Free TeraBytes ( TB ) Cloud Storage

In “PolifrogBlog”:

Did I mention free cloud storage?

Yeah, these are Chinese based companies so if that bothers you, you haven't heard of the NSA. With the USA having given up the last breath of honest governance there is no disadvantage in embracing the Chinese cloud storage give away.

Understand that if your data is of the type that it might ruffle the feathers of governance it is best to have that data in a country that you do not reside. 

And, of course, you can always encrypt before uploading.  
For those of you concerned about installing the PC client and mobile device software I have noticed that removing the software from my phone and/or computer once it has been downloaded, installed and used to sign in to my account does not reduce my increased cloud storage capacity.

Of note, according to the translations the Chinese think of it, not as a "cloud", but as a "network drive".  Get it free while you can...
What follows is a quick synopsis of four cloud solutions. 

But for more details (including upload/download speed restraints as compared to American counterparts  and maximum file size restraints regarding not only upload, but limits as well) concerning each visit this guy's thorough comments as he explored each.  His preference was for 360.

Weiyun (Tencent)

Although I have never been exposed to them until now, Tencent is apparently a huge tech company in SE Asia, like one of the top 5 in the world. That size allows Tencent (like Mega) to store data in multiple countries, not just China.  There is some confidence to be had in that.

One may upload file no larger than 4GB unless one engages the "power upload plugin" at which point the max. file size increases to 32GB.

Here are the steps required to get your 10TB

1. Register in the QQ service
2. Install Tencent Cloud app for your smartphone. Login with the data from step 1.
3. Click “Get 10TB”.
4. And don't forget to use the  English version of  Tencent's web offering.

Qihoo 360 (36TB)

Qihoo360 is currently the MacDaddy of cloud storage with 36TB.   To get hold of all 36TB, you must download the PC client & the Android or iOS app.  Downloading and signing in to the phone app alone will net you 26TB but if you choose to download and sign in the PC client you will get another 10TB which gets you to 36,000GB

That's a lot of storage but it does not stop there.  If one signs in each day and clicks on the drawing one gets the chance to increase their storage quota by  around 1/4GB to around 7GB.  Over 30 days this netted me nearly 50GB ... not that I really needed it. Not only is there this game play, but there is another which nets me an additional 150gig/day and up. My understanding is that 360 maxes out at 150TB.

Unfortunately Qihoo is still displayed in Chinese as are the apps and the PC client.  That will change soon, though.  Patience.
For those of you cautious about installing the PC client, I flipped steps 5 and 6 choosing to only to install the mobile device software and get the 26TB for my wife's account.  She was, however,  disturbed by the related Chinese notifications so I later removed that software from her phone incurring no penalty in the process.

Here are the steps required to get your 36TB

1. Go to http://huodong.yunpan.360.cn/xt and click the orange button.
2. In the popup window, click the text near the bottom right corner to Register a new account.
3. Then enter your email address and your password twice.
4. Get 10TB-- Now go to http://huodong.yunpan.360.cn/xt to download the PC software (labeled 1), sign in with your account from steps 1 and 2 above and then go back to http://huodong.yunpan.360.cn/xt to claim your 10TB by clicking the orange button. (From the comments: Timo Riemer said, "When the desktop client appears i had to click on the chinese text in the bottom right corner and use the login screen that appears.")
5. Get 26TB-- Now repeat step number 4 but download your phone app (the QR code helps to get your phone to the right place), sign in with your phone and then claim your 26TB

 

 

Get 10 TB of cloud storage for free (32 GB filesize upload limit):

http://www.weiyun.com/act/10t-en.html?WYTAG=weiyun.portal.index

Features of Weiyun QQ Cloud Storage

Micro cloud

Tencent micro-cloud is built for the user to carefully build a smart cloud services, they are already serving more than 300 million users in the use of micro-cloud providers

Features

1. Album backups:

A key backup cell phones all the photos, support background operation. You can back up 50 million, equivalent to 800 16G version of the phone can be saved photos. Since then do not worry about the phone is lost or shot full.

2. File player to view:

On a document on your computer, pictures, phone can still turn on, anytime, anywhere can view, important documents can be read offline.

3. Write notes:
Shopping lists, notes, lecture notes, address, phone, anytime included, as you create

4 Built-in QQ video kernel:
Has more than one hundred kinds of format playback capability, support for rich audio format player (RMVB, AVI, WMA, etc.), popular videos online play more directly, without having to wait for downloads.

5 Scan two-dimensional code:
Scan two-dimensional code to open any website, coupons, documents can be saved immediately, later want to use to use anytime, anywhere

6. Face no pressure to share:
Photo shoot with friends, meeting issued a document, the automatic distribution of micro-cloud two-dimensional code, can be distributed to everyone swept away, without first Add as Friend

7. Super sharing capabilities:
Share a key to QQ friends, QQ group, micro letters, circle of friends, QQ space, microblogging, E-mail, SMS.

8. Triple safety protection:
Separate account password + password + triple lock screen password protection, foolproof.

9. Powerful file management capabilities:
File categorized, support global search and batch operation, a unique thumbnail display mode to help you complete control over your file resources, arbitrary.

10. Compressed preview:
Received compressed (zip, rar, 7z) can be previewed on the iPhone, without having to download to your computer

11. Micro Cloud Transmission:
Large video phone, a large number of photos, point-speed transmission to the iPad or computer, 100M video do not get 1 minute, do not waste flow

12. Clipboard:
Some text, URL links, telephone address, phone copy, paste computers; computer copy, paste the phone.

Let us know what you think about this 10 TB cloud storage giveaway by Weiyun(QQ) for free and your experiences too.

 

Forget 1TB, China’s Tencent is giving away 10TB worth of free cloud storage

What Makes Lemons So Healthy?

In “DrWeil.com":

This tip is courtesy of Dr. Weil on Healthy Aging: Your Online Guide to the Anti-Inflammatory Diet.

Available year-round, lemons are at their peak in May - just in time for homemade lemonade.

A citrus fruit, lemons are a good source of vitamin C, a potent antioxidant that helps to keep the immune system strong.

Lemons come in both sour (Eureka and Lisbon) and relatively sweet (Meyer) varieties. Look for a lemon that is heavy for its size, which indicates less skin and more flesh. The peel should have a finely grained texture and be fully yellow.

You can use both the flesh and the peel (as a zest if the lemon is organic) in all types of dishes, so enjoy - we like them in the Lemon Olive Oil Cake recipe.

And don't limit the lemons to cooking - lemons make an effective, natural cleaning product for your home. To clean and polish wood furniture, add two tablespoons of lemon juice to 10 drops of (real) lemon oil and a few drops of jojoba oil.

 

How to Make Lemon Olive Oil Cake:

 

Lemon Olive Oil Cake:

Food as Medicine
Compounds known as limonins in the cells of citrus fruits have been shown to help reduce the risk of cancers of the mouth, skin, lung, breast, stomach and colon.

Ingredients

4 lemons, zested and juiced
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 eggs
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 cups evaporated cane sugar
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder

Instructions

1. Combine zest, juice and olive oil in a small bowl.
2. In the mixer combine eggs & salt. Mix on medium for 2 minutes. Slowly add the sugar and continue to mix until pale and thickened.
3. Turn mixer to low and slowly sift in the flour and baking powder, followed by the olive oil mixture. Do not over mix at this point; just incorporate the ingredients.
4. Pour this mixture into a cake pan or muffin tin. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes for cupcakes and 35 minutes for large cakes. Poke with a toothpick to check for doneness.
5. Serve with Greek yogurt and fresh strawberries.

What we're learning from online education

In “TED”:

Ver: Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education - Subtitles and Transcript

31 de Janeiro - Dia Nacional do Sargento

Hoje, 31 de Janeiro, é o dia nacional do Sargento português.

Passados 124 anos da Revolta do Porto, os Sargentos que servem Portugal, conscientes da importância da história de um povo, proclamam o direito a ter o seu dia, um dia glorioso, não por celebrar uma vitória, mas por recordar o sonho da Liberdade, da Igualdade e da Fraternidade.

 

 

VIVA O 31 DE JANEIRO - DIA NACIONAL DO SARGENTO

 

Ver:

http://mpmendespt.blogspot.pt/2009/01/31-de-janeiro-dia-nacional-do-sargento.html

http://www.ans.pt/

http://www.exercito.pt/sites/ESE/Documents/Newsletter%20007/31%20de%20Janeiro%20de%201891.pdf

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolta_de_31_de_janeiro_de_1891

https://www.facebook.com/ANSargentos

http://www.dnoticias.pt/impressa/diario/cartasdoleitor/edicao-2015-01-31/495652-rua-31-de-janeiro

The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle

In “SPIEGEL ONLINE”:

By Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Gibson, Claudio Guarnieri, Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Leif Ryge, Hilmar Schmundt and Michael Sontheimer

 

Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things."

Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). More precisely, it's operated by the NSA's digital snipers with Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the department responsible for breaking into computers.

Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to "remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware." Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to "remotely brick network cards." With programs like Berserkr they would implant "persistent backdoors" and "parasitic drivers". Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would "erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments."

An intern's tasks might also include remotely destroying the functionality of hard drives. Ultimately, the goal of the internship program was "developing an attacker's mindset."

The internship listing is eight years old, but the attacker's mindset has since become a kind of doctrine for the NSA's data spies. And the intelligence service isn't just trying to achieve mass surveillance of Internet communication, either. The digital spies of the Five Eyes alliance -- comprised of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- want more.

The Birth of D Weapons

According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.

During the 20th century, scientists developed so-called ABC weapons -- atomic, biological and chemical. It took decades before their deployment could be regulated and, at least partly, outlawed. New digital weapons have now been developed for the war on the Internet. But there are almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D weapons, and the only law that applies is the survival of the fittest.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw these developments decades ago. In 1970, he wrote, "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." That's precisely the reality that spies are preparing for today.

The US Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force have already established their own cyber forces, but it is the NSA, also officially a military agency, that is taking the lead. It's no coincidence that the director of the NSA also serves as the head of the US Cyber Command. The country's leading data spy, Admiral Michael Rogers, is also its chief cyber warrior and his close to 40,000 employees are responsible for both digital spying and destructive network attacks.

Surveillance only 'Phase 0'

From a military perspective, surveillance of the Internet is merely "Phase 0" in the US digital war strategy. Internal NSA documents indicate that it is the prerequisite for everything that follows. They show that the aim of the surveillance is to detect vulnerabilities in enemy systems. Once "stealthy implants" have been placed to infiltrate enemy systems, thus allowing "permanent accesses," then Phase Three has been achieved -- a phase headed by the word "dominate" in the documents. This enables them to "control/destroy critical systems & networks at will through pre-positioned accesses (laid in Phase 0)." Critical infrastructure is considered by the agency to be anything that is important in keeping a society running: energy, communications and transportation. The internal documents state that the ultimate goal is "real time controlled escalation".

One NSA presentation proclaims that "the next major conflict will start in cyberspace." To that end, the US government is currently undertaking a massive effort to digitally arm itself for network warfare. For the 2013 secret intelligence budget, the NSA projected it would need around $1 billion in order to increase the strength of its computer network attack operations. The budget included an increase of some $32 million for "unconventional solutions" alone.

NSA Docs on Network Attacks and Exploitation

• Excerpt from the secret NSA budget on computer network operations / Code word GENIE
• Document about the expansion of the Remote Operations Center (ROC) on endpoint operations
• Document explaining the role of the Remote Operations Center (ROC)
• Interview with an employee of NSA's department for Tailored Access Operations about his field of work
• Supply-chain interdiction / Stealthy techniques can crack some of SIGINT's hardest targets
• Classification guide for computer network exploitation (CNE)
• NSA training course material on computer network operations
• Overview of methods for NSA integrated cyber operations
• NSA project description to recognize and process data that comes from third party attacks on computers
• Exploring and exploiting leaky mobile apps with BADASS
• Overview of projects of the TAO/ATO department such as the remote destruction of network cards
• iPhone target analysis and exploitation with Apple's unique device identifiers (UDID)
• Report of an NSA Employee about a Backdoor in the OpenSSH Daemon
• NSA document on QUANTUMSHOOTER, an implant to remote-control computers with good network connections from unknown third parties

In recent years, malware has emerged that experts have attributed to the NSA and its Five Eyes alliance based on a number of indicators. They include programs like Stuxnet, used to attack the Iranian nuclear program. Or Regin, a powerful spyware trojan that created a furor in Germany after it infected the USB stick of a high-ranking staffer to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Agents also used Regin in attacks against the European Commission, the EU's executive, and Belgian telecoms company Belgacom in 2011.

Given that spies can routinely break through just about any security software, virtually all Internet users are at risk of a data attack.

The new documents shed some new light on other revelations as well. Although an attack called Quantuminsert has been widely reported by SPIEGEL and others, documentation shows that in reality it has a low success rate and it has likely been replaced by more reliable attacks such as Quantumdirk, which injects malicious content into chat services provided by websites such as Facebook and Yahoo. And computers infected with Straitbizarre can be turned into disposable and non-attributable "shooter" nodes. These nodes can then receive messages from the NSA's Quantum network, which is used for "command and control for very large scale active exploitation and attack." The secret agents were also able to breach mobile phones by exploiting a vulnerability in the Safari browser in order to obtain sensitive data and remotely implant malicious code.

In this guerilla war over data, little differentiation is made between soldiers and civilians, the Snowden documents show. Any Internet user could suffer damage to his or her data or computer. It also has the potential to create perils in the offline world as well. If, for example, a D weapon like Barnfire were to destroy or "brick" the control center of a hospital as a result of a programming error, people who don't even own a mobile phone could be affected.

Intelligence agencies have adopted "plausible deniability" as their guiding principle for Internet operations. To ensure their ability to do so, they seek to make it impossible to trace the author of the attack.

It's a stunning approach with which the digital spies deliberately undermine the very foundations of the rule of law around the globe. This approach threatens to transform the Internet into a lawless zone in which superpowers and their secret services operate according to their own whims with very few ways to hold them accountable for their actions.

NSA Docs on Malware and Implants

• CSEC document about the recognition of trojans and other "network based anomaly"
• The formalized process through which analysts choose their data requirement and then get to know the tools that can do the job
• QUANTUMTHEORY is a set of technologies allowing man-on-the-side interference attacks on TCP/IP connections (includes STRAIGHTBIZARRE and DAREDEVIL)
• Sample code of a malware program from the Five Eyes alliance

Attribution is difficult and requires considerable forensic effort. But in the new documents there are at least a few pointers. Querty, for example, is a keylogger that was part of the Snowden archive. It's a piece of software designed to surreptitiously intercept all keyboard keys pressed by the victim and record them for later inspection. It is an ordinary, indeed rather dated, keylogger. Similar software can already be found in numerous applications, so it doesn't seem to pose any acute danger -- but the sourcecode contained in it does reveal some interesting details. They suggest that this keylogger might be part of the large arsenal of modules that that belong to the Warriorpride program, a kind of universal Esperanto software used by all the Five Eyes partner agencies that at times was even able to break into iPhones, among other capabilities. The documents published by SPIEGEL include sample code from the keylogger to foster further research and enable the creation of appropriate defenses.

'Just a Bunch of Hackers'

The men and women working for the Remote Operations Center (ROC), which uses the codename S321, at the agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, work on one of the NSA's most crucial teams, the unit responsible for covert operations. S321 employees are located on the third floor of one of the main buildings on the NSA's campus. In one report from the Snowden archive, an NSA man reminisces about how, when they got started, the ROC people were "just a bunch of hackers." Initially, people worked "in a more ad hoc manner," the report states. Nowadays, however, procedures are "more systematic". Even before NSA management massively expanded the ROC group during the summer of 2005, the department's motto was, "Your data is our data, your equipment is our equipment."

NSA Docs on Exfiltration

• Explanation of the APEX method of combining passive with active methods to exfiltrate data from networks attacked
• Explanation of APEX shaping to put exfiltrating network traffic into patterns that allow plausible deniability
• Presentation on the FASHIONCLEFT protocol that the NSA uses to exfiltrate data from trojans and implants to the NSA
• Methods to exfiltrate data even from devices which are supposed to be offline
• Document detailing SPINALTAP, an NSA project to combine data from active operations and passive signals intelligence
• Technical description of the FASHIONCLEFT protocol the NSA uses to exfiltrate data from Trojans and implants to the NSA

The agents sit in front of their monitors, working in shifts around the clock. Just how close the NSA has already gotten to its aim of "global network dominance" is illustrated particularly well by the work of department S31177, codenamed Transgression.

The department's task is to trace foreign cyber attacks, observe and analyze them and, in the best case scenario, to siphon off the insights of competing intelligence agencies. This form of "Cyber Counter Intelligence" counts among the most delicate forms of modern spying.

 

Part 2: How the NSA Reads Over Shoulders of Other Spies