Last calendar week something unusual happened in the US court system: The sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that made it far easier to get National Security Letters were declared unconstitutional (specifically, they violate the First Amendment rights of US citizens) by federal Judge Victor Marrero. National Security Letters, or NSLs, are official documents written up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which can be used to demand sensitive information, such as personnel dossiers, telephone or Internet usage information, and financial history information without having to go on the record by requesting a search warrant from the court system. These …
David and Eileen Wetzel converted a 1986 Volkswagon Golf to run on vegetable oil as fuel a couple of years ago, and have been driving around with it for a while now. The Illinois Department of Revenue is investigating them for criminal charges, mostly for not paying tax on fuel that the car doesn't even use, retroactive to the point at which he re-worked the car's engine. The couple (who are in their late 70's) had to post a $2500us bond (no mean feat when living on a fixed income, as many retired people do), and have to pay $244us …
Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.
'Remote access tool', that is - a little beastie (usually considered malware, though there are legit incarnations of this sort of software) that hides itself inside a workstation and lets someone connect remotely at any time and go through the system and silently monitor what the user is doing. Crackers have been using them for years for recon before an infiltration attempt, but only recently are the white hats finding uses for them. Such as watching what your kids are up to. Presenting Snoopstick, an all in one package for infecting someone's box with a RAT that lets you keep an …
The Hitachi corporation has come out with a new generation of RFID tags, and get this: They're about as large around as a human hair and 5 microns thick. In fact, they're unobtrusive to the tune of 0.05mm by 0.0.05mm in size. They're calling it RFID dust, and it's an order of magnetude smaller than the smallest RFID chips that Hitachi has on the market, the so-called mu-chips, which are only 0.4mm on a side. RFID dust doesn't have a lot of storage capacity, at most 128 bits of data, but they're so tiny, they could …
Paul Cesarini of Bowling Green State University is an assistant professor of visual communication and has been using Tor (The Onion Router - an anonymisation system for net.traffic) to familiarise himself with it so that he could then discuss it with students in two of the courses he teaches. He was visited by campus police and a network admin and told to stop using it. It seems that someone else on campus was using Tor, and more's the point he was under investigation for fraud of some kind, and they wanted to know if the student under investigation had been …
Another bill's been put into circulation that I think everyone should know about. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas has put forth legislation that would require every ISP to keep records of what their users do on the Net to assist. For every customer an ISP has, every IP address they are given, every DNS request they make, every outgoing connection, and every incoming connection attempt would be recorded and archived on the off chance that a subpoena came in. Failure to do so would mean fines and jail time for not complying with this proposed law. On top of that …
An old chewing gum commercial says "Double your pleasure, double your fun," but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.. one hannah Kersey, age 23 from the UK have birth to triplets. Triplets carried to term in her two uterii. I'm not pulling your leg, folks, she really does have two wombs. The three girls (two identical twins, and an odd one out) were born by cesarian section seven weeks early.
Does anyone out there have a USB scanner that I can borrow? Mine just died in the middle of something important... The new threat to …
Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me - how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when …
