Yeah, got that one right

"They were helpless before their government just as we are helpless before our government."
—VA state Sen. Richard H. Black on why the German people didn't stop the Holocaust

Unchecked hyperbole should be registered as an offensive weapon, as this one certainly offends me. We're helpless? We've forced out how many politicians, put how many in jail? Public referendum drives forced a vote of confidence on Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. How many governors of Illinois are in prison, or politicians from New Jersey?

I guess no one's called Obama a Nazi in main-stream press recently and Black got kinda twitchy. The problems in Germany festered over decades, come back to me in 20 years and let's re-evaluate your comment.

Michael's/Aaron Brothers Art Mart join the ranks of hacked retailers

Details are very preliminary and sketchy, it was suspected that both crafting store retailers had been hacked then it was found out that Michael's bought out Aaron Bros, so they're really one in the same. I expect the date range of the compromise will probably come out next week and we'll begin getting a feeling for what the scope of the hack is. Cards are appearing on underworld web sites and they all traced back to Michael's or Aaron Brothers as the common point.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/sources-card-breach-at-michaels-stores/


In other retailer hacking news, Neiman Marcus revealed that they were compromised from the middle of July to the end of October 2013.

I think it's time for me to create a 'Retailer Compromise' tag.

Supreme Court to hear two cases on warentless searches of phones of arrestees

This is interesting. One case involve an appeal from a man convicted of involvement of a gang shooting. He was pulled over for expired tags on his car, and a field search of his phone found pix of him posing in front of a car used in a shooting. The other is the case of a convicted drug dealer whose phone tied him to his house, where drugs were found. The interesting point of the latter is that it was not a smartphone.

In the case of the former, I don't think the police had probable cause to search the phone, they definitely didn't have a 'hot pursuit' basis such as in a kidnapping or Amber Alert. In the second, they had probable cause to subpoena telephone records, so why didn't they?

The basic problem is that smart phones are our lives. The cops can't search computers without a warrant, they shouldn't be able to search phones either.

The Court will hear oral arguments in April and issue a ruling by the end of June.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-supreme-court-weigh-cell-phone-searches-police-194336271.html

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/14/01/18/0152222/scotus-to-weigh-smartphone-searches-by-police