I noticed this article via Schneier on Security.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
The information age in general and that remarkable trashdump known as the Internet always reinforce what I believe to be a sort of law of nature, information wants to be free. The more digital and connected our world becomes, the stronger that want becomes. All of us as owners and protectors of information try to fight that freedom at times, and one mistake is often all it takes to crush those efforts in the modern world. Once information is freed today, there is little that can be done to lock it back up. In an instant, it is everywhere and nowhere, free.
Information leaks aside though, the following blurb reminded me of a story I once heard.
Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.
Someone once told me about a meeting they had with a different TLA. They drove to the meeting, and ended up in a mostly residential neighborhood in Maryland, where they encountered what appeared to be a private residence at the address that they had been given. That facade only held until they got within a certain distance of the building though, at which point they encountered a very thorough escort. This was no ordinary private residence.
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Taipei, Taiwan, 10 March 2005 – VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced the VIA EPIA EN-Series Mini-ITX mainboards, the first of VIA’s ultra compact platforms to feature the VIA C7 processor, making it the most powerful EPIA platform to date.
Designed to inspire a new generation of powerful digital media appliances, the VIA EPIA EN mainboard sets new standards for performance per watt and rich feature set, integrating the advanced VIA CN700 digital media IGP chipset that boasts an impressive range of features, including full hardware HDTV encoding up to 1080i, 720p output, hardware MPEG-2 acceleration, VIA Vinyl Multi-channel Audio, support for up to 1GB of DDR2 400/533MHz memory, full featured SATA II RAID, an LVDS module connector and Gigabit LAN.
And lots of hardware crypto.
Integrated into the VIA C7 and VIA Eden processor supporting is the VIA PadLock Security Engine, the world’s most comprehensive collection native x86 security tools. Featuring the world’s fastest x86 AES encryption engine, a powerful secure hash engine, a hardware Montgomery Multiplier to accelerate public key encryption such as RSA, and dual quantum based random number generators to provide an unshakable foundation for security, the VIA PadLock Security Engine enables developers to seamlessly offload the computational process involved in complex encryption algorithms freeing processor loading to handle more data faster. The security engine also offers NX Execute protection to prevent the propagation of worms.
Oh my goodness, this sounds so so sweet (marketing spin aside). There are a couple of projects I have been thinking about for which this might be perfect.
via a post to cypherpunks
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The April 2006 NYCBUG meeting looks like it is going to have an open format.
Some of you may have noticed that we don’t have a meeting listed for April.
On admin we are discussing the idea of having an open type meeting, one
in which a few people off talk can propose a topic that they can discuss
in 5 minutes or so that is relevant to the their work with or on the BSDs.In other words, if you’ve had a repeated problem figuring out how to get
spamd working, or you have a great solution for dealing with those
repeated zombie attacks on sshd, this is the time.
Some of our readers (and friends) are BSD people, especially a few of you down in DC. If you want to chime in, I may know of a place for you to crash for the night.
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I know a few people that have been hit with this, including myself.
[...]I
>> got a call the other from the number 786-718-9058 and when I answered, it
>> was a message in Spanish which I couldn’t really hear and didn’t
>> understand. That was the end of it. Well then it called again 5 days
>> later and got my voicemail and left the same message it had the other day
>> when I answered the phone.
[...]
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Hot on the heels of the publicity around the latest release of John the Ripper, l0phtcrack goes away.
The purpose of this letter is to notify you that Symantec Corporation is discontinuing its L0phtCrack (LC) product line and will no longer provide product code updates, enhancements or fixes to this product line.
via this post on the DailyDave mailing list
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Signature verification of non-detached signatures may give a positive
result but when extracting the signed data, this data may be prepended
or appended with extra data not covered by the signature. Thus it is
possible for an attacker to take any signed message and inject extra
arbitrary data.
FYI, we recently generated an OpenPGP key for general inquiries to D-kriptik. The public key can be found here.
via this post on the cryptography mailing list
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Undeadly posted the following request.
Pre-Orders are Up for 3.9! Buy stuff!!!!
Pre-orders are up for 3.9, so you can all whip out your plastic and support the project.
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The first release candidate for 0.1.1.x branch of TOR was announced.
This is the first release candidate for the 0.1.1.x series.
I noted the following bugfix as well.
– When we’re printing strings from the network, don’t try to print
non-printable characters. This protects us against shell escape
sequence exploits, and also against attacks to fool humans into
misreading their logs.
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The 2006 SXSW music festival begins on Wednesday (14-03-2006).
The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over fifty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.
Sadly, I won’t be there. 