Def Con, one of the world’s largest security conventions, served as a laboratory for breaking into voting machines on Friday, extending its efforts to identify potential security flaws in technology that may be used in the November U.S. elections.

Hackers will continue to probe the systems over the weekend in a bid to discover new vulnerabilities, which could be turned over to voting machine makers to fix.

The three-day Las Vegas-based “Voting Village” also aimed to expose security issues in digital poll books and memory-card readers.

“We see a lot of value in doing things like this. We think it’s important,” said Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary of cybersecurity and communications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in an interview.

“The idea is, when we find things here, how do we connect them with the actual vendors and make sure that we are closing this loop back to a coordinated vulnerability disclosure process.”

Def Con held its first voting village last year after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded the Russian government used hacking in its attempt to support Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy for president. Moscow has denied the allegations.

Organizers have returned ahead of the November elections, in which Democrats hope to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Trump’s national security team last week warned that Russia had launched “pervasive” efforts to interfere in the elections.

“These vulnerabilities that will be identified over the course of the next three days would, in an actual election, cause mass chaos,” said Jake Braun, one of the village’s organizers. “They need to be identified and addressed, regardless of the environment in which they are found.”

Participants will have a chance to hack into more than five types of voting machines from manufacturers including Elections Systems & Software and Dominion Voting.

Last year a Danish researcher figured out how to take control of a touchscreen voting system used through 2014 in a remote hack that organizers said could work from up to 1,000 feet away.

A group representing U.S. secretaries of state lauded the goal of bolstering election security, but warned that the findings might be skewed.

“It utilizes a pseudo environment which in no way replicates state election systems, networks or physical security,” the National Association of Secretaries of State said in a statement.

Verified Voting, an advocacy group that helped organise the hacking village, said that some of the voting machine models being tested are still used to tally votes across the United States.

One system, the Dominion Premier/Diebold AccuVote TSx system, is used in 20 states and 23,784 precincts, according to Verified Voting.

Users who publish content freely available on the Internet should get consent from the person behind it, Europe’s top court ruled on Tuesday in a boost to the bloc’s creative industries.

Regulators say they lose out because illegal uploads of works on big online platforms such as Google’s YouTube and Vivendi’s video-sharing site Dailymotion deny publishers, broadcasters and artists of revenues.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruling came after a secondary school student in Germany downloaded a photograph of Cordoba from a travel website to illustrate a presentation which was then published on the school website.

Photographer Dirk Renckhoff then sued the city of Waltrop and North Rhine-Westphalia for copyright infringement and 400 euros in damages. A German court then sought guidance from the Luxembourg-based ECJ, which went against a non-binding opinion from its adviser four months ago.

“The posting on a website of a photograph that was freely accessible on another website with the consent of the author requires a new authorisation by that author,” judges said.

“By posting on the internet, the photograph is made available to a new public,” they said.

Judges said posting a work online was different from hyperlinks which lead users to another website and thus contribute to the smooth functioning of the internet.

“Subject to the exceptions and limitations laid down exhaustively in that directive, any use of a work by a third party without such prior consent must be regarded as infringing the copyright of that work,” the court said, referring to EU copyright legislation.

The ruling could result in a rash of litigation as artists assert their rights, said Nils Rauer, a partner at Frankfurt-based Hogan Lovells.

“The idea is that we as a society should appreciate and protect copyrighted works. The overall intention of the Commission, European Parliament and the court is to create respect for copyright,” he added.

]]> 7651 https://www.faith-matters.org/google-plans-censored-version-of-search-engine-in-china/ Thu, 02 Aug 2018 09:11:04 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7565

Google plans to launch a version of its search engine in China that will block some websites and search terms, two sources said, in a move that could mark its return to a market it abandoned eight years ago on censorship concerns.

The plan comes even as China has stepped up scrutiny into business dealings involving U.S. tech firms including Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. amid intensifying trade tensions between Beijing and Washington.

Google, which quit China’s search engine market in 2010, has been actively seeking ways to re-enter China where many of its products are blocked by regulators.

The Intercept earlier reported Google’s China plans on Wednesday, citing internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

The project is code named “Dragonfly” and has been underway since the spring of 2017, the news website said.

Progress on the project picked up after a December meeting between Google’s Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, it added.

Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests will be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app, which The Intercept said had already been demonstrated to the Chinese government.

The finalised version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials, it added.

Chinese state-owned Securities Times, however, said reports of the return of Google’s search engine to China were not true, citing information from “relevant departments”.

But a Google employee familiar with the censored version of the search engine confirmed to Reuters that the project was alive and genuine.

On an internal message board, the employee wrote: “In my opinion, it is just as bad as the leak article mentions.”

The worker, who declined to be named, said that he had seen slides on the effort and that many executives at the vice president level were aware of it. He said he had transferred out of his unit to avoid being involved.

Separately, a Chinese official with knowledge of the plans said that Google has been in contact with authorities at the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) about a modified search programme.

The official, who declined to be named, said the project does not currently have approval from authorities and that it is “very unlikely” such a project would be made available this year.

Google declined to comment on the accounts and the CAC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters on Thursday.

A day earlier, the search giant also declined to comment on specifics mentioned in The Intercept report, but noted that it has launched a number of mobile apps in China and works with local developers as part of maintaining its domestic presence.

But the report pummelled shares of U.S.-listed Baidu which dominates China’s search engine market. Baidu shares fell 7.7 percent on Wednesday, despite posting better than expected quarterly results.

Google’s main search platform is blocked in China along with its video platform YouTube, but it has been attempting to make new inroads into China.

In January, the search engine joined an investment in Chinese live-stream mobile game platform Chushou, and earlier this month, launched an artificial intelligence (AI) game on Tencent Holdings Ltd’s social media app WeChat.

Reports of its possible re-entry spurred a strong reaction on Chinese social media outlets on Wednesday evening, including debates over the merits of a censored search engine versus accessing the U.S. version through illegal virtual private networks.

“Let’s carry on jumping the Firewall,” said one anonymous poster. “I’d rather not have it than use a castrated version.”

Southeast Asian nations hope to strike a joint agreement on cybersecurity in coming days with Russia, accused by the United States of meddling in its elections, after a series of high-profile hacks in the region.

The draft of a document seen by Reuters discusses formalising an agreement with Russia. It is set to be issued by foreign ministers of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the close of meetings underway with other global lawmakers in Singapore.

“We welcome the further strengthening [of] our cooperation in cybersecurity with Russia through the issuance of the statement of ASEAN and Russian foreign ministers on cooperation in the field of cybersecurity,” the draft document said, adding the title would be updated depending on negotiations. It is due to be published on Saturday.

The host of the ASEAN meeting, Singapore, recently suffered its worst ever cyberattack when hackers stole the personal information of about 1.5 million people, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, from a government health database. Earlier this year, Malaysia said it had foiled an attempted cyber heist on its central bank.

Neither country has identified the hackers and neither suggested the involvement of Russia.

U.S. intelligence agencies have said a Russian propaganda arm tried to tamper with the 2016 presidential election by posting and buying ads on Facebook. Moscow has denied involvement.

Facebook said on Tuesday it had identified a new co-ordinated political influence campaign to mislead its users and sow dissension among voters ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections.

Russia last year appointed a dedicated Ambassador to ASEAN based in Jakarta.

Senior officials from ASEAN and Russia met in March in Jakarta for wide-ranging talks on co-operation in political, security and economic fields among others.

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