US military prepares for biggest Okinawa land return since 1972

Osprey military aircraft are seen at the U.S. Futenma airbase in Ginowan, on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, July 26, 2013. Reuters.

 The United States military said on Friday it was preparing for the biggest land return in Okinawa since 1972, as it faces a surge in opposition to its presence following the arrest of one its civilian contractors for the murder of a local woman.

Okinawa is the US military's key base in Asia where it faces an increasingly assertive China. It hosts 30,000 military personnel on bases that cover a fifth of the island.
"We are respectful of the feelings of Okinawans that our footprint must be reduced,” Lieutenant General Lawrence D. Nicholson, the US commander on the island, said in a press release.
Once new helipads are completed, the US military will hand back 4,000 hectares (40 square kilometers) of land to the Japanese government, which is 17 percent of the area it controls.
The tract is part of the US Marine Corp jungle training camp known as Camp Gonsalves in Northern Okinawa.
Okinawa was under US occupation until 1972.
The return of the land was agreed in 1996, but has been delayed by protesters blocking the construction of the helipads. The Japanese government recently resumed work at the site.
Local resentment over the US military presence surged after an American civilian working at a US base, Kenneth Franklin, was arrested last month in connection with the murder of a local 20-year-old Japanese woman, Rina Shimabukuro.
Nicholson announced a 30-day mourning period after the murder and temporarily banned marines from drinking off base. Washington and Tokyo agreed to limit legal protections and benefits to some US civilians working for the military.
The murder and a subsequent arrest of a US Navy sailor for drunk driving spurred large scale demonstrations and calls, backed by Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga, for Washington to move military personnel off the island.
After the rape of a Japanese schoolgirl by three US servicemen in 1996, the US and Japanese governments agreed to relocate some troops outside Okinawa but said others would be moved to less populated parts of the island.

Home > World WikiLeaks releases hacked Democratic National Committee audio files

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WikiLeaks released files on Wednesday of what it said were audio recordings pulled from the emails of the Democratic National Committee that were obtained by hacking its servers.

The latest release, which came in the middle of the Democratic National Convention where Hillary Clinton was officially named the party's presidential nominee.
WikiLeaks releases hacked DNC audio filesThe latest release, which came in the middle of the Democratic National Convention where Hillary Clinton was officially named the party's presidential nominee, is the second batch in a series that has deeply rattled the party and prompted the organization's chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to step down.

Google Removed Half Billion Pirate Links in 2016

Google was asked to remove over 500m allegedly infringing links from its search results in 2016 thus far, which is double the number of DMCA notices received last year. According to copyright owners, the surge was due to a failing system, but Google has its own opinion. It believes that the increase shows that the system is working. According to statistics, it takes Google less than 6 hours to remove infringing content.

In recent years, the number of takedown requests has exploded, with Google recently receiving its 500 millionth takedown request this year. For comparison, in 2015 it took Google almost the entire year to reach the same milestone. With this pace, the search engine will process a billion allegedly infringing links during the whole year.

The company confirmed that almost 98% of the reported links are indeed infringing and being removed. In other words, half a billion links were withdrawn from search results in 2016 alone. At the same time, copyright holders are still not satisfied, claiming that many files simply reappear under new URLs.

A few days ago, Google issued its updated “How Google Fights Piracy” report providing an overview of the measures taken to tackle piracy while countering some of the copyright owners complaints. However, copyright owners still demand a tougher stance from Google in regard to piracy. It looks like the entertainment industry groups and the search engine are not going to reach an agreement in the near future, with the argument going on for years and both sides standing their own grounds. Entertainment industry hopes that the government may eventually intervene, but until this happens the rightsholders continue to report millions of infringing links every day.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Edward Snowden Presented Phone Case Revealing Spying

Edward Snowden was one of the designers of a mobile phone case that can show when a device is transmitting data that could be spied on. Snowden and his co-designer Andrew Huang appeared online at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, demonstrating how the device connects to the phone’s radio transmitters and shows its owner when any type of connection is being used to share or receive information.

The prototype of the case shows a small, monochromatic display built into the casing, which shows whether the phone is “idle” or transmitting information. Besides, the case is also able to supply a device with extra battery power and cover the rear-facing camera. Snowden also explained that the item could be developed to act as a kind of “kill switch” that would disconnect a phone’s power supply once detecting that a radio is transmitting information after its owner turned it off.

Although this phone case is just an academic project and is not ready for the mass market, it could still influence how consumers view the “tracking devices” or regular smartphones. The former NSA contractor explained that if you have a phone in your pocket, a long-lived record of your movements is being created, as the smartphone is constantly shouting into the air by means of radio signals. This communication is not only saved by that phone company, but can also be observed by independent third parties.

Even when you turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular transmission in airplane mode, it can’t be trusted, because some malware can activate radios without any indication from the user interface.

The project is part of Snowden’s work to inform the public about the surveillance capabilities of the governments. Three years ago, he revealed the truth about mass surveillance programs from the NSA and has since become a recognizable name that can explain these issues in a comprehensible way.

The phone case developers admit the device is likely to remain a mockup, because the project is run largely through volunteer efforts. Apparently, if the proper funding is raised, they could release the device in partnership with the media advocacy group and use it to help protect journalists. So far, the designers are concentrating on working with iPhone, but the device could be modified to work on other models.

YouTube Flooded with Fake Pirate Movies

YouTube is again under pressure from the copyright owners, but this time with a quite unexpected claim. The video streaming service is under attack for allowing its users to upload videos that send potential pirates to scammy websites.

In recent months, YouTube has become a battleground over the DMCA and the copyright owners’ war with Google. The record labels were the most active complainers, and the MPAA has just added pressure on YouTube, this time by linking to an article published by moviemaker and anti-piracy advocate Ellen Seidler, which criticizes the streaming service for allowing Internet users to upload fake movies leading others to scammy websites. Such fake movies can be found on YouTube by searching for the name of any mainstream movie adding “full movie”. Such videos usually instruct users to “click the link” below the video to access the full film, but instead lead to scammy websites.

The anti-piracy advocate noted that such fakes pollute YouTube’s results and make the anti-piracy work much harder, because the copyright owners now have to filter the fake movies. But consider for a moment the tremendous negative effect on pirates: earlier, people were able to search for a movie on YouTube, filter out all clips less than 20 minutes long and get a decent copy of the film. But now YouTube’s search results are a horrible place to do so.

If you think that Hollywood must be grateful for someone else infecting potential pirates with malware, which is piracy deterrence, then you are wrong – instead, they urge YouTube to clean up its site, suggesting to do so by detecting and removing these fakes with ContentID.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

5% of UK Users Branded as “Hardcore Pirates”

The local Intellectual Property Office has revealed that about 25% of all UK media consumers pirated at least once during a recent 3-month period. The same report showed that infringement of video content was up this year, but music has shown a significant decrease.

In fact, the statistics showed that about 15% of Internet users consumed infringing content during the above said period, which is about 6.7 million people. But the study considered only users who had actually consumed content online rather than all Internet users, so the number of infringers increased to 25%.

The use of P2P networks has declined from 12% to 10% among all Internet users and from 26% to 23% among infringers. So far, uTorrent has been the most popular client used for infringing, but its usage has also declined from 17% of infringers in 2015 to 12% this year. 11% of them use The Pirate Bay for content downloading. As for infringement levels, they also vary across content formats, with the highest levels relating to music: 8% of all Internet users obtain it from unauthorized sources. 7% of users admit obtaining TV shows from illegal sources, 6% infringed movies. At the same time, consumption of legitimate content has gone up.

More interesting was people’s motivation to obtain illegal content: because it is free (49%), convenient (45%) and quick (42%). As a result, about 25% of infringers say that cheaper prices would make them pirate less, while 20% say that availability of legal sources would help.

Nevertheless, there are relatively few hardcore pirates in the United Kingdom: only 5% of all Internet users in the country admitted to exclusively obtaining content from illegal sources.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

10m Android Devices Infected with New Malware@@

More than 10m devices running Google’s Android OS have been infected with HummingBad – a new piece of malware that is able to take over a smartphone or tablet, steal and sell on user data, including banking information and other data for identify theft. It is also able to download unauthorized apps and tap on advertising.

Security firms have been tracking the malware for the past few months. According to their statistics, after a spike in infections in May, HummingBad has now passed the 10 million mark. Security experts explain that it can infect an Android device if the user browses the infected website, in so-called “drive-by-download” attacks. After this, the malware tries to gain access to the underlying Android system by using “root access” to take full control. If it fails, it attempts to trick the user into giving almost full control via a fake update alert.

Once HummingBad has control of the Android smartphone or tablet, it can force it to download apps and tap on adverts in order to generate fraudulent advertising revenue without the device owner’s knowledge. Besides, the hackers could sell access to the device or the user’s data. Infected devices have been detected all over the world with 1.6m devices in China, 1.35m in India, 288,000 in the US and 100,000 in the UK and Australia. Google admits it has been aware of that malware and is constantly improving Android, actively blocking installations of infected apps.

Nowadays, smartphones are increasingly popular, so malware targeting both Android and iOS has increased in volume and effectiveness. In response, the platform developers made further moves to protect devices from such malware. However, in this case Apple has had more success in getting users to upgrade to the latest and most secure versions of its operating systems thanks to its control of both hardware and software. As for Android updates, it can take months if not years, because Google does not directly control most of the devices.

Google has recently separated security patches from the rest of the operating system, and now security updates are pushed out on a monthly basis for its own mobile devices. At the same time, other Android manufacturers like Samsung and LG promised to do the same. However, many other manufacturers are slow to release updates to user phones, which leaves users exposed.

If your device is infected with HummingBad, a factory reset might be the only recourse. Moreover, even then it could remain.

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