Articles related to computer security, physical security, and similar things.
No, there’s no real Star Trek-style tractor beam (yet, anyway). What they’re discussing is parking a large spacecraft near such an asteroid and using its gravity to drag the asteroid onto a course that would miss the Earth. That assumes that we detect the threat early enough to launch such a craft, get it into …
Continue reading ‘“Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon”’ »
Wow! Maybe the US won’t turn into a technology-driven police state, as all recent indications had pointed toward (and as I had cynically expected, as the “security” apparatus has more money, and thus influence, than ordinary citizens). Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.
The literary and film genre known as the Western covers a very short period of American history — 1850 to 1900 by the most commonly-accepted definition, but it’s more accurate to say from the end of the Civil War (1865) to maybe 1890, when our forefathers ran out of frontier — a small window of …
Continue reading ‘“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”’ »
This entry could almost have come from Geek Drivel: […] I remember reading a science fiction story about a computer worm that searched for people this way: going from computer to computer, trying to identify a specific individual. I immediately thought of The Adolescence of P-1, one of my teenage favorites, and I was tickled …
Continue reading ‘“Authentication by ‘Cognitive Footprint’”’ »
So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold …
Continue reading ‘“US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux”’ »
Twenty years ago, headlines like this one wouldn’t have even been imaginable.
Wow… it seems that hacking, and hacker pranks, got their start well before the first computers were created. I can’t imagine how Marconi could have thought any clear-text wireless signal was secure against eavesdroppers. Even if his patented tuning system worked to keep the signal on a very narrow band, all it would take to …
Continue reading ‘“Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz”’ »
In the small mid-western hick community where my family spent the early- to mid-eighties, you didn’t dare let people know you were different in any way. Fifties McCarthyism was still alive and well, but no communists presented themselves, so it was turned on anyone who was different in any way. Kids who couldn’t fit in …
Continue reading ‘“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy”’ »
I’ve talked more than a few times about terrorists, terrorism, and the TSA on this blog, often quoting security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. He’s posted links to a new article by a former airline advisor which sums up the problems with the TSA’s responses to date, and offers suggestions about how to do things …
Continue reading ‘“Assessing Terrorist Threats to Commercial Aviation”’ »
Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a …