Bullrun And Edgehill @ Secret Decryption Programs

 

1.    Most of the techies who have relied always on their favourite encryption methods to have privacy in store should be in for a shock like me if they have not heard of BULLRUN and EDGEHILL @ Secret Decryption Programs.Below I produce an unedited extract from the Snowden talk at TED last week.He was asked a question by Chris Anderson,the curator of TED and what followed is produced below :

Chris Anderson : Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It’s about a program called “Bullrun.” Can you explain what that is?
 

Snowden : So Bullrun, and this is again where we’ve got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they’re named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They’re programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they’re giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. They’re building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world’s communications. And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won’t be able to access our banks and we won’t be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends.

2.   It was always suspected for long but now the newly leaked documents by Edward Snowden, the NSA and GCHQ are said to have defeated most of the online encryption used by internet users and the likes of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and even banks.Few important things about these two programs are bought below :

- Bullrun Is the Most Expensive Program Leaked by Snowden.The funding allocated for Bullrun in top-secret budgets dwarfs the money set aside for programs like PRISM and XKeyscore. PRISM operates on about $20 million a year, according to Snowden, while Bullrun cost $254.9 million in 2013 alone. Since 2011, Bullrun has cost more than $800 million.

- Bullrun Began 10 Years Ago

- A majority of the funding for Bullrun goes toward actively engaging tech companies in their product design. The NSA covertly influenced tech companies to insert vulnerabilities into commercial products that would allow the NSA access without consumers’ knowledge. 

- NSA and GCHQ View Encryption as a Threat(That's....incredible....)

- Edgehill started with the initial goal of decrypting the programs used by three major Internet companies, which were unnamed in Snowden’s leak, and 30 Virtual Private Networks.

- GCHQ hopes that by 2015 Edgehill will have decrypted 15 major Internet companies and 300 VPNs.

- NSA Covertly Influenced International Encryption Standards.

3.  Besides BULLRUN/EDGEHILL,the NSA and GCHQ have a number of programs for gathering different types of internet metadata few of which mentioned in Luke Harding's Book are :
   
Prism - Secret access to the servers of Google, Facebook and others.

Boundless informant - Mapping of all secret data to specific countries.

Upstream - Catch as much of the global internet traffic as it passes across the United States

Stellar Wind - liaison with US internet and telephone companies to provide metadata information.

Wireless Data Transmission from every Light bulb : HAROLD HAAS

1.   As we always hear,the future is always bright and the present is always keeps waiting to see the future.So here is another bright news for all those intersted in knowing the speeds and media for data transmission in near future(...how near...lets see...m sire most of us willbe able to see this...tech demo is seen in the video).Before I start telling you about what news I am sharing with you here,a quote from Harold Haas,the inventor of this technology :

"Everywhere in a day there is light. Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone. It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight. These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission.”

2.    Imagine using your car headlights to transmit data ... or surfing the web safely on a plane, tethered only by a line of sight.Promoting the invent as the D-Light, that uses a mathematical trick called OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) allowing it to vary the intensity of the LED's output at a very fast rate, invisible to the human eye.The signal can be picked up by simple receivers. As of now, Haas is reporting data rates of up to 10 MBit/s per second that is faster than a typical broadband connection), and 100 MBit/s by the end of this year and possibly up to 1 GB in the future.He says: "It should be so cheap that it’s everywhere. Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment.".Please watch this video from the TED talks by Harold Haas himself wherein he explains the technology behind in brief and shows the demo to the live audience.Simply jaw dropping for me...:-)

3.    In addition to this researchers in Germany have created the first white-light data links, which they claim can transfer information at rates up to 800 Mb s–1. The team has demonstrated a simplified version of the technology in an office building, where it managed to broadcast four high-definition video streams from overhead lights.

4.   Thanks http://www.ted.com/speakers/harald_haas.html and http://physicsworld.com

The Brain Virus : Some thing I missed.....

This is about BRAIN virus...a name heard in the late 80S and early 90S and recognized as the first computer virus for MS-DOS that infects the boot sector of storage media formatted with the DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) file system....This was written by two brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi who were from Lahore, Pakistan......so what makes a mention here is that I was recently watching a TED Video wherein the speaker Mikko Hypponen shares his interesting piece of interaction with these two brothers...do watch it...worth it for inviting a smile...