1. Flip the "removable" bit (the bit which makes the drive show up as removable / fixed harddrive)
2. Format a non-bootable thumbdrive in a way that you can boot from it (even when regular formatting and trying unetbootin etc. doesn't work)

Radio Totse
We’re now closing in on 20 years since KIWI Radio operated regularly from New Zealand and was heard across nearly all of North America (and with a good signal in the western half of North America. But new station Radio Totse reminded everyone just how well signals can propagate from the South Pacific.
Temple of the Screaming Electron (TOTSE) was a San Francisco-area BBS that was in operation from 1989 to 1998 and as a website on the Internet until 2009. The TOTSE site specialized in controversial subjects that many sites would shy away from. The idea was that absolutely nothing was off limits. For example, TOTSE was notorious among the mainstream media for such things as users who posted bomb-building plans.
Radio Totse not only follows the concepts of TOTSE, but the station’s operator, Daktologist, is a regular contributor to the totseans.com site, which continues the traditions of the original site. Dak first posted on the site that he would be building a radio station as early as January 2012. From that point, Dak regularly updated readers as to his progress with assembling the station, building the antenna, setting up the generator, etc. Despite all of the interest on the board and the how-to information, none of the other board members have taken the plunge into pirate radio.
Radio Totse uses an Icom IC-718 transceiver into a helically wound vertical with a capacitance hat at about 30 feet. The antenna tower is a guyed PVC mast made entirely from junked components. He also uses an MFJ Versa Tuner II and a Power Max generator.
The first broadcast from Radio Totse that was first reported in North America on August 4 on 6925 kHz USB, but the station had made a few in-band SWBC transmissions on frequencies like 6050 and 17730 kHz as far back as February 2013. In August the station was reported 10 times in North America, then twice in September, five times in October, another five times in November, and once in December. Nearly all of the broadcasts were heard for a few hours between 0700 and 1100 UTC. Radio Totse was reported many more times through the end of the year, however, thanks to a North American relay station that was airing the programs on their own, with no relay IDs. After a few dozen relay broadcasts with no IDs, the station started to identify itself as WRR, Whiskey Redneck Radio by early January. These relays were reported on a number of frequencies--including 6966.66, 6930, and 6940 kHz USB at times between 1400 and 0400 UTC.

Yes, it seems like the mystery has been solved.

We are aware of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) powers to break almost unbreakable encryption used on the Internet and intercept nearly Trillions of Internet connections – thanks to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

However, what we are not aware of is exactly how did the NSA apparently intercept VPN connections, and decrypt SSH and HTTPS, allowing the agency to read hundreds of Millions of personal, private emails from persons around the globe.

Now, computer scientists Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security that advances the most plausible theory as to how the NSA broke some of the most widespread encryption used on the Internet.

According to the paper, the NSA has exploited common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – a common means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels – to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections.

Diffie-Hellman – the encryption used for HTTPS, SSH, and VPNs – helps users communicate by swapping cryptographic keys and running them through an algorithm that nobody else knows except the sender and receiver.

It is described as secure against surveillance from the NSA and other state-sponsored spies, as it would take hundreds or thousands of years and by them and a nearly unimaginable amount of money to decrypt directly.

However, a serious vulnerability in the way the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is implemented is allowing the intelligence agencies and spies to break and eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

To crack just one of the extremely large prime numbers of a Diffie-Hellman in the most commonly used 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman keys would take about a year and cost a few hundred Million dollars.

However, according to researchers, only a few prime numbers are commonly used that might have fit well within the agency's $11 Billion-per-year budget dedicated to "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities."

"Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous," said Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger in a blog post published Wednesday.

"Breaking a single, 1024-bit prime would allow the NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections."

Around 92% of the top 1 Million Alexa HTTPS domains make use of the same two primes for Diffie-Hellman, possibly enabling the agency to pre-compute a crack on those two prime numbers and read nearly all Internet traffic through those servers.
According to the duo, this NSA technological project to crack crypto on a scale has "not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II."

Study: 11% of Americans Think HTML Is an STD

According to a new study

Had a particularly raucous night that ended with you doing the walk of shame the next morning? Uh oh, hope you don’t get HTML. Just kidding! HTML is a programming language that’s used to make websites, but according to a new study from VoucherCloud and published by the L.A. Times, 1 in every 9 Americans–or exactly 11%–think HTML is actually a sexually transmitted disease. VoucherCloud surveyed 2,392 people ages 18 or older and, according to the L.A. Times, “were given both tech and non-tech terms and were asked to choose from three possible definitions.” The results? An embarrassing amount of Americans think HTML is a disease you can catch from another human being–which says a lot about the state of both sex and computer education in the U.S. Other findings, unearthed by the Times:

http://time.com/12410/11-of-americans-think-html-is-an-std/

Edward Snowden: Smartphones can be hacked into with just one text message and then used to spy on their owners

GCHQ, the UK’s spying agency, has a ‘smurf suite’ of tools that allow it to break into and listen in on phones, Snowden claims from Moscow

The world’s spying agencies have tools that allow them to take over smartphones with just a text message, according to Edward Snowden, and there is “very little” that their owners can do to stop it.

The UK’s intelligence agency has a suite of tools that let it listen on phones and their owners, Snowden told the BBC’s Panorama in Moscow. All spies would need to do is send a special text message and they will be able to gain access to the camera and its microphones, the BBC reported Snowden as saying.

The set of tools is called “Smurf Suite”, according to Snowden. Each of the individual tools has their own name — “Dreamy Smurf” lets the phone be powered on and off, for instance, and “Nosey Smurf” lets spies turn the microphone on and listen in on users, even if the phone itself is turned off.

GCHQ even has a tool called “Paranoid Smurf” that hides the fact that it has taken control of the phone. The tool will stop people from recognising that the phone has been tampered with if it is taken in for a service, for instance.

“For example, if you wanted to take the phone in to get it serviced because you saw something strange going on or you suspected something was wrong, it makes it much more difficult for any technician to realise that anything's gone amiss,” Snowden said.

The comments mirror those by Snowden earlier in the year, when his lawyer said that the whistleblower doesn’t use an iPhone because it “has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him, that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone”.

The text message used to gain access to the phone wouldn’t be seen by its user and they would have no idea that it had arrived, Snowden said.

"That's a specially crafted message that's texted to your number like any other text message but when it arrives at your phone it's hidden from you,” Snowden said. “It doesn't display. You paid for it [the phone] but whoever controls the software owns the phone."

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/edward-snowden-smartphones-can-be-hacked-into-with-just-one-text-message-and-then-used-to-spy-on-a6680546.html

GET PATCHED: Adobe plugs Hacking Team Flash holes and more

Adobe has released patches for its Flash software to fix a pair of critical security vulnerabilities exposed by the Hacking Team megabreach. The bugs can be exploited to hijack PCs and infect them with malware – and crooks are already doing just that, so apply the updates now.

The security bulletin for Adobe Flash Player (APSB15-18) addresses both zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-5122, CVE-2015-5123). Version 18.0.0.209 Flash Player and associated browser plugins for Windows, Macintosh and Linux replace earlier releases, and constitute a critical update on affected systems.

Adobe was obliged to plug Flash last week because of an earlier 0-day which also emerged from the Hacking Team leak. Flash software is frequently targeted by cybercrooks and spies, prompting growing calls in the security community to ditch the technology.

There have been 11 Flash updates this year alone, and six have come outside Adobe's regular patching cycle as hurry-up patches for zero-day flaws, according to data from the software developer. This is a high patching overhead so it's no great surprise that patience with Adobe is wearing thin.

Facebook's recently installed security chief has just called for timetable to kill off Flash, while Firefox took the unusually aggressive step on Monday of blocking Flash plugins by default pending the patch which has now arrived.

The Flash updates are especially important because exploits targeting these vulnerabilities have already surfaced, as even Adobe admits.

Although the Flash update heads the bill the latest software updates from Adobe will also include a critical update for Adobe Shockwave Player (APSB15-17). Windows and Macintosh versions of the software need updating to version 12.1.9.159 because of flaws identified by Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs that have not so far made it into the wild in the firm of active exploits.

Lastly, Adobe is also releasing updates for Adobe Acrobat and Reader (APSB15-15) to "address critical vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system". Multiple bugs are resolved by the patches and Windows and Macintosh platforms are both affected, which sounds bad.

However Adobe attaches a patching priority of "two" to the updates compared to a higher priority of "one" to the Flash and Shockwave updates.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/14/adobe_flash_patch_tuesday/

jwplayer("myElement").setup({
    playlist: [{
        image: "/assets/sintel.jpg",
        sources: [{ 
          file: "/assets/q1audio1.mp4"
        }],
        title: "Sintel Movie Trailer",
        tracks: [{
          file: "/assets/captions.vtt"
        }]
    }]
});


Now this is the hard part, how I can make a file like that save it? Not really sure on this, Slarti any comments?