Contest: Cory Doctorow's Cipher Wheel Rings (6)
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1 day, 11 hours
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Cory Doctorow wanted a secret decoder wedding ring, and he asked me to help design it. I wanted something more than the standard secret decoder ring, so this is what I asked for: "I want each wheel to be the alphabet, with each letter having either a dot above, a dot below, or no dot at all. The first wheel should have alternating above, none, below. The second wheel should be the repeating sequence of ...
Privacy Policies: Perception vs. Reality (5)
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2 days, 11 hours
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New paper: "What Californians Understand About Privacy Online," by Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jennifer King. From the abstract: A gulf exists between California consumers' understanding of online rules and common business practices. For instance, Californians who shop online believe that privacy policies prohibit third-party information sharing. A majority of Californians believes that privacy policies create the right to require a website to delete personal information upon request, a general right to sue for damages, a ...
Sucking Data off of Cell Phones (6)
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3 days, 19 hours
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Don't give someone your phone unless you trust them: There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most ...
Security ROI (14)
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4 days, 18 hours
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An interesting look at security from a business/actuarial perspective, not something most techies are accustomed to, but very important to those they work for.
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Ishai said:
About the wrong mith of ROSI. Well put.
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tabo said:
this man speaks the truth
Schneier on Security: My LA Times Op Ed on Photo ID Checks at Airport (33)
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5 days, 19 hours
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Opinion The TSA's useless photo ID rules No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don't work. By Bruce Schneier August 28, 2008 The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government's no-fly ...
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David Arcos said:
Artículo "for dummies" de por qué los controles aéreos son inútiles
Another Voting Machine Cartoon (2)
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A British Bank Bans a Man's Password (11)
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1 week, 1 day
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Weird story. Mr Jetley said he first realised his security password had been changed when a call centre staff member told him his code word did not match with the one on the computer. "I thought it was actually quite a funny response," he said. "But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to 'Lloyds is pants' because they said it was not appropriate. [...] "The rules ...
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Attacks (9)
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1 week, 1 day
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This is serious stuff. (Kim Zetter's posts on the topic are excellent; read them.) It's a man-in-the-middle attack. "The Internet's Biggest Security Hole" (the title of that first link) has been that interior relays have always been trusted even though they are not trustworthy.
The TSA Told You That Liquids Are Dangerous (9)
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1 week, 2 days
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So weird: A plane was forced to land when a passenger had an extreme allergic reaction to a leaking jar of mushroom soup, it was revealed today. The soup fell on the man from an overhead locker on a Ryanair flight to Dublin from Budapest. He reportedly suffered allergic swelling in his neck and struggled to breathe, forcing staff to seek emergency medical treatment.
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HacKnight said:
The soup was probably brought on the plane in several 3oz shampoo containers and then reassembled mid-flight. We must learn to defend ourselves!
Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes (40)
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1 week, 2 days
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Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped. It's unclear if this error is random or systemic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systemic --...
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Eebs said:
*shudder* I don't even want to think about the implications here.
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Drewcipher said:
All your vote are belong to us. Ehhhhhh.
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Erik S said:
Diebold should receive a death sentence. Current and past execs should be criminally charged, some deserve life sentences. Their personal assets should be attacked with civil suits.The company should be stripped of all assets. Siezed personal and corporate assets should be auctioned and the proceeds used to refund the cost of voting equipment. Any remaining funds should be dispursed to the govt treasury.
Virus Infects the Space Station (9)
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Doctoring Photographs without Photoshop (17)
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1 week, 3 days
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It's all about the captions: ...doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption. The photographs presented by Colin...
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Bryn said:
This is a photo of Osama Bin Laden sun bathing in Nice. Really.
Full Disclosure and the Boston Farecard Hack (21)
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1 week, 4 days
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In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of "full disclosure," asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free. The "Oyster card" used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and a similar fare card used on the Boston "T" was the center of the U.S. ...
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trygve said:
Excellent essay on full & responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities.
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fmavituna said:
Awesome writeup,-Companies will only design security as good as what their customers know to ask for.This preference for secrecy comes from confusing a vulnerability with information about that vulnerability. Using secrecy as a security measure is fundamentally fragile. It assumes that the bad guys don't do their own security research. It assumes that no one else will find the same vulnerability. It assumes that information won't leak out even if the research results are suppressed. These assumptions are all incorrect.
Red Light Cameras Don't Work (31)
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1 week, 5 days
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Interesting: the solution to one problem causes another. "The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don't work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health. "Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections." Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario have all reported cameras are associated with increases in crashes. The study by the Virginia ...
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Wolfger said:
Gotta love capitalism, eh? Screw public safety! Let's make us some money!
Monitoring P2P Networks (6)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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Interesting paper: "Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks or Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice": Abstract -- We reverse engineer copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing network and find that a common approach for identifying infringing users is not conclusive. We describe simple techniques for implicating arbitrary network endpoints in illegal content sharing...
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Jackson said:
Interesting paper ... especially if you've ever received a notice from a copyright holder.
MI5 on Terrorist Profiling (25)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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There's no profile: MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian. [...] The main findings include: • The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic ...
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Noah said:
Profiling for the lose.
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gyakusetsu said:
Check your premises...
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mattpovey said:
Interesting stuff:"MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation."
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Sam said:
While this proves that we can't label one group of people as "highly probable to be terrorists," it's unfortunate because it seems like the British government is using that knowledge to make everyone in their country a possible terrorist and thus allows random invasive checks and other rude procedures to occur.
TSA Follies (23)
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2 weeks, 2 days
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They break planes: Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage... reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes' noses as handholds. "The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers," one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. ...
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Drewcipher said:
My hope is that Obama will win the election and then stomp the guts out of this idiotic group of losers.
Nice Article on Personal Surveillance (2)
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