Its reach is impossible to measure precisely, but more than 3 million vulnerable machines may ultimately have been infected. : The inside story on the Conficker Worm at New Scientist.
posted by The Whelk on Jun 15, 2009 - 84 comments

Clear passenger data stolen. A unencrypted laptop with the personal data, including name, address, SSi number, passport number, date of birth, etc. of every one of the 33,000+ users of the the Clear system has been stolen. The Clear system allows travelers who register and pay an annual fee to bypass airport security lines by using a smart card in some airports. TSA has suspended new registrations until Verified Identity Pass, Inc., a subsidiary of GE, figures out how to install PGP. VIP is the only private contractor allowed to register users to the Clear system. Via
posted by dejah420 on Aug 5, 2008 - 103 comments

Whole-disk encryption defeated with canned air. [via.] [more inside]
posted by Skorgu on Feb 21, 2008 - 92 comments

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] [more inside]
posted by TimeTravelSpeed on Dec 4, 2007 - 68 comments

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 by adamvasco on Nov 17, 2006 - 53 comments

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 by PreacherTom on Nov 9, 2006 - 49 comments

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 by ozomatli on Dec 14, 2005 - 49 comments

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 by Smedleyman on May 27, 2005 - 10 comments

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 by Vetinari on Jul 11, 2002 - 25 comments

Putting free, unencrypted copies on the web increases book sales, according to science fiction writer Eric Flint.
posted by myl on Apr 29, 2002 - 6 comments

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 by Brilliantcrank on Nov 20, 2001 - 7 comments

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 by tpoh.org on Oct 1, 2001 - 11 comments

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 by aaron on Sep 18, 2001 - 36 comments

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 by skallas on Sep 13, 2001 - 51 comments

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 by Steven Den Beste on Aug 3, 2001 - 16 comments

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 by davidchess on Jul 18, 2001 - 6 comments

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 by skallas on Jul 4, 2001 - 6 comments

Future of computing - Light or Molecules?
posted by tiaka on Jun 23, 2001 - 5 comments

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 by luser on Jun 7, 2001 - 21 comments

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 by rushmc on May 30, 2001 - 12 comments

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 by Jako on Mar 20, 2001 - 6 comments

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 by deftone on Mar 7, 2001 - 9 comments

"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 by quirked on Feb 6, 2001 - 28 comments

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 by Steven Den Beste on Jan 8, 2001 - 0 comments

Spammimic : The novelty wears off quickly, but it's an amusing diversion for a minute or two.
posted by champignon on Dec 12, 2000 - 0 comments

Relaxed encryption exports get green light. See comment inside.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 19, 2000 - 3 comments

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 by baylink on Aug 28, 2000 - 2 comments

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 by baylink on May 8, 2000 - 6 comments

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 by mathowie on Dec 29, 1999 - 0 comments

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 by grant on Nov 14, 1999 - 0 comments