Wednesday, 01 September 2010 at 23:04
A long-standing problem in cryptography has been the sharing of secrets (understatement of the century, right?) Assuming that your communication medium can't be trusted because anyone and everyone could be listening in, how do you distribute
keys to everyone you want to securely contact? The most obvious method is to meet up with everyone and hand them the keying material personally. However that way fraught with problems, from your courier getting ganked for the keying material to a simple matter of common sense: if you're going to meet with the intended recipient, why not just tell them and not bother with encryption? Then public key crypto came along and it works but it's difficult to explain to people in a manner that makes them want to use it (I'm working on that) and you can't always believe that the person whose name is on the key is the person you really want to send encrypted messages to. Then
quantum cryptography was invented in an attempt to help solve the key distribution problem. Long story short (and doing it no justice at all), entangled pairs of photons will either pass through sets of filters or will not depending on their polarization; call one orientation '0' and the other '1'. If a third party observes the polarizations of the photons by sticking a detector in the beam of light at least half (statistically speaking) of the photons/bits will be wrong due to the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The other party you want to communicate with measures the polarizations of the photons and uses them to generate the key to decrypt a message received by some other means. If someone tries to tap the keystream the key will be bad. Right?
Nobody ever figured that an attacker might re-transmit the key after intercepting it.
Yep.. a team of cryptographers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, headed up by one Vadim Makarov found a way. Their attack requires the third party (traditionally referred to as
Eve) to shine a laser not much more powerful than a laser pointer on the other party's detector (used to record the qubits of the crypto key) and intercept the beam of light with a photodetector. This might take a bit of hardware hacking to pull off, like splicing optical fibre someplace or doing a bit of jiggery pokery on the physical connections somewhere along the line without anyone noticing. The thing about photodetectors is that they also pick up variances in light in addition to polarization of photons. So the attacker figures out which qubits are 1's and fires a slightly brighter pulse of light at the other side's detector, where it is registered as one of the bits of the crypto key. The team that published the attack against a number of commercial quantum crypto systems
has a website detailing their research, from reverse engineering the modules to the equipment they used for the tests. Pretty clever stuff. Quantum crypto isn't yet in wide enough use for anyone to need to worry about attacks like this (though the early adopters are no doubt cursing and wailing) but some serious rethinking is going to be required in the near future to fix this problem.
Wednesday, 01 September 2010 at 21:36
The year 1985 was known for many strange and wonderful things:
Misfits of Science was on prime time television, William Gibson was working on the novel
Count Zero, and a scientific discovery flew beneath the radar of just about everyone except people working in the field of materials science. Three scientists in two countries working together discovered a brand new
allotrope of carbon, a molecule comprised of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a spherical shape. The molecule was named
buckminsterfullerene after the visionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller, due to the molecule's resemblance to a geodesic dome. Buckyballs, as they came to be known, fired the imaginations of scientists and science fiction authors around the world once word got out. Eleven years later Sir Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley, and Robert Curl won a Nobel Prize in the field of chemistry for their discovery. A few years later the production of
buckytubes, nanoscopic tubes of carbon based around a similar geometric pattern was perfected in the lab, and then research really took off.
For something so tiny they have some very unusual and, truth be told,
amazing properties dependent upon what other atoms are trapped inside of them, how many layers of buckytubes are wrapped around one another, whether or not the buckytubes are twisted and in what direction, and other such details. The most commonly encountered buckytubes have a tensile strength that has been benchmarked around fifty times that of steel, and when under pressure give diamonds a run for their money for hardness. Depending on how they are synthesized carbon nanotubes can either conduct electricity as if they were a metal or a semiconductor (like silicon); if
doped properly I bet you could tweak their electrical properties even more. Until recently, however, it wasn't feasible to manufacture them in bulk, let alone on a scale that the eye could see. That was, until a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas
built a fabrication device that can create sheets of carbon nanotubes a few centimeters in width by a couple of meters in length.
The ribbons are constructed out of the multiwalled variant of carbon nanotubes and analysis shows that they are not only stable on the macro scale (i.e., visible to the naked eye and capable of being handled without anything more sophisticated than your hands) but evidence all of the predicted properties. The fabrication process hasn't been optimized yet but they can produce up to seven meters of ribbon at a time - there is a video linked off of this article which shows the fabber going... and going.. and going.. they've already begun to experiment with their test samples and gotten some interesting results. The ribbon seen in that video is as strong as
kevlar yet conducts electricity well enough that you could probably make a paper-thin solar cell out of it. Folding, creasing, and welding sheets together with a microwave resulted in no signs of damage or compromise of electrical conductivity.
Another article says that the feedstock they use contains pre-fabricated ultra-long buckytubes that are chemically grown rather than electrically produced, which would make all the difference between experimenting under laboratory conditions and going into mass production.
I'd love to get my hands on a sample of this material to put it through its paces. Starting with doing chin-ups with it to see just how much stress it can take...
Wednesday, 01 September 2010 at 15:03
If you're in Silver Spring, MD near the headquarters of the Discovery Channel, sing out! Everybody okay out there?
Live police scanner feeds
here.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 at 19:42
Every couple of days - usually on the weekends - I force myself to go on a media fast. If I can get away with it, I don't watch television, I don't look at my RSS feed reader, and I don't let myself get wrapped up in the newswires. These days it's about the only thing that lets me get a good night's sleep on the weekends and makes my blood pressure managable. I'm pretty much a desk jockey these days so that's about the only exercise I get, but that's beside the point.
Many years ago, during the early time of the
civil rights movement the powers that be didn't know what to make of the events transpiring in the United States of America. Authority, the right to rule over or govern something, really only exists if that which is governed recognizes that authority. To put it simply, if they're fed up and not going to take it anymore, your authority goes right out the window. So when a segment of the population stands up and tells you
exactly what they think of what's going on the powers that be take steps to determine just how much of a threat is posed to their power bloc and what, if anything, needs to be done about it. Between the mid-1950's and the mid-1970's the FBI ran a series of operations called
COINTELPRO, in which organizations all over the political spectrum were monitored, infiltrated, and disrupted by undercover agents. Some of the groups really did need someone keeping an eye on them, namely, groups that openly espoused violence, destruction, and mayhem, if only because groups interested in blowing things up and killing people stop caring who their targets are after a certain point. However, some of the groups that were affected by COINTELPRO were groups involved in peaceful protest - anti-war activists, religious figures, and others who think that violence is not necessary, even as a last resort.
People still debate the reasons why nonviolent protests groups were monitored: maybe it's because the powers that be weren't certain that these groups were really not interested in violence. Another possibility is a concern that subsets of these groups were using the nonviolent protest angle as cover for something more nefarious. Which makes a certain kind of sense, when you think about it. It's also entirely possible that it came out of a mindset of "We don't quite understand what these weirdos are up to, so we'd better get someone in there just in case." Thus, as we head for the second decade of the twenty-first century us weirdos out there who disagree with how things are going had best take note of the fact that
domestic surveillance operations are going nearly as strongly now as they did during the Cold War. While the
First Amendment guarantees us the rights to speak out minds and gather in a peaceful manner it also means that if our voices or words catch someone's attention we might then be considered a "person of interest" and worthy of being put under the microscope. Even the act of taking notes or photographs in public has caused people to catch flak from the powers that be.
You have to wonder - if exercising the rights you have can possibly result in your being thrown in jail or followed by MiBs, do you still have your rights?
More under the cut...
Monday, 30 August 2010 at 12:50
The thing about cloud computing is that it makes your data and applications someone else's problem. Then you have to wonder if it's still your data...
Wednesday, 25 August 2010 at 19:01
It seems that the
controversy over full body x-ray backscatter scanners hasn't died down yet. Since word got out that the TSA was, in fact, saving
images from the machines (note: NSFW pictures) quite a few ears have perked up. Like those of a couple of US Senators. Senators Lieberman and Collins, who are the Chairman and a ranking member of the
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee along with a number of other senators have made
an official inquiry of the US Marshals Service about the practice. They aim to determine whether or not they are intruding unnecessarily into people's privacy by basically looking at them naked (I'll let you be the judge of whether or not that constitutes an invasion of privacy). For its part, the Marshals Service says that the images can only be accessed by someone who has an administrative password, but we all know how good people aren't at choosing secure passwords and about not sharing them at work. The US Marshals Service has yet to respond to the inquiry. Given that they lied the first three times around when it came to the scanners (about the level of detail in the images,
about how well they work, and about storing the images at all) what will probably happen is that they will publically say they'll get right on it and then promptly do nothing at all.
As if that weren't enough here's something that'll give you
Total Recall flashbacks (without Sharon Stone, unfortunately): backscatter x-ray scanners are not, in fact, staying in airports and government facilities.
There are units built into vans to peek inside of motor vehicles while on the road. More than 500 vans (ostensibly nondescript to prevent people from trying to avoid them, steal them, damage them,
or troll them) are on the road right now in a number of countries peering into vehicles to see which ones have illegal immigrants, drugs, smuggled vices, or bombs in them.
The website of the company that manufactures them has some interesting stuff and I highly suggest that you do a bit of browsing. They have a high-energy version designed to be installed in places where lots of vehicles need to some through in short order, the mobile scanner (with a picture of the van) which can presumably scan out of both sides simultaneously (suggested by the line about supporting two operators) which is also capable of scanning people if it's holding still (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page), and a few other variants that I'd love to get the specs on. Judging by the images these units don't seem to give very good images of people, so if you're squeamish by the idea of someone checking out your wabbily bits while crusing down the road you might not have to worry too much.
Oh, ad by the way: just like a securicam suddenly going dark, spotting a shielded car is just as suspicious as seeing one stuffed full of plastique, dead people, hooch, bales of marijuana, and stolen cigarettes. Just sayin'.
Sunday, 22 August 2010 at 11:20
Fans of the manga
Ghost In the Shell no doubt remember one of the more visually stunning pages at the beginning of the saga,
CG art depicting a neurochip, which in the series was the technology underlying artificial intelligence and the prosthetic brains which made full body cyborgs possible. Not a few of us have dreamed of the day in which it would be possible
to directly interface doped silicon processors with our wetware and move information out of one and into the other with little more than a thought. However, our science fiction-fueled dreams are just that, dreams, and probably will remain so for a number of years to come. However, a news article in the Globe and Mail late last week gave no small number of us pause: researchers at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute of the University of Calgary
have made significant advances fusing organic neurons to silicon chips in the lab. Six years ago they succeeded with snail neurons and they say that they are now ready to start experimenting with human brain cells.
Details are a bit sketchy right now but the gist of it is that they've made the mechanisms which detect the minute and nuanced puffs of
neurotransmitters and
electrical impulses (properly called
action potentials) much more sensitive. The experiments they have planned for the immediate future involve testing psychotropic compounds on samples of human brain tissue interfaced with their labtype neurochips to determine which are likely to be most efficacious in treating certain brain disorders. The standard protocol right now is to diagnose someone and look up what drugs (in decreasing order of likelihood) can be used to treat a disorder; the thing is sometimes the first choice doesn't work and something else has to be tried. Natural differentiation makes a species resilient, after all, but that differentiation also means that there are no silver bullets for treating a lot of things. By testing the compounds on the interfaced samples they can observe how the neurons react and better determine what dosages, compounds, or combinations of compounds might work. The brain tissue in question will be donated by an epilepsy patient
undergoing surgery to ease their symptoms.
The desired eventual conclusion of this research is hoped to be a fully functional bidirectional interface between silicon chips and living brains or nerves, which is still a relatively primitive technology right now. Late generation prosthetics, while impressive, are not interfaced with individual nerves yet; they are instead connected to bundles of nerves which introduces problems of resolution. The pickups are often larger than their intended targets so interfacing with multiple signal sources cannot be avoided. To put it another way, plugging into a group of 50 nerves results in a signal which is the composite of the signal traveling through every nerve in that bundle plus some amount of noise picked up by the electrodes, plus some amount of noise introduced by the act of amplification. It's hard to avoid touching multiple nerves because fabricating pickups small enough to avoid doing so is nontrivial.
Lilly electrodes can interface with individual nerve cells but they require microsurgical procedures to install and there are nonobvious difficulties in using them for long periods of time, such as
the continued growth of nerve cells causing contact with the electrodes to be broken through migration or formation of fiberous tissue.
We're not there yet, but we can see the horizon.
Sunday, 22 August 2010 at 10:48
For a couple of months now I've been following the
Lower Marion High School laptop surveillance case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If the story's been dropped from your cache for whatever reason, earlier this year it was discovered that a school district in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
was using the laptops it issued to students to spy on them while they were off-campus. As it turned out
some of the staff had been remotely activating the built-in webcams and using them to watch students.
A cache of images taken through the webcams was found on some of their servers, some depicting underage high school students in various states of (un)dress... which should be enough to send a shiver down anyone's spine if you think about it for a second.
A couple of days ago federal prosecutors decided that
there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against either the school district or the members of the IT staff in question. Their investigation did not reveal any signs of criminal intent said Zane Memeger, US Attorney. As things stand there was not enough information
to suggest that anyone was up to moustache-twirling, mad cackling no good, though the parents of the student in question still have a lawsuit pending against the school district on the grounds of invasion of privacy. It is thought that the decision to not file criminal charges will not adversely affect the civil suit filed by the family of Blake Robbins, the high school student reprimanded in school for eating candy at home. Personally, I would have thought that getting caught taking photographs of partially undressed underage students (remember - the spyware installed on the laptops had to be commanded by someone logged into a server in the high school to turn on the camera, turn off the "Hi, I'm recording" LED, and take pictures) would have been sufficient, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one anywhere, either. I don't mind saying that this decision concerns me; when on school property students are the responsibility of the staff and are subject to surveillance and disciplinary measures if they get out of line. However, when they go home they are the responsibility of their parents and the control the school has over them ends there, or at least it used to. I have to admit I don't know what the legal code says about that and I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who knows for sure and can quote links to repost.
I have a suspicion that this case is going to set a legal precedent, the impact of which we'll be feeling for years to come. I just don't know which way it's going to go.
Sunday, 22 August 2010 at 10:36
R. Mark Adams has posted the photographs taken by the test-type HacDC Spaceblimp to his Flickr account. Take a look at them
here.
Saturday, 21 August 2010 at 12:27
Driving home yesterday evening I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bright flash of light reflected in my rearview mirror nearly blinded me, closely followed by what I can best describe as a cartoon-character-gets-zapped sound effect that I heard even through closed windows and the air conditioning going at full blast. In a move that probably says more about my sense of self-preservation than anything else, I threw the TARDIS into park, jumped out, and ran toward the source of the sound - a rapidly descending power company cherrypicker below what used to be a small transformer on the pole. Said former transformer had apparently shorted out and caught fire while undergoing maintenance. I saw that the people working over there seemed okay - everybody was walking, talking, not clutching any body parts, and not laying on the ground so I snapped a couple of pictures with my smartphone. When those suckers go up, those suckers really go up.
By the way, the default camera app in Android v2.0 sucks - they took out the zoom feature.
Saturday, 21 August 2010 at 10:59
HacDC has launched its test-type Spaceblimp for the
Hackerspaces In Space competition! You can track it wherever you happen to be by following
@hacdcspaceblimp on Twitter (where updates are posted every two minutes) or
aprs.fi on the map.
Friday, 20 August 2010 at 19:51
System:
Eclipse Phase
Character name: Paul - El Pulpo Magnifico!
Apparent age: 3
Character concept:
Psychic octopus, professional sportscaster
Prior to the Fall of transhumanity people always said that there was something a little.. off.. about an uplifted giant Pacific octopus whom the Somatek geneticists decanted. Given the name Paul, he soon distinguished himself from his broodmates by becoming something of a historian. It's widely agreed that the first thing Paul saw after awakening to sentience was probably a sportscast of some kind; maybe it was microgravity rugby, maybe it was superconducting hockey, it might even have been centripital soccer. One thing is certain: he is as knowledgable about sports of all kinds, even those dating as far back as the early twentith century as he is eccentric. A fan of the game (any game) but utterly lacking the physical talent to play he soon took to sitting on the sidelines.. er.. climbing up the walls and perching inverted on the ceiling of the stadium while chattering a blinding stream of color commentary over the local mesh, complete with multi-tentacled interpretative gestures that once nearly caused him to be turned into the ball of a rugby game when he fell on one of the players. While sitting on the sidelines recuperating he kept two swiveling eyes on the action and his inner eye on the mesh, still sucking down sports history and archived recordings of sports matches.
Over time he began broadcasting live XP of the games he attended, complete with color commentary and AR toggles leading to stats, projections, and histories of all of the players. Paul built up quite a fan following in the months that followed, so much so that it's rumored that entire segments of the Lunar population might have missed the Fall of transhumanity had antimatter weapons not been involved. After a time of reconstruction Paul's lively narration became legendary in the Lunar habitat he called home and the moment he was able to set off on his own Experia offered him a position as an AR sportscaster. Little effort was required to build a viewership for Paul on Luna; aided by Experia's master memetic engineers and viral marketers he rapidly developed a following of sports fans (not a few of them in the Mercurial camp) around the solar system. His insightful commentary, strategic analysis, and uncannily accurate predictions of plays and point spreads have earned him kudos from the Suryas living on the surface of Sol, ravening anarchist sportsafficionados as far away as the asteroid belt, no holds barred armchair (and otherwise) quarterbacks of the Jovian Republic, and even (so the stories say) a couple of ancient members of the hyperelites scattered around the solar system. Gatecrashers are even known to archive rather than watch the games Paul comments on to have fun and new to watch during the rare moments of downtime on the far sides of the Pandora Gates.
And his unusually savvy predictions of point spreads? Yeah, about that...
More under the cut...
Thursday, 19 August 2010 at 21:51
It's been a while since I've had a surreally nervewracking experience to make things interesting, so when the opportunity came to go target shooting at the NRA range in northern Virginia I decided to give it a go.
I found out only recently that The Wrong Hands has been handgun training for a while now (six months, I think), and she extended an invitation to Lyssa a couple of weeks back to go to the range. By all accounts, at the end of the evening Lyssa had had an excellent time, and I was extended an invitation to join them also the next time she would be in the area. Last night I managed to get home early from work, just in time to meet up with everyone at home. We headed to Minerva in Fairfax for dinner and then drove to the NRA firing range a bit farther west of there. Those aren't my usual stomping grounds so I really don't know where we were. What I do know for sure was that the range is on the bottom floor of a large-ish building and the entrance is through a belowground parking garage. I can't be any more specific than that because I really don't know (though I could probably figure it out if I put my mind to it).
I wasn't sure what to exepct going in last night. I don't particularly trust the enculturation I had growing up so I was pretty much going in blind. What I saw was a lot of institutional floor, white walls, comfortable looking chairs at either end of a hallway, and a row of locker room benches along the hallway. A flatpanel television or two were mounted on the walls showing some firearms related recordings that I really didn't pay much attention to. Walking up the counter, I showed photo ID, paid a couple of dollars, and recieved a liability waiver, four pages of safety rules and general information, and a two page test that had to be passed before I'd be allowed to take my non-member card and walk to the firing line. The test is open book; I recommend that you read through everything once and then go over the rules booklet a few times while taking the test just to be sure that all of the information sticks. It's easy to screw up with a gun and even if nothing happens there really isn't a reason to take a chance. When everything was said and done and a booth had opened up for us, I picked up loaner goggles and hearing protection from bins at the front and walked through the sound-deadening pair of doors.
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 17 August 2010 at 14:22
Monday, 16 August 2010 at 21:01
I wish I could say it's been quiet over here, but it's actually been relentlessly busy for Lyssa and I down here in DC. I think I overextended myself a little
the weekend of the prototype Spaceblimp launch, which left me fighting off... something.. that kept me at a high fever and feeling run down most of the time. I did a little detail working on my car to cover up the myriad scratches and scuffs that accumulate whenever you park for long periods of time in an urban area. While the speeding edge of an SUV door doesn't actually do a lot of damage, over time the paint gets chipped, which can lead to rust starting underneath everything. My friendly neighborhood autoparts store keeps a goodly stockpile of touchup kits (sorted by manufacturer, year, and specific color) which did an okay job, but lately I've been wondering if wouldn't have been a better idea to leave well enough alone and deal with it. Temperatures and humidity are on the way up so our brief respite of comfortable weather has drawn to a close, at least for a while.
I'm going to miss the test launch of the new HacDC near space probe this weekend (assuming that it goes off this time; last weekend's didn't due to lack of bench testing of the electronics and prevailing weather conditions) due to a server migration at work in a couple of days. It's looking like I'm going to log some serious overtime due to the quantity of data that has to be moved. I now understand why
filers do so many tricky things with multiple mirrors and various arcane stacks of drives; it's not just for redundancy of data in case a drive blows, it's to improve the throughput of data from point A to point B. On a modern LAN running at gigabit speeds, it isn't so much the local network (even if it's lightly loaded) slowing transfers down, it's the speed at which the drives' electronics pull bits off of the platters and kick them to the OS. When there is only one drive containing a couple of hundred gigabytes of stuff, all of that data has to be accessed sequentially, which is far slower than pulling different parts of the same file out of multiple copies on multiple hard drives simultaneously. This weekend's going to be a fun one, I have a feeling; I'm going to have to lay in a supply of vitamin D supplements
to keep myself going along with some good coffee. And, God willin' and the crick don't rise, I won't have to sleep at the office to get this monster done.
Lyssa and I spent last weekend catching up on home IT stuff that's been neglected for a couple of months. No, that's not a euphemism; Lyssa upgraded Alphonse to a 64-bit quad-core CPU, another four gigs of RAM, and a brand-new copy of Windows 7 Pro so she could play Starcraft 2. For my part, I've had two dead machines (now one) and another in serious need of a reformat and reinstall in my lab and no time to work on any of them. One's been rebuilt and is up and running, another's damaged and the third is probably going to wind up being replaced (depending on just how bad the failure was). My netbook's been pressed into service as a replacement DNS until I'm certain that everything has been stabilized. I'd finish the job this weekend if it wasn't for my work schedule. I've got enough parts laying around to finish repairs (or whip a replacement into shape in a hurry) but not the time for at least another week.
So, that's my life in a nutshell right now. I'm going to take a break for a while on Wednesday evening before gearing up for the long haul and whatever it may bring at the close of this week.
Monday, 16 August 2010 at 19:58
For those of you who are fans of the text-based
BitTorrent client
rtorrent, it is worth noting that you can run its tracker communication traffic (though not its block exchange traffic) over an HTTP proxy of some kind by setting an environment variable
http_proxy=http://some host:port/ before you start rtorrent. This appears to work because rtorrent is linked against
libcurl to implement HTTP. However, please note that some BitTorrent trackers specifically disallow the use of proxies, and might penalize or ban you outright for doing so. If you want to do this, just set the above environment variable before running rtorrent. If someone sends you a private message asking you to not do that anymore, stop rtorrent (control-Q, control-Q), run the command
unset http_proxy to delete the offending environment variable, and then restart rtorrent.
Remember to be polite to your moderators; they have their work cut out for them. The account you save could be your own.
Saturday, 14 August 2010 at 19:22
Never bolt the sides back onto a computer you're building until you're absolutely, positively, cutting-charge-wrapped-around-a-major-artery serious that it's working exactly the way it's supposed to. Installing a server in the rack before the systemware's installed and patched and the servers are up and running is a sure-fire way to provoke a hardware failure or hard drive crash.
Thursday, 12 August 2010 at 22:02
If you haven't been paying attention to the news for a week or so,
Wikileaks dropped a major bomb last week
by releasing approximately 75,000 classified mission reports from the ongoing yet formally undeclared war in Afghanistan. The staff of Wikileaks has made it known that there is so much data there that anyone and everyone out there with programming skills should at least consider
downloading the archived documents and writing software to analyze their contents to find patterns in the information. However, nothing ever happens in a vacuum and blowback is being felt across the Net, and I don't mean the talking heads downplaying the significance of the data or
calling for Bradley Manning to be executed and demanding that
all guns to be brought to bear on the secretive, distributed organization. There are even some voices out there
calling for Julian Assange to be kidnapped by the military and tortured for information.. excuse me,
undergo extraordinary rendition wherever he may be to be taken into custody and
undergo enhanced interrogation techniques to find out exactly what he knows.
I must confess, I'm not sure why
Jacob Appelbaum vanished without a puff off smoke
a few weekends ago. My hypothesis is that, as a known and admitted associate of Julian Assange the powers that be would want to question him to ascertain whether or not Appelbaum knew of Assange's wherabouts. It is also possible that they wanted to gather intelligence about the website's back end, seeing as how
their attempts to get people to infiltrate the staff failed. They missed their shot at the Next HOPE but unfortunately
detained Appelbaum at Newark International Airport last week as
he flew back into the States to speak at
Defcon. You don't need to be a psychic to know that their "random search" really wasn't random at all, they knew he'd be flying into Newark because they have access to passenger rosters by way of the TSA. Appelbaum's three cellular phones (don't be that surprised, it's not uncommon for international travelers to carry multiple phones due to the vagaries of telephone companies abroad) were confiscated, which makes sense when you take into account the fact that people keep their entire lives in their smartphones. If you take someone's phone you can not only find out everyone they've been talking to through the records kept in the phone but
you can then start mapping the connections between everybody they know.
It's also worth noting that they demanded that he decrypt his laptop computer's hard drive so that they could make a forensic disk image for analysis. By all accounts it took them a while to understand that he was unable to do so because there did not appear to be a hard drive at all. This could mean a couple of things: first, the hard drive had been wiped clean prior to Appelbaum catching his flight. No data, nothing to decrypt. Second, he might have shipped his laptop's hard drive via airmail and gone analog for the trip home. Third, he may have been following a protocol developed by
Bruce Schneier, in which you have a trusted third party encrypt your hard drive for you but not tell you the passphrase until you get to wherever you were going and then contact them in in a pre-arranged manner; however, it seems to me that under such circumstances they would have confiscated his laptop as well, and the reports I've managed to track down do not say that this was done. Or fourth, and this seems the most plausible scenario, he could have been running his laptop without a hard drive of any kind and booting from
a live CD.
I shouldn't forget to mention that after
his presentation at Defcon he was approached by three agents of the FBI in plainclothes who wanted to ask him questions (subtly different from 'wanted to question him').
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 at 14:43
When installing the
heatsink/fan assembly of an Intel CPU designed for the LGA 775 socket,
do not twist the fastening pins of the cooling unit to seat them. Just use a flat-headed screwdriver to
push them straight down. Twisting them is only done to remove the cooling unit!
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 at 08:34
Not only is Christmas four months away, but the Christmas decorations store is open before the Halloween store.
Taken at Tyson's Corner Mall... 9 August 2010.
