core of the problem with the registry is that it’s simply bad policy the way it is implemented. At the core is that one category of crimes has been singled out for a registry whereas no other criminal has the same sort of publicity via public notice.

If there is to be a registry for criminal acts, all criminals, no matter how minor, must be compelled to be listed. The alternative creates policy and economic distortions in its maintenance and execution. As that famous Georgia law has done:

Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool … One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

There’s other absurdities with the registry that people rarely stop to think about. Having a sex offender in a neighborhood lowers  real estate value. An axe-murdering neighbor, on the other hand, would not — he (or she) isn’t publicly listed. Nor is the chronic DUI violator. Or if there was a man who gained sexual pleasure from stabbing women; the serial stabber isn’t a sexual predator. Who is to say living to a bank robber is any better if he decides to transition to a new career of home invasion and burglary.

The laws have also been shown ineffective at preventing crime. There’s no evidence the registry has had any impact and the residency requirements are a small obstacle to a determined predator. For the honest, hard-working people trying to make it through life and their families, it causes undue obstacles and undue stress on their familial relationships.

While it’s incredibly hard to spend political capital on something this politically popular, a modest start to rectifying the current problems with this policy would be to remove juvenile offenders, minor/non-violent offenders, and blanket residence/employment restrictions should be lifted. As Human Rights Watch also urges the US, the restrictions should be individually assessed and tailored by probation/parole officers — and reevaluated as necessary. If offenders are reviewed and deemed to be rehabilitated or too old to reoffend, they should be removed from the registry.

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Every day, rival nations, criminal syndicates and maybe even terrorists probe for weaknesses in our most critical computer networks, seeking to steal data, money, and identities. Even more dangerous is their potential to plant malicious code in industrial control systems that would allow them to seize control of a region’s electric grid, crash stock markets, or contaminate water supply with the touch of a key from a world away.

It feels like we’re back to the days before September 11, 2001. The system is blinking red. Yet, we are failing to connect the dots–again.

In a letter last year to Senate leadership, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Defense Secretary William Perry, along with six of our nation’s premier security experts, spanning Democratic and Republican Administrations, issued a stark warning: “[The] constant barrage of cyber assaults has inflicted severe damage to our national and economic security, as well as to the privacy of individual citizens. The threat is only going to get worse. Inaction is not an acceptable option.”

We agree it is time to take action. To counter these threats, we have introduced the comprehensive, bipartisan Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (PDF). Our bill has several key provisions.

First, it ensures that the systems that control our most critical infrastructure are secured. These are the systems that if breached or manipulated could reasonably lead to mass casualties, evacuations of major population centers, the collapse of financial markets, or degradation of our national security. A competing bill recently introduced in the Senate contains no provisions whatsoever to protect critical infrastructure. That is a major omission.

After identifying these precise systems, the Department of Homeland Security would then work with private-sector owners of these vital systems to develop cybersecurity performance requirements based on risk assessments of those particular industries. Covered entities must meet these performance requirements for specific systems and assets, not for their entire company.

Owners would have the flexibility to meet those performance requirements with whatever cybersecurity measures they choose as long as it achieves the required level of security. DHS will not be picking technological winners and losers, and there is nothing in this bill that would stifle innovation. Leading global information companies have even stated that that this legislation “includes a number of tools that will enhance the nation’s cybersecurity, without interfering with the innovation and development processes of the American IT industry.”

And if a company already has security levels that meet the requirements, it will be exempt, and entities already adequately regulated will receive waivers.

Data sharing between feds, private sector
This bill also establishes mechanisms for information sharing between the private sector and the federal government – and among private sector companies. This is important — computer security experts need to be able to compare notes in order to protect us against the ever-evolving threat. But the bill also creates security measures and oversight to protect privacy and preserve civil liberties.

We have worked hard to address the concerns of privacy and civil liberties advocates and believe our approach offers some of the strongest protections of any proposal being discussed in Congress.

Besides securing critical infrastructure, this bill does several other important things: It provides for a cybersecurity research and development program to further strengthen our computer defenses; improves the security of the federal government’s computer networks by moving to a system of continuous monitoring and “red-teaming” exercises to test for vulnerabilities, and strengthens the federal cybersecurity workforce by making sure we can offer competitive salaries to recruit and retain some of the best minds in the business.

This bipartisan bill has been at least three years in the making, with some 20 hearings held across seven different Senate committees, including at least 13 in our committees: the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Commerce Science and Transportation Committee, and the Select Intelligence Committee. Homeland Security and Commerce each passed comprehensive cybersecurity bills in the last Congress. We have reached out to industry, academics, and civil liberties, privacy, and security experts for advice. Hundreds of changes have been made to this bill as a result of their input.

There is a myth that earlier versions of this bill contains a “kill switch” that would allow the president to seize control of the Internet. There is nothing remotely like that in this bill.

There is also nothing in this bill that touches on the balance between intellectual property protections and free speech that inflamed public opinion over the proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act,” or the “Protect IP Act.” This legislation will not regulate the design or architecture of the Internet. This bill is focused on protecting our most critical infrastructure systems and assets–those that keep the water flowing, the power on, and the trains running.

September 11 reinforced the need to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm. Now we must apply those lessons to cybersecurity. If we fail to act, we only increase the likelihood that we will have to cope with the aftermath of a massive cyber attack.”

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Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood Lobbying

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