Foreign Sabotage Suspected in Phobos-Grunt Meltdown

Source: The Register
Brid-Aine Parnell

Russian space chief doesn't want to point any fingers, but...

The head of the Russian space agency has hinted that foreign sabotage might be to blame for the malfunction of the country's Martian space probe, Phobos-Grunt.

Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin told Russian newspaper Izvestia (in Russian, translation by Google Translate) that he had no complete explanation for the frequent failures of the agency's space projects, but he suggested Russia might not be entirely to blame.

"Today there is no clarity, why the propulsion unit onboard Phobos-Grunt failed to start," he said.

"It is also unclear, why our satellites often have failures at the time when they fly out of range [of Russian mission control] where we don't see the vehicle and do not receive telemetry from it. I don’t want to make any accusations, but today there is powerful equipment to influence spacecrafts, and the possibility of their use should not be ruled out,” he added.

Secret App On Millions of Phones Logs Key Taps

Source: The Register
Dan Goodin

An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users.

In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he had reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged by the software.

Ironically, he says, the Carrier IQ software recorded the “hello world” dispatch even before it was displayed on his handset.

Eckhart then connected the device to a Wi-Fi network and pointed his browser at Google. Even though he denied the search giant's request that he share his physical location, the Carrier IQ software recorded it. The secret app then recorded the precise input of his search query – again, “hello world” – even though he typed it into a page that uses the SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol to encrypt data sent between the device and the servers.

“We can see that Carrier IQ is querying these strings over my wireless network [with] no 3G connectivity and it is reading HTTPS,” the 25-year-old Eckhart says.