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WikiLeaks continued its ongoing release of documents from the CIA Friday with a collection of files detailing the agency’s ability to obscure its activities and make it difficult for investigators to attribute the origins of attacks and hacking.The latest release from what WikiLeaks calls Vault 7 is titled “ Marble ” and contains documentation of files that are purportedly part of the CIA Core Library of malware code. WikiLeaks describes Marble as part of the CIA’s “anti-forensics approach.” The name “Marble” refers to a specific algorithm that scrambles and unscrambles data.Marble is one of the more technical releases that WikiLeaks...

WASHINGTON - Chinese spies used code first developed by the U.S. National Security Agency to support their hacking operations, Israeli researchers said on Monday, another indication of how malicious software developed by governments can boomerang against their creators. Tel Aviv-based Check Point Software Technologies issued a report noting that some features in a piece of China-linked malware it dubs “Jian” were so similar they could only have been stolen from some of the National Security Agency break-in tools leaked to the internet in 2017. Yaniv Balmas, Checkpoint’s head of research, called Jian “kind of a copycat, a Chinese replica.” The...

At least a dozen Republican Senators reportedly walked out of the Senate impeachment trial on Thursday, after lead House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tried to argue that years of Trump rallies were incitement to violence.National Review reporter John McCormack reported several Republican Senators left the chamber during part of Raskin’s presentation, and missed the subsequent argument of Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who argued that Trump was a future danger.Inside the Senate chamber:Trump’s 2016 rivals Rubio, Cruz, and Graham watched intently as video documented Trump’s 2015-2020 remarks making light of or justifying political violence.Graham, Rubio, and Cruz then left...

The solution to what’s known as the 340 Cipher, one of the most vexing mysteries of the Zodiac Killer’s murderous saga, has been found by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia and Belgium. The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived 51 years ago. Investigators hoped the Zodiac, who killed five people in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, would reveal his name in one of his many ciphers, but there is no such name in the 340. According to code-breaking expert David...

In a paper published on the Web today, a group of Princeton computer scientists said they created demonstration vote-stealing software that can be installed within a minute on a common electronic voting machine. The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected. "We have created and analyzed the code in the spirit of helping to guide public officials so that they can make wise decisions about how to secure elections," said Edward Felten, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/ the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, a new center http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S13/34/75A49/index.xml at Princeton University that addresses crucial issues at the intersection of society...

Ali Nouri Zadeh, Asharq Alawsat: Eight fundamentalist Islamist organizations have received large sums of money in the last month from the Iranian intelligence services, as part of a project to strike U.S military and economic installations across the Middle East Asharq Al-Awsat has learned. The plan, which also includes the carrying out of suicide operations targeting US and British interests in the region, as well as their Arab and Muslim allies, in case Iran is attacked, was drawn up by a number of experts guerilla warfare and terrorist operations, and was revealed by a senior source in the Iranian armed...

Now that the Mueller report is out, effectively exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the Trump administration has begun investigations as to the origins of the phony Steele dossier and the illegal surveillance of his campaign. It's a trail that's unlikely to lead anywhere but to the office of embittered President Obama, and independent reporter Nicholas Ballasy got a chance to ask the Obama administration's former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, whether he thought this investigation would eventually lead. His response was about what you might expect — nowhere Obama...

ully self-driving vehicles that can go where they please and operate anywhere regulators allow them to do so are a tricky thing to think about, for three reasons. First of all, the technology isn’t here yet. It’s hard to believe in it until it exists, and it’s hard to know how long until it is truly available. Secondly, as a person who drives a Tesla Model 3 with the Full Self-Driving package, I see a handful of edge cases just in my measly amount of driving that seem tricky and hard to resolve. Sometimes the problem is confusing lines at...

The “Clinton Body Count” is an urban legend where people claim that the Clintons have their enemies or associates who “know too much” murdered, but they make it look like a suicide. The term comes from a rather long list of friends, enemies, and associates of the Clintons who have been found dead from “apparent suicide.” If you go on Twitter the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount is very active and filled with all sorts of juicy tidbits and theories. While the #ClintonBodyCount is mostly a funny joke, like with all “jokes” there’s truth in it…why do so many of Clintons “associates” die?...

Lots of incriminating stuff. Here's a good tweet explaining what's in there: https://twitter.com/AnonymousAda/status/1252708336514076672

The app used to report early results in Iowa's Democratic Presidential primary caucus was rudimentary in many ways, according to analyses by multiple Android app development experts and cybersecurity professionals who decompiled and studied the app after it was obtained by Motherboard. The app, called IowaReporterApp and developed by a company called Shadow Inc., malfunctioned during the caucus, causing mass chaos and delaying the public reporting of results until Tuesday evening. The app was designed to rapidly report early results, not tabulate final vote counts. That means its failure will not result in the election result being altered. But, until...

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said. A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center. The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi...

Programmers have pride with good reason. No one else has the power to reach into a database and change reality. The more the world relies on computers to define how the world works, the more powerful programmers become.Alas, pride goeth before the fall. The power we share is very real, but it’s far from absolute and it’s often hollow. In fact, it may always be hollow because there is no perfect piece of code. Sometimes we cross our fingers and set limits because computers make mistakes. Computers too can be fallible, which we all know from too much firsthand experience....

Justice Department documents released on Friday confirm that the DOJ attorney known as Robert Mueller’s “pit bull” arranged a meeting with journalists in April 2017 to discuss an investigation into Paul Manafort.The documents show that Andrew Weissmann arranged a meeting with DOJ and FBI officials and four Associated Press reporters on April 11, 2017, just over a month before Mueller was appointed special counsel.Manafort’s lawyers obtained the documents on June 29 and revealed them in a briefing filed in federal court in Virginia. The attorneys are pushing for a hearing into what they say are possible leaks of secret grand...

A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the Voynich manuscript. Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for over a century, it took Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document. In his peer-reviewed paper, The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained, published in the journal Romance Studies, Cheshire describes how he successfully deciphered the manuscript's...

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued to defend herself against claims promoted by Donald Trump, Jr. and others that she changes her accent to pander to minority audiences. In a string of Saturday evening tweets, the first-term Democrat wrote that her habit of "code-switching" was informed by years of navigating professional and social environments as a woman of color. "Next time you‘re told straight hair is 'unprofessional' and that speaking like your parents do is 'uneducated,' then you can complain about code-switching," she wrote, referring to the practice of changing speech patterns based on environment. "Code-switching is a tool communities...

UPDATE: FEBRUARY 5, 2019After Threat of Prosecution, Free Speech Advocates Seek Restraining Order Against New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal in Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit TRENTON, N.J. (February 5, 2019) — Today, attorneys for six advocacy organizations and one individual, Firearms Policy Coalition founder Brandon Combs, filed a new lawsuit and a motion seeking a restraining order and preliminary injunction against New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. The case was filed just days after Grewal’s Office of the Attorney General sent a threat of prosecution to Cloudflare, a major Internet services company headquartered in San Francisco, about www.CodeIsFreeSpeech.com. A copy of...

A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter. The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time. The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing. A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News...

Newly revealed e-mails show that former Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) deputy director Andrew McCabe was keenly aware of CNN’s internal understanding of a secret briefing about the infamous Steele dossier, days before CNN published any stories on the matter. The e-mails, which were obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), also reveal that top officials used coded language to refer to the salacious and unverified allegations made by Steele. Former FBI director James Comey briefed then-President-Elect Donald Trump on January 6, 2017, on at least one unproven allegation contained in Steele’s dossier, which was jointly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign...

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