Source: https://www.brighteon.com/61b65d7e-6a28-4ed1-a65d-
0468f2eff523#disqus_thread
„Did You Know Your Government Kills Men They Can’t Control?
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Think About It
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In January of 2016, a man who refused to allow tyranny to violate his constitutional rights was shot in cold blood by state and federal law enforcement in America. This is why we must NOT allow his death to be forgotten.“
Jimmie Campton Jr.: Yes I did know this I’ve known for years. 20 some odd years ago I worked for these people. I’ll say no more.
Matt Cohrs: bully enough people and someone will eventually fight back.
Marko Vovk: CIA is the new hitman. Seals hit people all day long in USA.
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From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic
„Data Centre Storage
From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic
By Thomas Claburn in San Francisco 7 Mar 2019
It’s not just the walls that have ears. It’s also the hard drives.
Eggheads at the University of Michigan in the US, and Zhejiang University in China, have found that hard disk drives (HDDs) can be turned into listening devices, using malicious firmware and signal processing calculations.
For a study titled „Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone,“ computer scientists Andrew Kwong, Wenyuan Xu, and Kevin Fu describe an acoustic side-channel that can be accessed by measuring how sound waves make hard disk parts vibrate.
„Our research demonstrates that the mechanical components in magnetic hard disk drives behave as microphones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human speech,“ their paper, obtained by The Register ahead of its formal publication, stated. „These unintentional microphones sense speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive.“
The team’s research work, scheduled to be presented in May at the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, explores how it’s possible to alter HDD firmware to measure the offset of a disk drive’s read/write head from the center of the track it’s seeking.
The offset is referred to as the Positional Error Signal (PES) and hard drives monitor this signal to keep the read/write head in the optimal position for reading and writing data. PES measurements must be very fine because drive heads can only be off by a few nanometers before data errors arise. The sensitivity of the gear, however, means human speech is sufficient to move the needle, so to speak.
„These extremely precise measurements are sensitive to vibrations caused by the slightest fluctuations in air pressure, such as those induced by human vocalizations,“ the paper explained.
Vibrations from HDD parts don’t yield particularly good sound, but with digital filtering techniques, human speech can be discerned, given the right conditions.
Flashing HDD firmware is a prerequisite for the snooping, the paper says, because the ATA protocol does not expose the PES. This could be accomplished through traditional attack techniques – binary exploitation, drive-by downloads, or phishing – or by intercepting HDDs somewhere in the supply chain and modifying them. The researchers point to the Grayfish malware attributed to the Equation Group as an example.
To exfiltrate captured data, the three boffins suggest transmitting it over the internet by modifying Linux operating system files to create a reverse shell with root privileges or storing it to disk for physical recovery at a later date.
While many computing devices come with microphones that might look like easier targets for hijacking, the researchers observe that security conscious individuals may disable known microphones in software or with hardware hacks. A hard disk-focused attack would be less expected.
But look, let’s be real: for the vast, vast majority of people, this is all just a cunning academic exploitation of hard drive technology. No one’s really going to bug you via your spinning rust.
But… if they were to, the PES sampling rate (34.56 kHz) allows the capture of audio signals up to 17.28 kHz, which covers almost all of human hearing (20 Hz–20 kHz) and is significantly better than the sampling rate of the telephone system (8 kHz). Since the PES data amounts to air pressure readings, the researchers simply turned the series of PES measurements into linear pulse-code modulation values and then converted these samples into sound via digital signal processing algorithms.
Wait, there’s a catch
One limiting aspect of the described technique is that it requires a fairly loud conversation in the vicinity of the eavesdropping hard drive. To record comprehensible speech, the conversation had to reach 85 dBA, with 75 dBA being the low threshold for capturing muffled sound. To get Shazam to identify recordings captured through a hard drive, the source file had to be played at 90 dBA. Which is pretty loud. Like lawn mower or food blender loud.
The researchers acknowledge this is louder than most practical scenarios but they say they „expect that an attacker using state of the art filtering and voice recognition algorithms can substantially amplify the channel’s strength.“
While the growing popularity of solid state drives diminish the risk even further, there were still twice as many hard drives sold with PCs in 2017 as there were solid state drives, the researchers claimed.
To prevent HDDs from being turned into microphones, the trio suggest hard drive makers sign firmware cryptographically and use TLS when distributing updates to prevent MITM attacks.
They also note that their work may open future research possibilities, such as using a hard disk’s read/write head as a crude sounds generator to issue spoken commands to nearby connected speakers like Alexa, Google Home, and Siri. ®
Addendum: If you’re suffering deja-vu, the paper cites Alfredo Ortega’s earlier work on using hard disks as microphones, although its authors claim they use a different technique to measure the effects of sound, and require a lower volume compared to other approaches.“
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/07/hard_drive_eavesdropping/ -
19-Year-Old Indigenous Climate Activist Artemisa Xakriabá: “We Fight for Mother Earth”
„19-Year-Old Indigenous Climate Activist Artemisa Xakriabá: “We Fight for Mother Earth”“

„Friday’s climate strike in New York City concluded with remarks from indigenous leaders, activists and organizers. Artemisa Xakriabá, a 19-year-old indigenous climate activist of the Xakriabá people, spoke about the increasing intensity of environmental destruction across Brazil and the interconnectedness of the fight for climate justice. “We fight for our Mother Earth because the fight for Mother Earth is the mother of all other fights,” Xakriabá said. “We are fighting for your lives. We are fighting for our lives. We are fighting for our sacred territory. But we are being persecuted, threatened, murdered, only for protecting our own territories. We cannot accept one more drop of indigenous blood spilled.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
CLIMATE STRIKERS: People over profits! People over profits! People over profits! People over profits! Wall Street, we see your greed! Wall Street, we see your greed!
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the Gobal Climate Strike in New York. The protest ended at Battery Park, where 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd. But first, Artemisa Xakrriabá, a 19-year-old indigenous activist from Brazil, took to the stage.
ARTEMISA XAKRIABÁ: [translated] My name is Artemisa Xakriabá. I am 19 years old, and I am from the Xakriabá people in Brazil. I am here today representing the more than 25 million indigenous and traditional communities from the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities. This alliance is formed by four organizations: APIB from Brazil, COICA from the Amazon Basin, AMPB from Central America and AMAN from Indonesia. Together, we protect 600 million hectares of forest.
But I am also here as a young woman, because there’s no difference between an indigenous young female activist like myself and a young indigenous female activist like Greta. Our future is connected by the same threads of the climate crisis.
The Amazon is on fire. The Amazon agonizes year after year for the responsibility of the government and its destructive policies that intensify deforestation and drought, not only in the Amazon, but in the other five Brazilian biomes. Climate change is a result of this, and it also helps to make the fires stronger. And beyond the Amazon, there are the forests of Indonesia, Africa, North America, whose suffering has such an impact in my life and in your life.
We, the indigenous peoples, are the children of nature, so we fight for our Mother Earth, because the fight for Mother Earth is the mother of all other fights. We are fighting for your lives. We are fighting for our lives. We are fighting for our sacred territory. But we are being persecuted, threatened, murdered, only for protecting our own territories. We cannot accept one more drop of indigenous blood spilled.“
Source: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/23/brazil_indigenous_climate_activist_artemisa_xakriaba







