In the halcyon days of the 80's, a fairly common trope of cyberpunk was people (usually background characters but occasionally a main character) wearing battlegoth makeup - funky facepaint that distinctively changes your appearance. Often it was described as a stylistic choice, not unlike what somemedia stars effect today though occasionally you see it at street level. Facial recognition systems are pretty primitive today but they're starting to be deployed by law enforcement and advertising agencies just the same to gather actionable information for later use. Right now eye tracking software is used to determine what keeps people's attention for …
If you just look at the outside of a piece of hardware you can't tell if it's working or not, but if you open the housing to peek inside you will unquestionably break it.
Confirmation's just hit the NOVALUG website - I will be presenting at the next meeting on 10 April 2010 on the topic of anonymity technologies in general and Tor in particular. Tor is the name of a free/open source utility which protects the user from traffic analysis and some content monitoring by passive attackers. I will discuss the origins of Tor as well as the threat model it was designed for, its capabilities, and potential attacks against the network as a whole and individual users thereof. I will also talk about operational security for users and Tor nodes. I will …
It seems that Squidgate has finally drawn to a close and now all that remains is to pack the pieces back into their respective slots, fold up the game board, and find out what sentence will be given to Dr. Watts. As has been repeated time and again around the Net (with varying signal/noise ratios), he was convicted of obstructing US border guards. Not attacking or making any threatening movements toward them, as the agents originally claimed. Obstructing them. The jury eventually decided in favor of the prosecution because, by the letter of the law (good luck finding it …
MySpace, one of the biggest and best known social networking websites on the Net has announced that they'll be putting volumes of their users' data for sale on the open market. An outfit called Infochimps, which specializes in such bodies of data as stock market trading activity archives, political statistics, public service usage surveys, and social network data dumps will be handling the sales. The data will include such user generated content as playlists of music, posted photographs, blog posts, and users' stated locations. Some of the data dumps will even be organized by the (approximate) latitude and longitude of …
For those of you following the saga of Peter Watts, his trial began on Tuesday, 16 March 2010. I've been not posting about it to try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible due to the rampant speculation, guesses couched as fact, and outright asshattery surrounding the case. What I will say is that Have Satellite Truck, Will Travel is covering the Watts trial directly - someone's not only on site but watching from the audience in the courtroom and posting updates as they come. It would appear that the trial itself actually took place on the sixteenth and …
It almost seems as if we're indoctrinated by North American culture to not enhance ourselves (the blizzards of spam to the contrary) in some way, shape, or form but still be told to do whatever we can to make sure that we get ahead. It's safe to say that we've grown up in a time when we can't remember hearing about at least one star athlete being suspended from a league because they tested positive for anabolic steroid use (be careful searching on that term, there are a couple of dodgy SEO sites in the top twenty) to build up …
Back in 2002, the desktop security company Symantecbought out Securityfocus, which at the time was one of the biggest clearinghouses of information security related information. Everything from mailing lists to archives of whitepapers can be found there, and for many years it was pretty much the first place to go if you wanted to monitor vulnerability reports and software releases. After Symantec bought them out there was some concern that Securityfocus would decline in quality as time and energy might no longer be spent maintaining and updating the website. That didn't happen, thankfully, but last week the other shoe …
