The latest revelation by Wikileaks of what happens behind the scenes in the twenty-first century began publication on Monday. Called the GI Files (for Global Intelligence), it is said to be made up of approximately five million e-mail messages and associated documentation copied from the e-mail servers of Strategic Forecasting, Incorporated (Stratfor) by adherants of the Anonymous meme and passed on to Wikileaks some time last year. Due to the gargantuan volume of data Wikileaks has opted to release smaller quantities of information every day rather than overwhelm everyone with information. Predictably, spin control efforts on all sides started up …

There is a lot of breathlessly sensationalistic reporting about the arrest of Senator Roy Ashburn of California. Now, while my black little hearts oh so dearly want to leap up and down for joy at this turn of events, that's not the right thing to do. Let's face facts, here: he's been humiliated. He was thrown in jail but got out on $1400us bond (wow, that's cheap for DUI). His family and especially his children are probably taking this about as well as they would a pregnancy test that says they're about to have puppies. Chances are this could be …

There's a certain feeling a system admin gets when they find out that one of their boxen has been pwned. You can't really compare it to anything else but it seems to combine the worst symptoms of cardiac arrest, realizing that someone's just shot at you and not missed, being busted by military police while carrying, and discovering that you slept through your thesis defense. A personal website falling is bad enough, but when you're talking about an operation that's worth six or seven digits in American dollars you just know that heads were rolling.

Over the weekend a post …

Why don't they just give up on Dibold's e-voting machines? They're already been proven insecure and unauditable beyond the shadow of a doubt. They've already compromised the hardware and software in an undetectible manner. The keys to the locks can be freely purchased online... or fabricated by hand because Diebold put an image of the master key on their website. Because the locks used on the Diebold electronic voting machines are the same ones used on many filing cabinets (the locks of which can be purchased in many hardware and office supply stores), it wasn't hard for Kinard of the …

First HD DVDs were cracked; now Muslix64 has gone for an encore and cracked the protection on Blu-Ray DVD's so that they can be ripped in unencrypted form. It seems that he didn't even need a Blu-Ray player to figure out how to do it, he found an attack that sidesteps the AACS (Advanced Access Content System, which does anything but let you access content) by finding the key used to encrypt the media data hidden inside the cyphertext. To prove that he was successful, he posted a ripped copy of Lord of War to the Net, which was subsequently …