Australia – Senior managers of the companies building Australia’s largest desalination plant in Victoria have denied authorising covert surveillance at the site.
Construction workers have walked off the site near Wonthaggi, south-east of Melbourne, following allegations the project’s joint venture company, Thiess Degremont, hired operatives to spy on them. The allegations were revealed this morning by The Australian newspaper, which says it has sources and documents about what was called Operation Pluto.
The newspaper says it was a secret deal between senior managers of Thiess and the Australian Security Intelligence group (ASI), a company run by experienced strike breaker Bruce Townsend. (
more)
CA – A San Ramon, California, man is facing charges he stole valuable technology (The sugar pie.) from his former employer in hopes of building competitive location-aware products.
Zhiqiang “Michael” Zhang was arrested Tuesday, on charges that he stole trade secrets from Sirf Technology, a San Jose, California, maker of Global Positioning System chipsets, used by wireless location-aware programs in devices such as mobile phones and automobile navigation systems. A noted expert on location aware technology, Zhang had been a director of software development before resigning from Sirf in May 2009. He had been with the company for seven years.
According to prosecutors, Zhang then set up a company called Anywhere Logic “in order to develop and sell location-based services utilizing trade secrets stolen from Sirf.”
Zhang allegedly hired two Sirf engineers (The honey bunch.), Xiaodong Liang and Yanmin Li away from Sirf to work at Anywhere Logic. They have also been charged in the case, but are now living in China. (The same old song.) (more) (sing-a-long)
Almost a third of employees regularly breach enterprise mobile management policies by using personal smartphones for work purposes, according to a report.
The survey of 1,100 mobile workers by iPass, a provider of enterprise mobility services, found 22% of employees breached their employers’ strict smartphone policies when using non-managed personal smartphones to access corporate information, putting data at a security risk.
“Un-provisioned smartphones are a significant risk to enterprises,” said Steven Wastie, senior vice-president marketing and product management at iPass. “20% of these mobile employees have experienced a relevant security issue with their smartphone containing business data lost, stolen, infected or hacked.” (more)
Facebook has released the updated application for BlackBerry handsets which finally brought Places, the location-based tagging facility to rival the popular Foursquare service.
Yet with this, the developers must not have taken into account the BlackBerry Simulation Software, which for all intents and purposes is a fully functional device for the desktop yet purely for simulating the phone and testing applications, can be used to spoof your Facebook Places and Twitter status locations.
This screenshot gallery will guide you through everything. (more)
If you want to, however, go right to the good bit, by all means skip to it by clicking
here.
One cannot overstate the importance of Thursday night’s Delta 4-Heavy launch from Cape Canaveral to national security, a mission by the massive rocket that will deploy “the largest satellite in the world” to hear the whispers of evil…
The clandestine payload going up this time, known only by its launch identification number of
NROL-32, is widely believed to be an essential eavesdropping spacecraft that requires the powerful lift provided by the Delta 4-Heavy to reach its listening post…
…this new spacecraft supposedly will unfurl an extremely lightweight but
gigantically huge umbrella-like antenna to overhear enemy communications and aid U.S. intelligence.
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more)
