Whole-disk encryption defeated with canned air. [via.]
posted on Feb 21, 2008 - View this thread

Ever wondered if and where a specific set of numbers could be found in pi? Maybe you'd like to know where your birthday is? Or maybe just something funny. [prev. here, here]
posted on Dec 4, 2007 - View this thread

New "Hi - tech" passport cracked. Standards for the new passports were set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in 2003 and adopted by the waiver countries and the US. The UK Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. However they used non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.
posted on Nov 17, 2006 - View this thread

Quantum Encryption Scientists have created an unbreakable cypher through the use of quantum physics, where a photon is observed and used as the basis for an encryption key. "Uncertainty is the principle we exploit. It's impossible to find the key, because the photon can be measured once and only once. An eavesdropper can't measure it, and so can't get the key." Props to Heisenberg!
posted on Nov 9, 2006 - View this thread

The synchronization of two pendulum clocks was discovered in 1665 by Huygens. Two pendulum clocks mounted on the same wall always fell exactly out of phase with each other no matter what the starting conditions. Regardless of the initial conditions the system always ended up the same. In stark contrast, a chaotic system is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. How can these two seemingly seperate things be tied together? The synchronization of chaos. When two chaotic systems are synchronized together, information can be shared between them. It immediatly brings to mind applications for encryption, but it is still far away from everyday use.
posted on Dec 14, 2005 - View this thread

Technophobia? or ignorance? or mendacity? A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. The specific crime here aside, why is encryption - and by extension privacy - viewed as something seedy?
posted on May 27, 2005 - View this thread

Homer Simpson: Hack your DVD player. It seems in countries in which the DVD Copy Control Authority doesn't own the government, even the giants of corpmedia don't like the "protection" features the platform foists on consumers. On Fox's Simpsons UK DVD release FAQ page, Homer himself says "I have no idea whatsoever what regional coding means. But it is essential that you buy a multi-regional player. Do it now." Is the DVD region-coding system really only relevant in the United States?
posted on Jul 11, 2002 - View this thread

Putting free, unencrypted copies on the web increases book sales, according to science fiction writer Eric Flint.
posted on Apr 29, 2002 - View this thread

FBI software cracks encryption wall The FBI is developing software capable of inserting a computer virus onto a suspect’s machine and obtaining encryption keys...
posted on Nov 20, 2001 - View this thread

The Terrorists Did NOT Use Encryption. None of the communications, authorities said Sunday, involved the use of encryption or other code to disguise the contents of the messages.
posted on Oct 1, 2001 - View this thread

War on Civil Liberties Watch: Usable encryption is in deep doo-doo. A new poll finds 72% of Americans now supporting a ban on unbreakable encryption. (Apparantly breakable, and thus useless, encryption is just fine.) Besides the obvious fact that this stuff is already out there and cannot be taken back, particularly from non-US citizens who don't give a damn about our laws (such as, say, the exact people we're trying to defeat), is there any hope that the courts will find any such new laws unconstitutional?
posted on Sep 18, 2001 - View this thread

Terrorism's first win? Bye-Bye crypto. The rubble is still burning and the Republicans are ready to strip of our right to use crypto products. Opportunists feeding off fear. That's how you win at the terrorist game.
posted on Sep 13, 2001 - View this thread

The crypto used in 802.11 wireless networking has been cracked. The crack is devastating; it's fast and passive. Simply by listening, the 40-bit key can be cracked in 15 minutes. Worse, the crack scales linearly with the number of bits in the key, so raising the key length to 128 bits would raise the crack time to about an hour. 802.11 is used in such products as the Linksys Etherfast Wireless and the Apple Airport. From now on those products should be considered to be completely insecure.
posted on Aug 3, 2001 - View this thread

A Russian security expert has been arrested for showing how easy it is to crack an e-book. All hail the DMCA! Some information is just Too Dangerous to be Revealed! (See also wildly detailed coverage, including the affidavit, from Planet eBook.)
posted on Jul 18, 2001 - View this thread

European Parliament says Echelon exists and is more or less powerless to stop it. All the more reason for government and industry to create encryption standards.
posted on Jul 4, 2001 - View this thread

Future of computing - Light or Molecules?
posted on Jun 23, 2001 - View this thread

Tivo hackers today released the hack that enables you to get MPEG-2 video out of the box and put it on CDs, share it over the net, etc. No details because the AVS Tivo site (registration required) is being slashdotted...but will this precipitate a TiVo crackdown on the hackers?
posted on Jun 7, 2001 - View this thread

ALL YOUR EMAIL ARE BELONG TO US! How serious is this threat? What precautions do you routinely take? What precautions do you think you *should* be taking? What viable options do we have today, for those of us who aren't computer programmers by profession? And how secure are they, anyway?
posted on May 30, 2001 - View this thread

Wincent Colaiuta has seen and reviewed the new Mac OS but you can't read the review. He's encrypted the whole thing using PGP and he's not releasing the key until the OS is released. He says he's done this to avoid law suits from Apple.
I say he's begging for hits.
If he wanted to avoid lawsuits, he could just wait to publish the review...
posted on Mar 20, 2001 - View this thread

Descramble DVD encryption in 7 lines of perl code ...created by 2 MIT programmers. Will the MPAA threaten to sue you if you include it in your email signature? Yah for civil disobedience.
posted on Mar 7, 2001 - View this thread

"Now it's possible to send a verse from the Koran, an appeal for charity and even a call for jihad and know it will not be seen by anyone hostile to our faith, like the Americans." Osama bin Laden and others are reported to be using encryption to post instructions for terrorist activities on sports chat rooms, pornographic bulletin boards and other Web sites.
posted on Feb 6, 2001 - View this thread

The battle for unrestricted encryption continues. Professor Bernstein won't rest; he's not going to let this go. More power to him and let's hope he ultimately wins. [He's challenging the US government restrictions on private encryption on free-speech grounds, and so far he's won in every court where the case has been heard. The government has been using delaying actions, and their relaxation of restrictions may partially have been in hopes he'd give up, leaving them still capable of some control. He's not going to, though. He's got blood in his eye, so to speak.]
posted on Jan 8, 2001 - View this thread

Spammimic : The novelty wears off quickly, but it's an amusing diversion for a minute or two.
posted on Dec 12, 2000 - View this thread

Relaxed encryption exports get green light. See comment inside.
posted on Oct 19, 2000 - View this thread

For those of you who don't want to violate the law by linking from your website to the DeCSS source code, you can now link to a [semi-]dramatic reading of the source code (3.5MB MP3), and this semi-alternative sort of Dylanesque folk song of the code (6.3MB MP3).

And no, I'm not making *any* of this up. Thanks to Dave at The Stuffed Dog. He can't blog it, but *I* sure can. :-) [Amazingly enough, they're both pretty good, although the song is a bit over driven. ]
posted on Aug 28, 2000 - View this thread

In this sendmail.net piece, Greg Knauss (of Winerlog-when-it-was-good fame) asserts, among other things, that if a court subpoenas your email, and it's encrypted, that you can be tossed in jail for contempt if you don't give them the keys. Um, hello? 5th amendment? Does anyone have references either way on this one?
posted on May 8, 2000 - View this thread

Thank god, a judge was smart enough to throw out an injunction against all the web site owners that posted the DeCSS source code. This suit was completely pointless because DeCSS is used for *playback* of DVDs, not copying (which can be done bit-for-bit digitally). The people who should be punished for this are the dorks that came up with the weak encryption in the first place.
posted on Dec 29, 1999 - View this thread

Streambox says that it has broken the encryption used on the RealNetworks streaming media format and they have released a tool that converts RealAudio to MP3. This would probably be more useful if the actual quality of RealAudio files made it worth ripping them to my Rio.
posted on Nov 14, 1999 - View this thread