Yes, its true. The NSA asked and is currently receiving telephone call details on nearly every citizen in the US. These aren't international calls, these are calls from someone in the US to someone else in the US. Call details aren't the actual content of the calls. It is things like which number called which, what time the call was made, and how long the call was. Over 200 million people are being track *right now* and its been happening since just after 9/11.

There was no warrant, no authorization by the secret FISA court. The NSA just asked Version, SBC, AT&T, BellSouth and the like to be a patriot and turn the data over. What do those companies have to say for themselves now?

AT&T: "We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law."

BellSouth: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

Verizon: "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

The only major company who didn't comply was Qwest. They wanted some kind of ruling from the FISA count, which normally handles these things...

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events

When it it become OK for the government to spy on its people?

USATODAY: NSA tracking nearly every *domestic* phone call in the US

Decius wrote:
I just received fairly reliable word that the Georgia Private Investigator Felony Statute has been vetoed by the Governor. Unfortunately I don't have a press link on that, so if anyone out there has a secondary source they can confirm this through, that would be helpful, but it seems like the Governor has heard the message from the technology community and understood the ramifications of this law. Thank you to everyone who communicated with them!

Confirmed:

The existing definition of “private detective business,” continued in this bill, in conjunction with the applicable exemptions in the law, fails to exclude from the private investigator licensing requirement many professions that collect information or may be called as expert witnesses in court proceedings. To expand the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony without revision of the existing definitions in the law could result in unintended consequences; I therefore VETO HB1259.

Hell Yeah! Go Tom and his 1337 gubernatorial skillz

RE: HB 1259 Vetoed!

Ran into a file on my laptop with some funny quotes from Shmoocon this past January:

"Boobs are always relevant"
-Rattle

"That is the most manly drink I've ever seen you drink"
-Decius

"Into freaky shit. I mean, I'm asian and it was freaky to me!"
-timball

"Are you interested in making lots of money?"
"Sure, Don't we all?"
-Abaddon to some Amway drone

"I just want to smack these people and say 'It's a freaking pyramid schema!'"
-Acidus

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran's nuclear program, said that Iranian scientists had succeeded in enriching uranium to a concentration of 3.5 percent.

There is a lot of scary talk going on today, so I did some digging and I finally found a number: Iran has used centrifuges to enrich Uranium Hexfloride gas to 3.5%. Spinning the gas in centrifuges is the most common technique for enriching uranium and was the appoarch used at Oak Ridge TN in the 1940s to create the first bombs. It is a slow and crude method, as uranium hexfloride is very corrosive and dangerous, and is not really used by the US or western nations anymore.

According to Wikipedia:

-85% enriched is considered "weapons grade" and is the minimum purity of the uranium in the US's arsenal.
-20% will create a usable bomb
-3% to 5% is what a light weight nuclear reactor will use. This is most common reactor and what Iran claims it wants to build.
-While the uranium could be placed in a dirty bomb, this would not be the best use. Since dirty bombs simply spread radioactive material, isotopes like Strontium-90 are more effective than Uranium-235

Update:
According to this history of nuclear weapons the average enrichment of the Little Boy nuclear weapon was 80%

Iran enriched Uranium to 3.5%

Hugh and Dave's Online Wines is not really a winestore. It's an application that demonstrates the concepts of web database applications, and is downloadable source code that you can use freely under this license. It pretends to give customers from around the world the opportunity to buy over 1000 wines that come from more than 300 wineries throughout Australia.

The case study website from O'Reilly'd tome on LAMP development. The book is enjoyable with a lovely chapter on securing web applications. Kind of ironic since it took about 45 seconds to find some XSS. Take a peak and see if you can't too.

O'Reilly's 'PHP and MySQL'

ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.

Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products

Want to learn Ruby? Here's a fun web app which lets you try it inside the browser

try ruby! (in your browser)

The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg (see BW Online, "Under 30, On the Cutting Edge"). But already, www.facebook.com has become the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. It racked up 5.5 billion page views during the month of February, the latest month for which complete data are available. That's more page views than the Web sites of Amazon.com (AMZN), Ask.com, or Walt Disney (DIS).

I know several other Memestreamers are working on some cool web apps. Seems that there is a lot of interest in the area. How misguided it may be is a different story, but it looks like there's a crazy money pile at the end of the rainbow.

$750 Million not enough for Facebook

You know that scene in Die Hard when Alan Rickman and crew finally gets the vault open? Remember how Fur Elise starts playing and the robbers see stacks and stacks of bearer bonds? This is totally like that.

Microsoft Opens IE Bug Database

Users will be able to report bugs found in the Web browser.

To post or view bugs, users must sign up for a Passport account on the Microsoft Connect Web site.

"Many customers have asked us about having a better way to enter IE bugs. It is asked, "Why don't you have Bugzilla like Firefox or other groups do?" said the Microsoft blog post.

Microsoft is only accepting bug posts for Internet Explorer 7 and future versions.

This is interesting. IE 7 is a 1.0 product in a 7.0 wrapper. There are going to be lots of bugs MS's QA department just didn't get to. More importantly, there will be more bugs than they can fix. There will be a backlog that is ripe for 0day.

This will make for interesting things in the Layer 7 world.

Microsoft Opens IE Bug Database!!!

Today, the Chairman FCC stated they support a so-called "tiered Internet" where telcos can change the priority of the packets for other peoples data depending on who pays them.

Martin told attendees at the TelecomNext show that telcos should be allowed to charge web sites whatever they want if those sites want adequate bandwidth.

He threw in his lot with AT&T, Verizon, and the other telcos, who are no doubt salivating at the prospect at charging whatever the market can bear.

If this sounds like extortion that because it is (See Meme). So who is this FCC Chairman and why is he favoring the telecoms?

Martin worked several years for Wiley, Rein, and Fielding, "Rated Top Telecommunications Lobbyists" according to an article on their website. The firm represents the Bells as well as Viacom/CBS, Gannett, Belo, Emmis, Gray Television, and Motorola.

Bush nominated the slimeball lobbyist to become the chairman of the FCC? Martin now chairs the organization he spent years lobbying? You can't get a better example of "Fox guarding the hen house." But all can't be lost! This little clip from the "tiered Internet" article was hopefuly:

[Martin] did throw a bone to those who favor so-called "net neutrality" -- the idea that telcos and other ISPs should not be allowed to limit services or bandwidth, or charge sites extra fees. He said that the FCC "has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations. He added that it had done so already, when it stepped in to stop an ISP from blocking Vonage VoIP service.

Wow, the FCC did seem to foster VOIP, and why would a guy in the telecom's pocket do that?... oh wait, Kevin Martin didn't do any such thing. Kevin Martin wasn't even AT the FCC when that decision was made. It was the previous chairman, Michael Powell.

Update - My mistake, Kevin Martin was at the FCC during the Vontage VOIP issue. He was serving as one of the five FCC Commissioners. I'm looking up now how he voted on that issue.

Kevin Martin can suck it.