Cellphones “can be transformed into surveillance devices,” writes the Guardian, reporting startling new details about which innocent people are still being surveilled (as part of a collaborative reporting project with 16 other media outlets led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories).

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the newspaper’s critique of a “privatised government surveillance industry” that’s made NSO a billion-dollar company, thanks to its phone-penetrating spy software Pegaus:

[NSO] insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”. Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data… The presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware.

But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups [which track the general locations of cellphone users] can be exploited in this environment.
It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO’s spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half.

The investigators say that potential targets included nearly 200 journalists around the world, including numerous reporters from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, and even the editor of the Financial Times.

In addition, the investigators say they found evidence the Pegasus software had been installed on the phone of the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO denies this to the Washington Post. But they also insist that they’re simply licensing their software to clients, and their company “has no insight” into those clients’ specific intelligence activities.
The Washington Post reports that Amnesty’s Security Lab found evidence of Pegasus attacks on 37 of 67 smartphones from the list which they tested. But beyond that “for the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work.”

Familiar privacy measures like strong passwords and encryption offer little help against Pegasus, which can attack phones without any warning to users. It can read anything on a device that a user can, while also stealing photos, recordings, location records, communications, passwords, call logs and social media posts. Spyware also can activate cameras and microphones for real-time surveillance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Investigation Reveals Widespread Cellphone Surveillance of the Innocent

18-year-old Oliver Daemon will become the youngest person ever to travel to space as the fourth passenger on Blue Origin’s first crewed mission this week to the edge of outer space (flying with Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk).

The Atlantic calls it “a rather unusual bunch”:

When they take off on Tuesday, they will each fulfill a personal dream, but as a crew, they’re making history: No group like this one has ever gone to space together before. Even the participants of the most diverse missions to the International Space Station have had far more in common with one another than this quartet. They were all professional astronauts, with comparable ages, educational backgrounds, and even temperaments, given that potential astronauts must undergo psychological screenings before getting the job. The motley crew of Blue Origin’s first passenger flight seems closer to a cast of offbeat characters gathered together for a zany adventure: If The Breakfast Club had the brain, the jock, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal, this Blue Origin flight has the boss, the tag-along, the real deal, and the kid…

Blue Origin has conducted 15 test flights of the New Shepard rocket, but has never before flown the vehicle with people on board.

Of the passengers on Bezos’s debut flight, Daemen might be the most unexpected pick. In fact, Daemen wasn’t supposed to be on this flight. Blue Origin had held an auction for one of the seats on the flight, culminating in a top bid of a whopping $28 million. But the company said today that the winner, whose name has not been disclosed, decided to skip this particular flight and go later, citing “scheduling conflicts,” so the company slotted in Daemen, a soon-to-be physics student at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. (Blue Origin said the teen was “a participant in the auction,” but did not disclose how much the seat cost.)

Daemen and Funk, as Blue Origin pointed out in its announcement, “represent the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space.” But describing them by age alone elides the very different journeys they have taken to reach this point. Funk is an aviation legend who underwent more difficult tests than John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had to, and has waited 60 years for this moment. Daemen is a teenager who took a gap year to get his pilot’s license, and the son of a private-equity executive… Daemen represents a new class of spacefarers; in the coming years, as private companies such as Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX make people into astronauts more readily than government agencies like NASA can, the distance between a childhood dream and reality is bound to shrink. Expect more smorgasbord space crews like the Blue Origin one, filled with an assortment of very wealthy individuals and the people they choose to go with them…

The rules about who can become an astronaut have changed, and the new “right stuff” is money and luck.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Blue Origin Auction Winner Backs Out, 18-Year-Old Flies Instead

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace writes:

2021 is turning out to be an even stronger year for vinyl album sales than in 2020. In the first six months of 2021, 19.2 million vinyl albums were sold, outpacing CD volume of 18.9 million, according to MRC Data, an analytics firm that specializes in collecting data from the entertainment and music industries. That is a 108% increase from the 9.2 million that were sold during the same period in 2020. And according to MRC Data, Record Store Day 2021 helped to sell 1.279 million vinyl albums in the U.S. in the week ending June 17, a record for a Record Store Day week and the third-largest week for vinyl album sales since MRC Data began electronically tracking sales in 1991. Further, with 942,000 vinyl albums sold at independent record stores in the week ending June 17, that marks the largest week ever for the format at the indie sector in MRC Data history.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Vinyl Album Sales Jump 108% In First 6 Months of 2021

A committee in the U.K. Parliament says the music industry is weighted against artists, with even successful pop stars seeing “pitiful returns,” reports the BBC:

They are calling for a “complete reset” of the market, with musicians given a “fair share” of the £736.5 million that UK record labels earn from streaming. In a report, they said royalties should be split 50/50, instead of the current rate, where artists receive about 16%.

The findings came after a six-month inquiry into music streaming. “While streaming has brought significant profits to the recorded music industry, the talent behind it — performers, songwriters and composers — are losing out,” said Julian Knight, MP, who chairs parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee. “Only a complete reset of streaming that enshrines in law their rights to a fair share of the earnings will do….”

A survey by the Ivors Academy and Musicians’ Union found that in 2019, 82% of professional musicians made less than £200 from streaming, whilst only 7% made more than £1,000…

The committee’s report said streaming had “undoubtedly helped save the music industry” after decades of piracy, “but it is clear that what has been saved does not work for everyone”.
A chart accompanying the article shows that meanwhile streaming services keep 30% of the revenue, while labels end up with 55%.

“Artists who release their own music, or who work with independent labels and distribution companies, tend to get a higher share.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Music Streaming Inquiry Finds ‘Pitiful Returns’ For Performers

“Starting September 1, 2021, the Chinese government will require that any Chinese citizen who finds a zero-day vulnerability must pass the details to the Chinese government,” reports SecurityWeek, “and must not sell or give the knowledge to any third-party outside of China (apart from the vulnerable product’s manufacturer).”

Brief details are provided in a report by the Associated Press (AP) published Tuesday, July 13, 2021. No source is provided beyond the statement, “No one may ‘collect, sell or publish information on network product security vulnerabilities,’ say the rules issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and the police and industry ministries….”

AP describes this action as “further tightening the Communist Party’s control over information”. This is unlikely to be the primary motivation for the new rule since the government already has a vice-like grip on data. Companies may not store data on Chinese customers outside of China. Foreign companies selling routers and some other network devices in China must disclose to regulators how any encryption features work.

“I would expect the Chinese Government to weaponize any discovered security vulnerabilities to enhance China’s cybersecurity capabilities,” Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and advisory CISO at ThycoticCentrify, tells SecurityWeek. And Jake Williams, co-founder and CTO at BreachQuest adds that “the defensive advantages of Chinese government organizations being able to mitigate vulnerabilities discovered may well outweigh any offensive gains….”
But he also believes this could rebound against China. “One of the biggest likely issues is brain drain. If Chinese researchers can profit handsomely from their work anywhere else, but can’t do so in China, why would they stay? This probably helps China in the short term but harms them in the long term.”
The new law does encourage network operators and product vendors to set up a reward mechanism for reported vulnerabilities, according to the Record. But Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, also raises the issue of western-based bug bounty platforms that have been working with Chinese security researchers for the past years. “If Western-based bug bounty platforms comply with this requirement in order to continue to legally receive bug reports from Chinese researchers, we must assume they will be required to hand over vulnerability data to the Ministry within two days of receiving the reports,” Moussouris said. “That requirement will effectively introduce a backdoor straight to the Chinese government in any VDP [vulnerability disclosure program] or bug bounty program where Chinese researchers submit bugs via platforms, even to non-Chinese companies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Will a New Law Help the Chinese Government Stockpile Zero-Days?