industryterm:security systems

Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier @hlc CC BY 21/02/2019

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Google says Nest’s secret microphone was ‘never intended to be a secret’ | TechCrunch
▻https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/20/nest-secret-microphone
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/nakedgun.gif?w=650
When Google announced earlier this month that its Nest Secure would double-up as a Google Assistant, it sparked anger. Google hadn’t told anyone that the security hub had a microphone inside to begin with. There was no mention of the microphone on the initial list of tech specifications, nor was it mentioned after the company announced Google Assistant integration. (It’s there now.)
After Google, which owns Nest, realized its customers didn’t like being deceived or having their privacy violated, the company swallowed its pride and admitted fault.
“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs,” said Google spokesperson Nicol Addison in an email to TechCrunch. “That was an error on our part. The microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option.”
Business Insider first reported the news.
Google said that security systems “often use microphones to provide features that rely on sound sensing and included the microphone so it could “potentially offer additional features to our users in the future, such as the ability to detect broken glass.”
No doubt it’s a smart, if not terribly executed idea.
You can forgive a company for not wanting to drop the ball on its own future product line-up announcements, but not disclosing the inclusion of a microphone in a device that sits in your home just looks bad. And it couldn’t come at a worst time for tech giants, as they try to clamber back any ounce of respect they have from privacy-conscious consumers.
It makes you wonder how many other devices you have in your home — and out in the world — that could be used to spy on you.
Just this week, Singapore Airlines landed itself in hot water after passengers discovered cameras embedded in the in-flight entertainment systems. The airline said in a tweet that the cameras were included as standard by the original manufacturer and that it has “no plans to enable or develop any features using the cameras.”
No plans doesn’t mean “never.” And, just like the Nest device, the customer would have no way of knowing if it was in use anyway.
#Google #Surveillance #Microphone #Nest

Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier @hlc CC BY
- Monolecte 😷🤬 @monolecte CC BY-NC-SA 21/02/2019
  
  C’est bizarre, quand même, cette sensation qui s’amplifie depuis des années qu’on vit dans la pire des dystopies.
  
  Monolecte 😷🤬 @monolecte CC BY-NC-SA
- jsene @jsene CC BY 21/02/2019
  
  “don’t be evil”
  
  jsene @jsene CC BY
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Nouvelles d’Orient @alaingresh 20/08/2017

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Europe must not buy what Israel is selling to combat terror
Israel has managed to turn 50 years of Palestinian resistance to occupation into a cottage industry, and is now selling the concept of a police state to the world
Jeff Halper Aug 20, 2017
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.807941
Whenever a terrorist attack happens such as the one last week in Barcelona, Israel politicians and security “experts” get on TV to criticize European naïvité. If only they understood terrorism as we do and took the preventive measures we do, they say, they would suffer far less attacks. Most infamous in this regard were the remarks of Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz after the Brussels bombing in March 2016, in which 34 people died.
Rather than convey his condolences in the name of the Israeli government, he scolded the Belgians in the most patronizing way possible. “If in Belgium they continue to eat chocolate, enjoy life and parade as great liberals and democrats while not taking account of the fact that some of the Muslims who are there are organizing acts of terror,” he pronounced, “they will not be able to fight against them.”
The Belgians reacted angrily, and asserted the position of most European governments: While we will continue to be vigilant and take the necessary precautions, we are not going to forsake our freedoms and political openness to become copies of Israel. For they understand that Netanyahu’s government is peddling something far more insidious than mere precautions – even more than the weapons, surveillance and security systems and models of population control that is the bread-and-butter of Israeli exports. What Israel is urging onto the Europeans – and Americans, Canadians, Indians, Mexicans, Australians and anyone else who will listen – is nothing less than an entirely new concept of a state, the Security State.
What is a Security State? Essentially, it is a state that places security above all else, certainly above democracy, due process of law and human rights, all of which it considers “liberal luxuries” in a world awash in terrorism. Israel presents itself, no less, than the model for countries of the future. You Europeans and others should not be criticizing us, say Katz and Netanyahu, you should be imitating us. For look at what we have done. We have created a vibrant democracy from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River that provides its citizens with a flourishing economy and personal security – even though half the population of that country are terrorists (i.e., non-citizen Palestinians living in isolated enclaves of the country). If we can achieve that, imagine what we can offer those of you threatened by terrorist attacks?
In a brilliant shift in imaging, Israel has managed to turn 50 years of Palestinian resistance to occupation into a cottage industry. By labeling it “terrorism,” it has not only delegitimized the Palestinian struggle but has transformed the occupied territories in a laboratory of counterinsurgency and population control, the cutting edges of both foreign wars and domestic repression. It has transformed tactics of control and their accompanying weapons of surveillance systems into marketable products. No wonder, as Netanyahu constantly reminds us, “the world” loves Israel. From China to Saudi Arabia, from India to Mexico, from Eritrea to Kazakhstan, Israel supplies the means by which repressive regimes control their restless peoples.
#Europe #Israel #terror
- #Israel
Nouvelles d’Orient @alaingresh
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Rumor @rumor CC BY-NC-SA 17/04/2016

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Is Israel forming an alliance with Egypt and Saudi Arabia? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/04/israel-al-sisi-egypt-saudi-arabia-islands-transfer-alliance.html#
According to a senior security official, who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, Ya’alon emphasized to his associates that security cooperation between Israel and Egypt had reached an all-time high. The security systems of the two countries share the same interests. Egyptians, for instance, help Israel contain and cordon off Hamas in Gaza.
The recent move — the transfer of the two islands to Saudi Arabia — reveals part of the dialogue that has been developing between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. A highly placed Israeli security official, who spoke to Al-Monitor anonymously, added some details: Israel’s relationships in the region are deep and important. The moderate Arab countries have not forgotten the Ottoman period, and are very worried about the growing strength and enlargement of the two non-Arab empires of the past: Iran and Turkey. On this background, many regional players realize that Israel is not the problem, but the solution. Israel’s dialogue with the large, important Sunni countries remains mainly under the radar, but it deepens all the time and it bears fruit.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s action has aroused sharp public criticism in Egypt. The president’s opponents argue that under the Egyptian Constitution he has no authority to give up Egyptian territory, but Sisi rightly warded off this criticism: These islands originally belonged to Saudi Arabia, which transferred them to Egypt in 1950 as part of the effort to strangle Israel from the south, and prevent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from taking control of them. Israel embarked on two wars (the Sinai War in 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967) for navigation rights in the Red Sea. It took over these islands twice, but then returned them to Egypt both times. Now events have come full circle, and the Egyptians are returning the islands to their original owner, Saudi Arabia. This is a goodwill gesture from Sisi to King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, after the Saudis committed themselves to the economic solvency of the Egyptian regime for the next five years. The Saudis are making massive investments in Egypt and providing financial support to save the Egyptian economy from collapse.
There is another aspect to the Egyptian transfer of the islands to Saudi Arabia: In the past, several proposals were raised regarding regional land swaps, with the goal of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The framework is, in principle, simple: Egypt would enlarge Gaza southward and allow the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians more open space and breathing room. In exchange for this territory, Egypt would receive from Israel a narrow strip the length of the borderline between the two countries, the Israeli Negev desert region from Egyptian Sinai. The Palestinians, in contrast, would transfer the West Bank settlement blocs to Israel. Jordan could also join such an initiative; it could contribute territories of its own and receive others in exchange. To date, this approach was categorically disqualified by the Egyptians in the Hosni Mubarak era. Now that it seems that territorial transfer has become a viable possibility under the new conditions of the Middle East, the idea of Israeli-Egyptian territorial swaps are also reopened; in the past, these land swap possibilities fired the imaginations of many in the region. In his day, former head of Israel’s National Security Council Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland led a regional initiative on the subject. But he was stymied by Egypt.
#Israël #Egypte #Arabie_Saoudite #Turquie
Rumor @rumor CC BY-NC-SA
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eva @evaspiek 16/06/2015

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THE challenge for self-proclaimed Hackers among seenthis users: 50.000 for those who are able to hack into Tresorit.
▻http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/internet/best-cloud-storage-dropbox-google-drive-onedrive-icloud-3506734
There are several services that offer secure storage in the cloud - Mega and Spideroak being a couple of examples (reviewed below) - but to our knowledge none of them have offered a cash incentive for hackers to actually break into them. None, that is, except for Tresorit. This Swiss company is so confident in its product that there is a standing reward of $50,000 for anyone who can overcome its security systems. So far, the company reports, one thousand hackers have been actively trying for around five hundred days but the system remains intact. So if your data is valuable, then you could do a lot worse than try out the Tresorit offering.
eva @evaspiek
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klaus++ @klaus 12/10/2013

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A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse | David Graeber | The Baffler
▻http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide
What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.
P.S. Merci ►http://seenthis.net/messages/184058

klaus++ @klaus
- tbn @thibnton PUBLIC DOMAIN 30/10/2013
  
  #apocalypse
  
  tbn @thibnton PUBLIC DOMAIN
- koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA 15/07/2015
  
  mise à jour du lien ▻http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse
  
  koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA
- koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA 15/07/2015
  
  If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
  How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.
  In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.
  #brown_tech #néolibéralisme #oligarchie #surveillance
  #histoire #longue_durée
  
  koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA
- koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA 15/07/2015
  
  it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.
  At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.
  Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable.
  #dette #productivité #critique_techno #crise #climat
  
  koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA
- koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA 15/07/2015
  
  Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.
  
  koldobika @koldobika CC BY-NC-SA
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Warda Mohamed @wardamd 7/10/2013

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L’Arabie Saoudite engage une agence de sécurité accusée de violer les droits des Palestiniens et de torture pour assurer la sécurité durant le pèlerinage à La Mecque | Al Akhbar English
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/saudi-hires-occupation-friendly-company-hajj-security
G4S’ subsidiary in Israel (Hashmira) was awarded a contract with the Israeli Prison Service in July 2007 to supply equipment and security services that enable violations of Articles 49 and 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The company provides security systems and centralized control systems to the Hasharon-Ramonim prison, which contains a section for Palestinian political prisoners.
G4S has installed a central command room in Megiddo Prison, in addition to supplying a wide array of security services to the Damon and Ketziot prisons. In Ofer, the prison where more than 1,500 Palestinians are detained – mostly administrative prisoners – G4S has also installed a central command room and provided protection through peripheral defense systems on the walls surrounding the prison. The company routinely supplies systems for command and control, IT, CCTV, and communications to Israeli prisons.
In the Jalma and Maskoubieh interrogation centers, which are also serviced by G4S, not even children are spared from torture. It is in one of those centers that Palestinian detainee Arafat Jaradat was tortured to death earlier this year. There, too, Luay al-Ashqar, a Palestinian administrative detainee, became permanently paralyzed in his left leg when he suffered a triple fracture in his spine during his detention.
Warda Mohamed @wardamd
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Reka @reka CC BY-NC-SA 14/01/2013

People Pay for Research Against Migrants
viua la liste « Migreurop »
Des centres de recherche financés sur des fonds publics travaillent sur des systèmes de sécurité que l’UE demande à de grandes multinationales de fabriquer et de mettre en place pour prévenir la migration des « indésirables »
Inter Press Service
►http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/01/people-pay-for-research-against-migrants
By Apostolis Fotiadis and Claudia Ciobanu
This is the second of a two-part report on extraordinary measures the EU is taking to keep unwanted migrants out.
ATHENS/WARSAW, Jan 11 2013 (IPS) - Publicly funded research is paying towards security systems that the EU is inviting major multinationals to put together to keep unwanted migrants out.
The new EU approach to border security started to be implemented in 2004 with the setting up of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP). This went on to become a part of the EU’s 7th Framework Research Programme (FP7) under the current seven-year EU budget for 2007-2013.
#migration #asile #politique-asile #europe #eu #frontex

Reka @reka CC BY-NC-SA

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