Today, the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the U.S. Secret Service (USSS), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), announced the results of a year-long, coordinated national operation that used the first nationwide undercover action to target vendors of illicit goods on the Darknet. Special Agents of the HSI New York Field Division, in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, posed as a money launderer on Darknet market sites, exchanging U.S. currency for virtual currency. Through this operation, HSI New York was able to identify numerous vendors of illicit goods, leading to the opening of more than 90 active cases around the country. The Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS) of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, working with more than 40 U.S. Attorney’s Offices throughout the country, coordinated the nationwide investigation of over 65 targets, that lead to the arrest and impending prosecution of more than 35 Darknet vendors.

These results were announced by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting Executive Associate Director Derek Benner of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Special Agent-in-Charge Angel M. Melendez of HSI New York Field Office, Inspector in Charge Peter R. Rendina of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) New York Division, Assistant Director Kenneth Jenkins of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) Office of Investigations, and Special Agent in Charge James J. Hunt of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) New York Division.

“Criminals who think that they are safe on the Darknet are wrong,” said Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. “We can expose their networks, and we are determined to bring them to justice. Today, we arrested more than 35 alleged Darknet vendors. We seized their weapons, their drugs, and $23.6 million of their ill-gotten gains. This nationwide enforcement effort will reduce the supply of deadly drugs like fentanyl that are killing an unprecedented number of Americans. I want to thank our federal prosecutors, and the dedicated federal agents with DEA, Homeland Security Investigations, the Postal Inspection Service, and the Secret Service for their outstanding work.”

“The Darknet is ever-changing and increasingly more intricate, making locating and targeting those selling illicit items on this platform more complicated. But in this case, HSI special agents were able to walk amongst those in the cyber underworld to find those vendors who sell highly addictive drugs for a profit,” said HSI Acting Executive Associate Director Benner. “The veil has been lifted. HSI has infiltrated the Darknet, and together with its law enforcement partners nationwide, it has proven, once again, that every criminal is within arm’s reach of the law.”

“Postal Inspectors and their law enforcement partners will spare no resource or expense to shine a light on the sale and distribution of illicit and dangerous items on the Darknet, that serve to destroy the lives of many through addiction and despair,” said Inspector in Charge Rendina. “Today’s announcement of our law enforcement partnership and operation sends a strong message to those who choose this illegal path, we are watching and will bring you to justice for your crimes against the American public.”

“The Secret Service is proud to work with our law enforcement partners to help combat one of the largest threats to the U.S. financial infrastructure, money laundering with virtual currency,” said U.S. Secret Service Assistant Director Jenkins. “The Secret Service continues to adapt along with these cyber criminals to maintain our level of success in stopping them.”

“At this crucial time of unprecedented drug related deaths, one of the greatest threats we face is cyber drug trafficking,” said DEA Special Agent in Charge Hunt. “Because the Darknet invites criminals into our homes, and provides unlimited access to illegal commerce, law enforcement is taking steps to identify and arrest those involved. I applaud all the agencies who participated in this groundbreaking investigation.”

The extensive operation, which culminated in four weeks of more than 100 enforcement actions around the country, resulted in the following:
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The National Security Agency successfully broke the encryption on a number of “high potential” virtual private networks, including those of media organization Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military and internet service organizations, and a number of airline reservation systems, according to a March 2006 NSA document.

A virtual private network, or VPN, uses an encrypted connection to enable users to go over the internet and connect to a private network, such as a corporate intranet. This allows an organization’s staff to access internal services like file-sharing servers or private wikis without having to physically be in the office.

The NSA’s ability to crack into sensitive VPNs belonging to large organizations, all the way back in 2006, raises broader questions about the security of such networks. Many consumers pay for access to VPNs in order to mask the origin of their internet traffic from the sites they visit, hide their surfing habits from their internet service providers, and to protect against eavesdroppers on public Wi-Fi networks.

The fact that the NSA spied on Al Jazeera’s communications was reported by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2013, but that reporting did not mention that the spying was accomplished through the NSA’s compromise of Al Jazeera’s VPN. During the Bush administration, high-ranking U.S. officials criticized Al Jazeera, accusing the Qatar-based news organization of having an anti-American bias, including because it broadcasted taped messages from Osama bin Laden.

At the time, Al Jazeera defended itself against this criticism, insisting that its reporting was objective. “Osama bin Laden, like it or not, is a party to this present crisis,” news editor Ahmed Al Sheikh told the BBC in 2001. “If we said that we were not going to allow him the air time, then we would have lost our integrity and objectivity and our coverage of the story would have become unbalanced.”

According to the document, contained in the cache of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA also compromised VPNs used by airline reservation systems Iran Air, “Paraguayan SABRE,” Russian airline Aeroflot, and “Russian Galileo.” Sabre and Galileo are both privately operated, centralized computer systems that facilitate travel transactions like booking airline tickets. Collectively, they are used by hundreds of airlines around the world.

In Iraq, the NSA compromised VPNs at the Ministries of Defense and the Interior; the Ministry of Defense had been established by the U.S. in 2004 after the prior iteration was dissolved. Exploitation against the ministries’ VPNs appears to have occurred at roughly the same time as a broader “all-out campaign to penetrate Iraqi networks,” described by an NSA staffer in 2005.

“Although VPNs pose special challenges for SIGINT (signals intelligence) collection and processing, we’ve recently had notable success in exploiting these communications,” wrote the author of the document, an article for the internal NSA news site SIDtoday. The author added that the NSA’s Network Analysis Center had been focusing on “VPN SIGINT Development (SIGDev) for over three years now, and the investment is paying off!” The article does not say what VPN technology any of the targets used, nor does it give any technical details on how the NSA broke the encryption on them.
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People know that sugar is bad for your teeth – it is a common knowledge at this point. However, it is not enough to read the label and assess the amount of sugar in your food. Some more processed forms of starch can be broken down into sugars in the mouth. That is why a new research, commissioned by WHO, encourages people to stick to whole grain carbohydrates and avoid processed ones.

Food contains some starchy substances – that is just the way we construct our food. These are not good carbohydrates for your general health and you probably knew that by now just from experience. However, scientists long suspected that starch may be bad for your teeth. This new research did not show the correlation between the amount eaten and the risk of cavities. But it became clear that the risk is certainly higher is your diet contains a lot of starch. Scientists reviewed 33 academic papers on starch and oral health and made some interesting recommendations.

You should replace sweet starch with whole grain starches, which offers protection against gum disease. Whole grain starch is not processed as much and thus does not damage your oral health nowhere near as badly as processed sweet starch. Remember that such products as white bread, crackers, biscuits, cakes, pretzels and so on contain the bad kind of starch and wholegrains and legumes – the good one. These recommendations are a part of continuous effort of WHO to define the optimum carbohydrate consumption for the human body. For now WHO recommends limiting free sugar intake to less than 10 % of total energy (calorie) intake and notes that further reduction to 5 % is beneficial. Free sugars are the ones introduced by the makers of the food as well as the ones present naturally in food like honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates.

There are a lot of myths concerning carbohydrates in a normal everyday diet. Professor Paula Moynihan, leader of the research, said: “Despite an ill-advised fashion for eliminating carbohydrates from the diet, a carbohydrate-rich diet is shown to be fine for oral health so long as it is low in sugars and is based on whole grain varieties of carbs such as pasta, couscous and wholemeal bread”. The best solution is just to look for wholegrains in the aisle of your local store and limit your sugar intake.

Oral health is more important than you think. It is not the matter of cosmetics – teeth decay has an effect on your heart and the general health of your body. Sugar is bad for you in so many ways you should limit it as much as possible.

https://www.technology.org/2018/08/15/want-healthy-teeth-stick-to-wholegrain-carbohydrates/

Yellowstone National Park's supervolcano could be the result of rubbing tectonic plates after all, a new study suggest – challenging the favoured explanation which pins it on heat billowing up from deep beneath the crust.

Virginia Tech geoscientist Ying Zhou has identified anomalies in the crust that suggest sliding layers of rock are responsible for generating the enormous amount of heat, not a magma plume as was previously thought. This study might not settle the argument, but it does show the debate is far from over.

If there's one thing Wyoming's Yellowstone is famous for around the world – other than its pristine natural beauty – it's the churning belly of magma that could one day burst free in a catastrophic eruption.

But there's an ongoing debate over which geological forces are primarily responsible for the region's volcanic basement.

In one corner, there's the magma plume model, which blames a channel of molten rock rising from the mantle through a rift or weakening in the crust for the hot mess beneath the surface.

In the other, there's the subduction explanation. Huge chunks of Earth's crust slide over one another, creating the enormous amounts of rock-melting friction needed to fill Yellowstone's magma chambers.

Naturally, volcanoes that sit near the edge of tectonic plates – like those in Indonesia – are assumed to be powered by the rubbing-rocks model. For others, such as Hawaii's chain of volcanic islands, the magma plume model is a safer bet.

Yellowstone has all the hallmarks of a volcano produced by a hotspot of rising magma, sitting at the end of a dotted line of calderas – the sunken hollows that form after the eruption of a magma chamber.
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A pirate site which served copyrighted content over a nine-year period has been shut down by Ukranian cyberpolice. With half a million users, authorities say that OnlainFilm was among the top five most-visited sites in several countries. Five searches were carried out with computer equipment and cash seized.

While torrent sites were once the next big thing, streaming is now at the height of fashion.

A shocking number of platforms now offer instant access to massive movie and TV shows libraries, something the authorities seem powerless to do much about. Over in Ukraine, authorities say they have made a start.

For the past nine years Onlainfilm has been serving up movies to the masses but this week all that came to an end when local cyberpolice shut the operation down.

Government and police investigators report that after detecting “members of a criminal group” behind the site, police carried out five raids in the city of Khmelnytskyi located in the west of Ukraine.

“Online movie theater ‘Onlainfilm’ was among the five most-visited sites in several countries,” police said in a statement.

“Every day, the site was visited by half a million Internet users, and the number of video views exceeded two million. The total amount of videos posted on the site exceeded 50 TB.”

While police haven’t yet announced how many people were arrested, the image below reveals that hardware, money, and other items were seized during their searches.
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With the aim to protect the interests of copyright holders, Google is making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. This week the search engine revealed more information about the scope of this effort. Thus far, Google has downranked 65,000 sites, a measure that led to a 90% reduction in referrals from search results.

The entertainment industries have repeatedly accused Google of not doing enough to limit piracy while demanding tougher action.

Ideally, groups including the MPAA and RIAA want search engines to remove clearly infringing websites from their search results entirely, especially if courts have previously found them to be acting illegally.

While Google doesn’t want to remove whole sites, the critique did prompt the company to make changes.

For example, in 2014 it updated its core algorithms aimed at lowering the visibility of “pirate” sites. Using the number of accurate DMCA requests as an indicator, these sites are demoted in search results for certain key phrases.

“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily,” Google explained.

While the effects were felt immediately, it’s been unclear how many sites were affected by the algorithmic change. This week, the search engine is filling in some of these blanks.

In a comment to Australian media, Google states that it has demoted 65,000 sites in search results, a list that’s still growing every week. In total, the company received DMCA takedown requests for over 1.8 million domain names, so a little under 4% of these are downranked.
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Digital IDs should be brought in to end online anonymity that permits "mob rule" and lawlessness online, the security minister of United Kingdom has said.

Ben Wallace said authentication used by banks could also by employed by internet firms to crack down on bullying and grooming, as he warned that people had to make a choice between "the wild west or a civilised society" online. He also took aim at the "phoniness" of Silicon Valley billionaires, and called for companies such as WhatsApp to contribute to society over the negative costs of their technology, such as end-to-end encryption. It comes after Theresa May took another step against tech giants, saying they would be ordered to clamp down on vile attacks against women on their platforms. The prime minister will target firms such as Facebook and Twitter as she makes the pitch at the G7 summit this weekend, where she will urge social media firms to treat violent misogyny with the same urgency as they do terror threats. Mr Wallace told The Times: "A lot of the bullying on social media and the grooming is because those people know you cannot identify them. It is mob rule on the internet. You shouldn't be able to hide behind anonymity."

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/10/2113200/digital-ids-needed-to-end-mob-rule-online-says-uks-security-minister

The US European Commander wants more US troops in Europe "to deter Russian aggression." Meanwhile, Poland is offering the US $2 billion to build a permanent US base on its territory. And the US is moving 2,500 new tanks and fighting vehicles into Europe. Does Russia really want to invade Europe? Or is this a fantasy of the US military-industrial complex?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFwnHlakiW4

Hamstrung by troubles with lethal injection — gruesomely botched attempts, legal battles and growing difficulty obtaining the drugs — states are looking for alternative ways to carry out the death penalty. High on the list for some is a method that has never been used before: inhaling nitrogen gas.

Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi have authorized nitrogen for executions and are developing protocols to use it, which represents a leap into the unknown. There is no scientific data on executing people with nitrogen, leading some experts to question whether states, in trying to solve old problems, may create new ones.

“If and when states begin carrying out executions with nitrogen, it will amount to the same type of experimentation we see in the different variations of lethal injection,” said Jen Moreno, a lawyer who is an expert on lethal injection at the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic.

With some 2,750 inmates on death row in 31 states and in federal and military prisons, any jurisdiction that tries something new will be scrutinized as a test lab.

The push for change comes because lethal injection, introduced 40 years ago as more efficient and humane than the electric chair or gas chamber, has not met that promise. Indeed, it has sometimes resulted in spectacles that rival the ones it was meant to avert.

One pitfall is that execution teams must find a vein to infuse, a process that can be excruciating. In February, an Alabama execution team gave up after trying for more than two hours on an inmate whose blood vessels had been damaged by chemotherapy and drug abuse. His lawyer accused the team of opening an artery and puncturing the prisoner’s bladder. The state later said it would not try again to execute him.

Lethal injection also involves drugs that, if given incorrectly, can result in suffering. One is a paralyzing agent, and the other stops the heart. The paralyzing drug was included in the original plan for lethal injection partly to make the process look peaceful and less disturbing to witnesses, by preventing the prisoner from thrashing around. Both it and the heart-stopping drug are supposed to be given after a powerful sedative has rendered the person unconscious, but if the sedative does not work properly, the other two drugs can cause significant pain.

Barbiturates were originally used for sedation, but manufacturers began refusing to sell them for executions. So states tried substituting other drugs. Some were ineffective and left prisoners moaning in what appeared to be prolonged agony.
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