At last week's Oakland conference (a.k.a. the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy), a team of researchers from MSR demonstrated that the auto-complete features of many web sites (including Google search) reveal individual keystrokes based on the size of the returned auto-complete lists. They demonstrated this over WPA2, but I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work over HTTPS.
Separately, it was also pointed out that the root certificates for Google's HTTPS site use MD2 and 1024-bit RSA keys.
Seattle's red light cameras actually capture two images: one before you enter the intersection while the light is red, and one after you enter the intersection. To do this, the camera systems have to predict whether you will run the light or not. If you might, it will take a picture before you enter the intersection. This leads to many complaints about the cameras misfiring, but in fact, they are working just fine.
The Internet is an open network. The SMB/CIFS protocol (which is the basis for Windows file sharing) lets you remotely connect to file shares over the Internet. Sure, most people have file sharing turned off (or at least firewalled), but Windows will still let you shoot yourself in the foot, just like P2P software will.
OnStar can't keep you locked in your car -- there is ALWAYS a manual override.
You can request that the Remove Vehicle Slowdown feature is disabled. Apparently, they can disable it over the air, but to re-enable it, you need to take it into a dealership, so they can't just re-enable it if the police demand them to.
OnStar claims that their software has been modified so that the driver is ALWAYS notified when the microphone is activated remotely.
Even if this doesn't satisfy you, you can always unplug the OnStar unit without affecting the rest of the car.
It's not a bug in DOS, but a bug in the NT virtual 8086 machine monitor. Since hardly anyone still runs DOS applications, it's not surprising that it took so long for the bug to be discovered. It's a feature that's not often thought about.
There's some equally-questionable terms in the sales agreement:
You may not cancel these Terms and return a Device that has been engraved with a personal message of any sort regardless of where you reside.
Devices that were not successfully delivered to you will be returned to Google and Google will issue a refund to the credit card or other payment method originally charged for the order. The amount of the refund will be the original purchase amount, minus shipping charges and any refurbishing fees associated with engraving. Specifically, returned delivery of Devices that have been engraved with a personal message will result in a $45 USD engraving fee.
I can understand them not wanting to accept returns of customized devices... But if someone other than you (say, Fedex, or the notorious Brightstar, which handled fulfillment for the Android Dev Phones and royally screwed up the XO laptop shipments) screws up and gets returned to Google, they charge you a $45 fee. Presumably this fee covers the cost of restoring the phone to its original condition -- but if they can do that, why not just charge that fee for returned devices, instead of outright rejecting them?
You could get advance warnings if you can get the information out faster than the propagation speed of the wave. I don't imagine it'd be too useful, except to possibly perform some sort of automated pre-earthquake tasks (parking hard drives, maybe?).
This proposal, as described in the article, would enact DMCA-like takedown notices:
The Digital Economy Bill would force internet service providers (ISPs) to send warning letters to anyone caught swapping copyright material illegally, and to suspend or slow the connections of those who refused to stop.
The ISPs are claiming that this will cost them £25 per year per connection to enforce, and they want the content industries to pony up the money.
Now, I don't know about you, but £25 per year per connection seems like a lot. In the US, the process can be largely automated -- DMCA notices now often contain XML that ISPs can parse automatically and forward the notice without any human intervention.
And then there's this load of crap:
Ministers have not estimated the cost of the measures but say that the cost of the initial letter-writing campaign, estimated at an extra £1.40 per subscription, will lead to 40,000 households giving up their internet connections. Impact assessments published alongside the Bill predict that the measures will generate £1.7 billion in extra sales for the film and music industries over the next ten years, as well as £350 million for the Government in extra VAT.
I doubt a single household will give up Internet for this. The casual sharers will stop or migrate to hosted services. The hardcore sharers will likely find ways to make their actions harder to trace.
... because they already do it. Amazon already collects sales tax for products sold by third-party merchants on their site. So, they already have the infrastructure in place to assess and collect sales tax for merchants located virtually anywhere.
This is simply about keeping a competitive advantage they have over brick-and-mortar stores. Sure, you could say it's not moral for them to avoid paying their fair share, but you could also say it's immoral for them to NOT find ways to maximize profit for their shareholders (which might include you, depending on your retirement plan!).
You might be able to buy an iPhone in NYC, but you can't from AT&T's web site.
Try for yourself!
1. Go to http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/cell-phones.jsp
2. If you're outside of NYC, you'll see "Showing 69 standard phones or devices" and the iPhones listed immediately below.
3. Change your zip code to 10101 by clicking Update next to your location in the upper-right corner.
4. Now notice that it says "Showing 65 standard phones or devices." The iPhones are nowhere to be found.
Now, the reason that the CSR gave for iPhone being unavailable might not be correct, but you certainly can't buy an iPhone from the AT&T website in NYC.
World of Warcraft uses BitTorrent to distribute its patches. Every WoW player using Comcast can make a claim without admitting to anything that the MAFIAA might use against them.
Google for link:http://www.target.com/gp/search/ref=sr_bmvd_redirect?field-keywords=Anal%20Massage%20for%20Lovers%20Vol%202&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index. Six sites are linking to it! It's showing up in Google's results because people are linking to it.
Of course, the story is a bit trickier than that. People are linking to an old product URL (Target sometimes has humorous products on their site), which Target redirects to a search page when they no longer carry the product. Google indexes this redirect and treats both URLs as the roughly the same (you'll notice that the links you find above point to a product URL, not the search result URL).
In many cases, this is a reasonable thing to do. People point to content they care about. They usually don't care what the exact URL is. If the URL changes, they likely still care about the original content. Target's redirection breaks this assumption, but I'm not sure there's a straight-forward fix. Perhaps they could return a 404 response (with the same content) when redirecting from a broken product URL?
I suspect the boarding pass check is primarily to keep the TSA from being overwhelmed by people not flying, such as family members waiting for you to arrive. Using it for any other purpose (including identifying selectees) is pretty pointless until they actually validate the boarding pass. They're slowly starting to do this, but it's a long process.
I once wrote a tool called "StarPatch" that lets you run StarCraft in a window. It works by 1) patching a calls to CreateWindow and some DirectDraw initialization functions, 2) patching calls to DirectDraw's Lock and Unlock to return a fake video memory pointer, and 3) periodically copying the fake video memory to the real video memory.
The source code is almost ten years old at this point, but I've made it available again at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/supersat/starpatch.c. You'll need to tweak it to work with anything other than StarCraft 1.10, but you can modify it to scale up pixels, etc.
Noank Media, a company based on a Harvard University research proposal, is working on a blanket-license program that would charge colleges and other institutions a flat fee. Users would install software that would count every time they played a song, for the purpose of distributing royalties to the musicians.
What? How do they expect that to work? Are service providers going to force me to install some metering software? How will it count plays on portable music players?
The stated goal doesn't mesh well with what Vanish actually does. If the communication is happening between two trusted parties, each party can trust the other to delete the information within a given time-frame.
The problem isn't with the trusted parties, but with the intermediaries. For example, if you send someone an encrypted email through GMail, even if the recipient deletes the data, Google might keep a backup. The recipient could then be compelled to produce the key.
Disclaimer: I'm in the same research group that produced Vanish, but I am not part of the project.
I'm not sure it was a conscious decision by Sega. It's total security by obscurity -- you have to create a second data track for it to work. Just burning a regular data CD-R doesn't work.
Of course, once people figured this out, the piracy rate went out of control. It might have been the final nail in the Dreamcast's coffin.
They're effective, but not perfect. The EDLs can be read from up to 30 ft away under typical conditions, and over 150 ft away under certain conditions. The sleeves reduce the read range to a maximum of about 2 ft. Depending on the card, the sleeve, and the condition the sleeve is in, the read range can be 0. I have a paper appearing at CCS '09 on this, but in the mean time, you can read the tech report (which is very similar): ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/tr/2008/10/UW-CSE-08-10-02.PDF
Remember that before they started Skype, the founders of Skype created KaZaA, notorious for its immense crapfest of malware. I'm not at all surprised that they're trying to screw over eBay now.
Slashdot Mirror
At last week's Oakland conference (a.k.a. the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy), a team of researchers from MSR demonstrated that the auto-complete features of many web sites (including Google search) reveal individual keystrokes based on the size of the returned auto-complete lists. They demonstrated this over WPA2, but I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work over HTTPS.
Separately, it was also pointed out that the root certificates for Google's HTTPS site use MD2 and 1024-bit RSA keys.
This was confirmed by a Washington State Patrol trooper in the Seattle PI: http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/archives/151729.asp
Seattle's red light cameras actually capture two images: one before you enter the intersection while the light is red, and one after you enter the intersection. To do this, the camera systems have to predict whether you will run the light or not. If you might, it will take a picture before you enter the intersection. This leads to many complaints about the cameras misfiring, but in fact, they are working just fine.
The Internet is an open network. The SMB/CIFS protocol (which is the basis for Windows file sharing) lets you remotely connect to file shares over the Internet. Sure, most people have file sharing turned off (or at least firewalled), but Windows will still let you shoot yourself in the foot, just like P2P software will.
Government contractors are covered by this bill as well.
OnStar can't keep you locked in your car -- there is ALWAYS a manual override.
You can request that the Remove Vehicle Slowdown feature is disabled. Apparently, they can disable it over the air, but to re-enable it, you need to take it into a dealership, so they can't just re-enable it if the police demand them to.
OnStar claims that their software has been modified so that the driver is ALWAYS notified when the microphone is activated remotely.
Even if this doesn't satisfy you, you can always unplug the OnStar unit without affecting the rest of the car.
It's not a bug in DOS, but a bug in the NT virtual 8086 machine monitor. Since hardly anyone still runs DOS applications, it's not surprising that it took so long for the bug to be discovered. It's a feature that's not often thought about.
Windows 7 is Windows NT 6.1. NT has been in development for over 20 years.
I can understand them not wanting to accept returns of customized devices... But if someone other than you (say, Fedex, or the notorious Brightstar, which handled fulfillment for the Android Dev Phones and royally screwed up the XO laptop shipments) screws up and gets returned to Google, they charge you a $45 fee. Presumably this fee covers the cost of restoring the phone to its original condition -- but if they can do that, why not just charge that fee for returned devices, instead of outright rejecting them?
You could get advance warnings if you can get the information out faster than the propagation speed of the wave. I don't imagine it'd be too useful, except to possibly perform some sort of automated pre-earthquake tasks (parking hard drives, maybe?).
The ISPs are claiming that this will cost them £25 per year per connection to enforce, and they want the content industries to pony up the money.
Now, I don't know about you, but £25 per year per connection seems like a lot. In the US, the process can be largely automated -- DMCA notices now often contain XML that ISPs can parse automatically and forward the notice without any human intervention.
And then there's this load of crap:
I doubt a single household will give up Internet for this. The casual sharers will stop or migrate to hosted services. The hardcore sharers will likely find ways to make their actions harder to trace.
... because they already do it. Amazon already collects sales tax for products sold by third-party merchants on their site. So, they already have the infrastructure in place to assess and collect sales tax for merchants located virtually anywhere.
This is simply about keeping a competitive advantage they have over brick-and-mortar stores. Sure, you could say it's not moral for them to avoid paying their fair share, but you could also say it's immoral for them to NOT find ways to maximize profit for their shareholders (which might include you, depending on your retirement plan!).
You might be able to buy an iPhone in NYC, but you can't from AT&T's web site.
Try for yourself!
1. Go to http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/cell-phones.jsp
2. If you're outside of NYC, you'll see "Showing 69 standard phones or devices" and the iPhones listed immediately below.
3. Change your zip code to 10101 by clicking Update next to your location in the upper-right corner.
4. Now notice that it says "Showing 65 standard phones or devices." The iPhones are nowhere to be found.
Now, the reason that the CSR gave for iPhone being unavailable might not be correct, but you certainly can't buy an iPhone from the AT&T website in NYC.
protocol != client. The Blizzard updater uses the BitTorrent protocol.
World of Warcraft uses BitTorrent to distribute its patches. Every WoW player using Comcast can make a claim without admitting to anything that the MAFIAA might use against them.
Google for link:http://www.target.com/gp/search/ref=sr_bmvd_redirect?field-keywords=Anal%20Massage%20for%20Lovers%20Vol%202&url=index%3Dtarget%26search-alias%3Dtgt-index. Six sites are linking to it! It's showing up in Google's results because people are linking to it.
Of course, the story is a bit trickier than that. People are linking to an old product URL (Target sometimes has humorous products on their site), which Target redirects to a search page when they no longer carry the product. Google indexes this redirect and treats both URLs as the roughly the same (you'll notice that the links you find above point to a product URL, not the search result URL).
In many cases, this is a reasonable thing to do. People point to content they care about. They usually don't care what the exact URL is. If the URL changes, they likely still care about the original content. Target's redirection breaks this assumption, but I'm not sure there's a straight-forward fix. Perhaps they could return a 404 response (with the same content) when redirecting from a broken product URL?
I suspect the boarding pass check is primarily to keep the TSA from being overwhelmed by people not flying, such as family members waiting for you to arrive. Using it for any other purpose (including identifying selectees) is pretty pointless until they actually validate the boarding pass. They're slowly starting to do this, but it's a long process.
I once wrote a tool called "StarPatch" that lets you run StarCraft in a window. It works by 1) patching a calls to CreateWindow and some DirectDraw initialization functions, 2) patching calls to DirectDraw's Lock and Unlock to return a fake video memory pointer, and 3) periodically copying the fake video memory to the real video memory.
The source code is almost ten years old at this point, but I've made it available again at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/supersat/starpatch.c. You'll need to tweak it to work with anything other than StarCraft 1.10, but you can modify it to scale up pixels, etc.
- Karl
There's no viruses or nasties for it because NOTHING RUNS ON IT. ;)
What? How do they expect that to work? Are service providers going to force me to install some metering software? How will it count plays on portable music players?
The problem isn't with the trusted parties, but with the intermediaries. For example, if you send someone an encrypted email through GMail, even if the recipient deletes the data, Google might keep a backup. The recipient could then be compelled to produce the key.
Disclaimer: I'm in the same research group that produced Vanish, but I am not part of the project.
You don't even need access to the BASIC interpreter to do that.
I'm not sure it was a conscious decision by Sega. It's total security by obscurity -- you have to create a second data track for it to work. Just burning a regular data CD-R doesn't work.
Of course, once people figured this out, the piracy rate went out of control. It might have been the final nail in the Dreamcast's coffin.
They're effective, but not perfect. The EDLs can be read from up to 30 ft away under typical conditions, and over 150 ft away under certain conditions. The sleeves reduce the read range to a maximum of about 2 ft. Depending on the card, the sleeve, and the condition the sleeve is in, the read range can be 0. I have a paper appearing at CCS '09 on this, but in the mean time, you can read the tech report (which is very similar): ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/tr/2008/10/UW-CSE-08-10-02.PDF
I'm guessing it's about 25 years too late for him.
Remember that before they started Skype, the founders of Skype created KaZaA, notorious for its immense crapfest of malware. I'm not at all surprised that they're trying to screw over eBay now.
Of course, not that eBay is much better...