microsoft's $8b skype deal shocks analysts

and disappoints users who wish cool companies wouldn't sell out to corporations that have intelligence connections...
from guardian: Microsoft is reported to have closed a $8.5bn (£5bn) deal for the internet phone service Skype, in a deal that has shocked analysts who think it would be a substantial overpayment for the company.

The acquisition, which is expected to be announced on Tuesday, would be Microsoft's biggest, ahead the $6bn it paid for online advertising company aQuantive in 2007, and would bring it 660 million users worldwide while giving it a foothold in voice and video communications. Analysts suggested the service could be integrated into existing Microsoft products such as its Xbox 360 games console and Kinect gaming systems, or even into its flagship Office product to let users collaborate more effectively.

Speculation has been rife in Silicon Valley for months about Skype's future. Rumours last week suggested Facebook, Google or Cisco Systems were interested in acquiring it to fold into their own services. Tony Bates, the chief executive hired from Cisco last year, has reportedly been exploring the idea of joint ventures or a sale to Google and Facebook.

News of the deal and Microsoft's interest in Skype was first reported by the Wall Street Journal online and the technology site GigaOM.

leuren moret reveals google shocker!

You need wonder no further whether Orwell's vision came true! Leuren Moret, radiation expert, will drop a brick on your head!On Jeff Rense's program, Moret informs Microsoft, Google, Facebook social networking sites, Ebay, all have roots in military intelligence. Microsoft software insures backdoors into computers. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders, park their private jet at a NASA facility. Perhaps, most shocking, Moret reveals Google is doing DNA surveys from space! Whew! The Human Genome Project is just one means along with computing, medicine and the police state to establish a totalitarian scientific oligarchy with a depop agenda. If you still aren't convinced, Moret relates depleted uranium particles stick to DNA and mitochondria, which provides the body's energy! Moret credits Bertrand Russell with these ideas of control and believes sterilization is in most people's future,"...wild reproduction is no longer an option," according to Moret's recap of Russell's message! There's still more with human beings as electric transmitters with control integrated into the HAARP system! It's a can't miss program!

as smartphone scandal grows, tech firms run for cover

while they reap windfall profits...
from antifascist calling: Recent revelations that Apple's iPhone and iPad, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating systems collect, store and transmit records of users' physical locations to central databases--secretly, and without consent--have ignited a firestorm over Americans' privacy rights in an age of hypersurveillance.

And with a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Florida by two iPhone users, The Register reports, Apple guru Steve Jobs was forced to respond to complaints after the firm's usual tactic--deafening silence--failed to assuage customer's anxieties.

The lawsuit alleges that "irreparable injury has resulted and continues to result from Apple's unauthorized tracking of millions of Americans," plaintiffs Vikram Ajjampur and William Devito averred. They are requesting their case be granted class-action status, a move likely to send shudders along the silicon spine of the secretive Cupertino high-tech powerhouse.

In response to the outcry, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple "is scaling back how much information its iPhones store about where they have been and said it will stop collecting such data when consumers request it, as the company tries to quell concerns it was tracking iPhone owners."

But as journalists Yukari Iwatani Kane and Jennifer Valentino-Devries point out, "a week of silence on the growing controversy, raised new questions and criticism about its data-handling practices."

related video: assange calls facebook 'most appalling spy machine' ever

3/24 defcon: mobile, micro, mystery, messenger

at&t to purchase t-mobile for US$39b;
as strangling of the free internet begins continues*
microsoft, feds pull plug on spam network*
fbook traffic mysteriously passed through chinese isp*
goldman programmer gets 8yrs for code theft*
tracking your wi-fi trail at the airport*
first tweet & other communication firsts*
nasa 'messenger' enters orbit around mercury*
chavez says capitalism may have ended life on mars*
video: 'red' rocker sammy hagar abducted by aliens*

2/3 defcon: killswitch, bandwidth, floodgates

as egypt returns to the internet: lieberman says US internet killswitch bill is different than egypt's internet killswitch*
US tests system that beats internet censorship by dictatorships*
certified lies: detecting & defeating govt interception attacks against ssl*
vodafone volluded with egyptian regime's information warfare psyop*
metered bandwidth isn't about stopping bandwidth hogs; it's about preserving old media business models*
US p2p traffic lower than world average*
US cyber challenge partners with lockmart & microsoft*
US recruiting young cyber warriors*
docs in assange rape investigation leak onto web*
video: assange's boring 60 minutes interview*
no, hackers can't open hoover dam floodgates*
nasa spots 54 life-friendly planets*
video: ufo hovers over jerusalem*

when computers keep watch

computers that see you & keep watch over you
from nytimes: Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises. Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout — body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year’s drill, computers that could see the action. Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior... "It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there," said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. "You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior."

12/31 defcon: high chance, top threats & the cloud

top cyber threats of 2011*
living with our heads in 'the cloud'*
paul allen tries patent megasuit again*
apple sued for app privacy violations*
man quits job to sue spammers*
with 15 minutes of fame ticking; assange signs $1.5m-worth of book deals*
smith, assange, soros & claims that assange is helping the neocons*
assange: 'high chance' i'd be killed 'jack ruby-style’ in US prison*
video: 'reality of illusion 4: julian assange, the white brotherhood & the nazis'*

10/7 defcon: spooks, satnav & sightings

pentagon says 'the global cyberwar is just beginning'*
military spooks step up war on leakers*
obama pressures isp's to censor websites*
microsoft wants govt licensing net access*
aol says infowars 'whipping the internet into a frenzy of anxiety'*
iran say it has captured 'western spies' involved in nuclear cyberattack*
researchers using rat-robot hybrid to design better brain machine interfaces*
uk man dies after satnav sends him into a reservoir*
ufo forces airport closure in china*
best image yet of comet closing in on earth*

defcon 7/1: fight the net, biomet & int'l sex station

the secret state's mad scheme to control the net*
comprehensive cyber legislation approved*
windows 8 features, like biometrics, revealed in leaked microsoft documents*
white hat uses foursquare privacy hole to capture 875k check-ins*
impediments to a post-scarcity future*
obama space plan under continuous assault*
nasa commander says sex banned aboard international space station*

hacked US treasury websites serve visitors malware

from the register: Websites operated by the US Treasury Department are redirecting visitors to websites that attempt to install malware on their PCs, a security researcher warned on Monday. The infection buries an invisible iframe in bep.treas.gov, moneyfactory.gov, and bep.gov that invokes malicious scripts from grepad.com, Roger Thompson, chief research officer of AVG Technologies, told The Register. The code was discovered late Sunday night and was active at time of writing, about 12 hours later.

To cover their tracks, the miscreants behind the compromise tailored it so it attacks only IP addresses that haven't already visited the Treasury websites. That makes it harder for white hat-hackers and law enforcement agents to track the exploit. Indeed, Thompson initially reported that the problem had been fixed until he discovered the sites were merely skipping over laboratory PCs that had already encountered the attack.

The attack is most likely related to mass infections that two weeks ago hit hundreds of sites hosted by Network Solutions and GoDaddy, said Dean De Beer, founder and CTO of security consultancy zero(day)solutions. He made that assessment based on the observation that the compromised Treasury websites are hosted at Network Solutions and the owner of grepad.com is also the owner of record for most of the websites used in the earlier attacks. "There's a very high probability that it's the same person," De Beer said. "The only things that are changing are the domains."

Earlier, Thompson speculated the attack might be the result of someone exploiting a SQL injection vulnerability on the Treasury websites. After investigating that possibility, De Beer said it was unlikely because the hacked Treasury sites contained static HTML pages that aren't susceptible to such exploits. Media representatives at the Treasury Department didn't return a phone call seeking comment.

defcon 4/22: takedowns, lockups & predictive analytics

google exposes government takedown requests*
google: US demanded user info 3,500 times in 6 months*
google hackers stole source code of global password system*
second banker accused of stealing high-frequency trading code*
mcafee antivirus program locks up pc's worldwide*
crime prediction software is here & it's a very bad idea*
precrime in florida: ibm's predictive analytics*
online game shoppers duped into selling souls*
microsoft's chinese labor scandal:
there's more trouble ahead for the rest of high tech*
cultivated play: farmville*
9 yr-old blamed for US school system hack*
1/3 of US teens with phones 'text 100 times a day'*
wikileaks claims facebook deleted its page, 30,000 fans*
draft of secretive intl copyright treaty leaked -
confirms fears on net freedom*
reverse-engineering artist busts biometric control grid*
'second life' players sue over illegal seizure of virtual property*
video: richard clarke says private firms should spy on net*
clarke says public aversion to regulation prevents govt from defending cyberspace*
facebook steps up lobbying, deepens ties with intel agencies, ftc*

microsoft patents 'guardian angel' as intelligent personal agent

would microsoft 'guardian angel' turn our brains to mush?
from nick eaton: I was reading TechFlash's piece on Microsoft's new "guardian angel" patent, and it stirred up a creepy feeling inside of me. In the time I've been covering Microsoft for seattlepi.com, I've had this strange shudder a handful of times. And I'm wondering if other people feel it, as well.

TechFlash reported that Microsoft has been granted a patent on an "intelligent personal agent" that could predict a user's wants and actions. If the user is at a shopping mall and the software's artificial intelligence knows it's lunchtime, the "guardian angel" could search for nearby restaurants that serve the user's preferred foods, choose a cuisine based on the user's recent meals, check for seating availability, and make lunch reservations.

This is an example laid out in Microsoft's 2006 patent application, which lists Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie as two of the inventors.

But I know of an existing device that already has this function. It's called the human brain. Call me pessimistic if you want, but do we really need the artificial intelligence of a digital guardian angel to supplant the organic intelligence of our own selves?