Articles related to computer security, physical security, and similar things.
Our young cousin has apparently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked. We’ve been getting several spam messages a day purporting to be from her through it. The funniest part is the text auto-appended to the bottom of each spam message: Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com …
Some spammer’s automated spam-bots have targeted Geek Drivel over the past few weeks, for reasons unknown. Well, okay, the surface reasons are obvious — but since they haven’t managed to get a single spam published, despite weeks of effort and hundreds of attempts per day, you’d think the spammer would notice and turn them to …
I’ve been against wide-spread spy cameras on privacy principles, ever since I heard about plans for them a few years ago. Now it seems that my concerns are unfounded… there’s no incentive to install them in any new cities, and the existing ones will probably scrap them soon, as they discover the same thing.
I suspect that this is only good when the suspected person doesn’t know to expect it, and how it’s judged. When he does, he’ll have worked out how to draw the visual details along with the rest of his story. Of course, I could be wrong, he might still give himself away.
How long do you think it will take for this to be adopted by intelligence services worldwide? 😉 So much for hiding conversations from electronic eavesdroppers by holding them near running water. (My guess: they’ve already got it. I could be wrong, but it’s an obvious idea to any science guy — or hard science …
Continue reading ‘“Zoom for audio enables you to hear a single conversation in huge crowd”’ »
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This isn’t a perfect society, by a long shot, so those who have authority must be held accountable for exercising that authority responsibly. And the best way to do that is to give everyone — especially their superiors and the courts — the ability to see their behavior first-hand. If they …
I’ve always thought that computers could do more to protect themselves from theft. Even something as simple as full drive encryption, built into all hard drives, would at least prevent any thief from getting the data on a machine (and the data is usually worth far more than the machine itself). Apparently someone at Intel …
Continue reading ‘“Intel slips anti-theft tech into hardware to deter thieves”’ »
Nothing to add to this, just thought it was very interesting. And, of course, the Monty Python reference (in the original article) is always appreciated. 😉
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »
I can’t believe that someone had the gall to do this. My systems are safe enough, because I use long random strings that I’ve been able to memorize, but most of the WiFi networks of my friends and associates — the ones I’ve been given the passwords for — would fall to it quickly. I …
Continue reading ‘“WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud”’ »