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bcn | 1 year ago | on: French prosecutors say Telegram CEO freed from custody, will appear in court

Politico claims to have (exclusively) seen a French administrative document that narrows the focus to a single case where Telegram did not respond to legal request for user information. Copied from the article, here are a few key points:

> The arrest warrants were issued after the messaging platform gave "no answer" to an earlier judicial request to identify a Telegram user, according to the document, which was shared with POLITICO by a person directly involved in the case.

> Warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai, the platform’s co-founder, were issued on March 25 over charges including “complicity in possessing, distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group.”

> The warrants were issued after an undercover investigation into Telegram led by the cybercrime branch of the Paris prosecutor's office, during which a suspect discussed luring underaged girls into sending "self-produced child pornography," and then threatening to release it on social media.

> The suspect also told the investigators he had raped a young child, according to the document. Telegram did not respond to the French authorities’ request to identify the suspect.

> There’s no suggestion either of the Durov brothers were directly involved in any of the illegal activities identified by the investigation.

-https://www.politico.eu/article/exclusive-telegram-ceo-broth...

bcn | 1 year ago | on: Demand for seed-oil-free foods is growing

The claim that oils rich in linoleic acid (e.g. seed oils) increase inflammation was looked at in, "a systematic review of randomized controlled trials that permitted the assessment of dietary LA (linoleic acid) on biologic markers of chronic inflammation among healthy noninfant populations was conducted to examine this concern."...

"We conclude that virtually no evidence is available from randomized, controlled intervention studies among healthy, noninfant human beings to show that addition of LA to the diet increases the concentration of inflammatory markers"

see: Effect of dietary linoleic acid on markers of inflammation in healthy persons: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22889633/

bcn | 10 years ago | on: Encryption “would not have helped” at OPM, says DHS official

A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"

bcn | 11 years ago | on: Offer HN: Free Domains

These coupons expire (if not used) in less than ~6 hours and there are still a few un-used ones:

1 .XYZ 1 .EU

The following were claimed but as of yet not used. If they are not used in the next 2-3 hours, I will pass them on to the anyone else who will make sure to use them before the deadline later today.

1 .EU 1 .XYZ 1 50% OFF .SURF,.BEER or .VODKA

bcn | 11 years ago | on: Offer HN: Free Domains

The .com, .me and 1 .xyz have been sent.

1 .xyz, 1 .eu and the 50% off are left.

bcn | 12 years ago | on: Important Customer Security Announcement

More details from Brian Krebs' blog post - http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/adobe-to-announce-source-...

  "KrebsOnSecurity first became aware of the source code leak roughly one week ago...with fellow researcher Alex Holden...discovered a massive 40 GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet and Kroll."

  "The hacking team’s server contained huge repositories of uncompiled and compiled code that appeared to be source code for ColdFusion and Adobe Acrobat."

bcn | 12 years ago | on: Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light

Here is the abstract (all I could find) of this paper:

  Memories can be unreliable. We created a false memory in mice by optogenetically manipulating memory engram–bearing cells in the hippocampus. Dentate gyrus (DG) or CA1 neurons activated by exposure to a particular context were labeled with channelrhodopsin-2. These neurons were later optically reactivated during fear conditioning in a different context. The DG experimental group showed increased freezing in the original context, in which a foot shock was never delivered. The recall of this false memory was context-specific, activated similar downstream regions engaged during natural fear memory recall, and was also capable of driving an active fear response. Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.
- from https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387

The Ars article also has a good link to a backgrounder on optogenetics: http://f1000.com/prime/reports/b/3/11/

bcn | 12 years ago | on: In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

Here's a zinger:

The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court’s opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of “metadata” — facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations — does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications.

This concept is rooted partly in the “special needs” provision the court has embraced. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data,” a third official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing.”

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