Domain: philosecurity.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to philosecurity.org.
Stories · 5
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What the DHS Knows About You
Sherri Davidoff writes "Here's a real copy of an American citizen's DHS Travel Record, retrieved from the US Customs and Border Patrol's Automated Targeting System and obtained through a FOIA/Privacy Act request. The document reveals that the DHS is storing: the traveler's credit card number and expiration; IP addresses used to make Web travel reservations; hotel information and itinerary; full airline itinerary including flight numbers and seat numbers; phone numbers including business, home, and cell; and every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the traveler, even ones not used for the specific reservation." -
What the DHS Knows About You
Sherri Davidoff writes "Here's a real copy of an American citizen's DHS Travel Record, retrieved from the US Customs and Border Patrol's Automated Targeting System and obtained through a FOIA/Privacy Act request. The document reveals that the DHS is storing: the traveler's credit card number and expiration; IP addresses used to make Web travel reservations; hotel information and itinerary; full airline itinerary including flight numbers and seat numbers; phone numbers including business, home, and cell; and every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the traveler, even ones not used for the specific reservation." -
Pirates and Ninjas — Emacs Or Vi?
Sherri Davidoff writes "In the great debates of Pirates vs. Ninjas and Emacs vs. Vi, there is one overarching question: Do Pirates and Ninjas use Emacs or Vi? Philosecurity has conducted countless hours of research, interviewed real ninjas and pirates in their natural environs, and launched intensive laboratory studies involving monkeys in order to bring you, our readers, the scientifically proven answers you demand. After thousands of hours and monkey brains, our scientists have reached the following conclusions: Pirates use Emacs and Ninjas Use Vi. Laboratory results showed that 92% of ninjas preferred vi, while fully 96% of pirates used emacs. In the wild, these numbers were even higher (94% and 97.5%, respectively)." -
Pirates and Ninjas — Emacs Or Vi?
Sherri Davidoff writes "In the great debates of Pirates vs. Ninjas and Emacs vs. Vi, there is one overarching question: Do Pirates and Ninjas use Emacs or Vi? Philosecurity has conducted countless hours of research, interviewed real ninjas and pirates in their natural environs, and launched intensive laboratory studies involving monkeys in order to bring you, our readers, the scientifically proven answers you demand. After thousands of hours and monkey brains, our scientists have reached the following conclusions: Pirates use Emacs and Ninjas Use Vi. Laboratory results showed that 92% of ninjas preferred vi, while fully 96% of pirates used emacs. In the wild, these numbers were even higher (94% and 97.5%, respectively)." -
Interview With an Adware Author
rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."