Ubuntu Raised $10 Million for Edge Phone in Crowdfunding

A UK software developer Canonical has set a record for the most money raised in a crowdfunding campaign. They did it with a project to develop a new smartphone, which gathered pledges of over $10 million.

Canonical confirmed that its fundraising for Ubuntu Edge phone has secured pledges worth over $10 million within a month on the Indiegogo crowdfunding service, outrunning the previous record set by the Pebble smartwatch. Ubuntu developers are planning to deliver their first handsets in May 2014, and pledgers donating $700 will receive their own devices in return. Thus far, over 14,500 smartphones had already been pledged for.

Media group Bloomberg has also joined the campaign and pledged $80,000 for an enterprise package of 115 devices. Canonical founder admitted that Bloomberg’s level of interest was surprising and had prompted interest from some large handset makers. Over 22,000 pledges have come from all over the globe – most donations arrived from the United States and Europe.

It should be noted that the pledges may never be redeemed, because the developers must meet their minimum fundraising goal of $32 million to claim the money, while the end of the campaign is near. However, the Canonical campaign had already smashed the previous record set on the pledge service: back in 2012, Scanadu Scout managed to raise $1.7 million to develop a medical tricorder able to read vital signs and send them wirelessly to a smartphone.

Canonical, currently employing 500 people in 30 countries, creates open source software for servers and cloud infrastructure. The company was originally established to create a desktop OS alternative to Windows, but with the computing moving from the desktop to mobile devices had to switch its attention to smartphones.

The Ubuntu Edge runs on both Ubuntu and Google’s Android software. The device can also be connected to a desktop PC, allowing the phone to become the brain of a personal computer running on Ubuntu’s OS, with files stored on the handset visible on the PC screen. Media group Bloomberg has announced its involvement earlier in August. The company has its own team designing and creating software for mobile devices and says it sees Ubuntu Edge as an exciting prospect, complementing its vision for open development on the mobile platform.

Facebook Refused to Award a Hacker

Facebook team was humiliated by a hacker after it was trying spin out the news the software was flawed. It is known that the largest social network in the world has a policy that it is ready to pay at least $500 for any security flaw a hacker can find.

Khalil, a systems information expert from Palestine, discovered a flaw which allowed anyone to post to someone else’s timeline even if they are not friends. Khalil reported the flaw to Facebook security team twice, but with no result. He warned Facebook that he could post to Mark Zuckerberg’s wall, but the security experts claimed it wasn’t a bug at all. After this, Khalil posted an Enrique Iglesias video to the wall of Zuckerberg’s schoolmate. However, Facebook team still insisted that since one couldn’t see that post unless they are a friend of a user, it was all right.

Khalil said ok and posted onto Zuckerberg’s wall details of the security flaw. It should be noted that the hacker was very nice about it and apologized for violating Mark’s privacy. In a few seconds Khalil’s Facebook account was suspended and Facebook engineer contacted him to request all the details of the vulnerability. This time they explained that he hadn’t provided enough technical details for them to take action on it. In addition, they claimed that even by proving to them the hack existed, the company couldn’t pay him for the security hole because his actions broke Facebook’s Terms of Service.

It is unknown why the security team hasn’t said from the very beginning that they could see what the hacker talking about but lacked technical details. As you can see, Khalil tried to contact Facebook at least twice and both times they refused to act. So, it turned out that the hacker who found the exploit lost out by forcing someone at Facebook to understand it was a security hole. Frankly speaking, Khalil was punished for his good faith, while he could have sold it on to a 3rd party and make more cash that way.

Google Outage Cut Internet Traffic Twice

Over 40% of the Internet traffic throughout the globe disappeared after Google suffered an outage last week. Although the downtime only lasted a few minutes, depending on the user’s location, all of the Google services, including YouTube, went down.

Although the search giant hasn’t revealed the reasons for the outage, according to online analytics firm GoSquared, global online traffic fell almost twice during the downtime. Apparently, this figure can reflect Google’s control of the worldwide web. It is clear that for many users, the reliance on the tech giant is huge – just seconds after the outage, page views spiked shortly afterwards while users managed to get to their destination.

According to a message on the Google Apps Dashboard, all of its services were affected. Google admitted that it was aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. While people managed to access Gmail service, they were only seeing error messages or other unexpected behavior. In addition, Google itself only believes that 50% to 70% of requests to its services received errors – in other words, if the outage had really been total the figure could have been much worse.

Apparently, Google has a vested interest in preventing this happen again – in the 4 minutes of downtime it would have lost $500,000 in advertising. The experts claim that to face a problem that size there would have had to be a physical infrastructure problem. However, Google provided no comments on the issue, so it can be just a guess

How NSA Spied on Americans

Recent media reports released a few top secret documents about how the US National Security Agency illegally spied on its citizens, thousands of times per year. It turned out that most of the May 2012 audit was a catalogue of cock-ups where the agency collected information by accident, blaming analyst and programming errors. However, in one situation the phone records of over 3,000 American citizens were collected despite the fact that the agency had been ordered to erase them by a surveillance court.

Overall, the audit reported 2,776 cases where the National Security Agency violated its own privacy rules. In one case, the spooks confused the US area code (202) with the international dialing code for Egypt and snooped on domestic US phone calls. In another situation, the agency mixed domestic and foreign emails collected from tapping into a fibre-optic cable passing through the country. The NSA wanted to store the emails and claimed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that they simply couldn’t filter out which emails belonged to the US citizens. In response, the court ruled that the email collection effort must stop, because it was “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds”.

The audit in question appears to have been provided to the mass media several months ago by famous Edward Snowden and was initially supposed to be seen by the NSA’s top brass and no politicians ever saw it. Although Snowden made promises to not reveal any secrets while he is staying in Russia, more information of what he had passed to the media earlier is expected to be released soon. It is known that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who has published the most NSA secrets based on Edward’s leaks, keeps working on a pile of them. According to his tweets, he will be releasing more data soon.

Book about Hacking Collectives Released

The security forces all over the globe have been desperately trying to reveal the identities of LulzSec and Anonymous hackers, while journalist Parmy Olson obtained extraordinary access to the hacking groups and wrote a book.

Everyone remembers how in 2010 a new global superpower emerged, which was acting in unorthodox ways, was unaccountable and yet of the people – nameless, faceless and Anonymous. The group was created online and acted most decisively and effectively when it saw threats to the Internet itself. For example, its most successful operations were carried out after infamous WikiLeaks released the embassy cables and lots all sources of funding because major payment systems refused to take donations on its behalf under the pressure of the government.

You can learn from Parmy Olson, a reporter with Forbes and the author of “We Are Anonymous”, that it was WikiLeaks attacks that turned Anonymous political. Olson managed to create a clear, coherent narrative from lots of confusing detail, tracing Anonymous’ origins to the 4Chan site. Her book details the chronology of the group’s evolution, although everyone, including the media, police and even the hackers themselves, had their own opinions of what it really was.

The book also mentions LulzSec, a small group of talented hackers and activists, recognized as the most wanted cyber-criminals in the world, who easily hacked the CIA and the British Serious Organized Crime Agency. Good sense of humor they had – after PBS criticized WikiLeaks, LulzSec hacked into its server and published a story claiming that Tupac Shakur had been found alive and well in New Zealand. In addition, the hackers took down the Sun’s front page to replace it with another, saying that Rupert Murdoch had died in his famous topiary garden.

Everything is described in the book, which was written a year ago, as the author befriended the key members of the group before their identities were disclosed by the authorities. As you know, the FBI picked up one of the band members and turned him into an informer, and then the arrests followed. The review, posted by the Guardian, admits that “We Are Anonymous” has only one substantive flaw, which is even not the author’s fault – it is at the moment out of date because of the numerous legal issues surrounding the trials – so it contains no updates on the sentencing and nothing on the significance of the PRISM leaks by Snowden.