From Ian Urbina’s “High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places” (The New York Times: 3 November 2008):
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, politics, security | No Comments »
From Shane Harris’ “China’s Cyber-Militia” (National Journal: 31 May 2008):
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, history, politics, security | No Comments »
From Federico Biancuzzi’s interview with security researchers Greg Hoglund & Gary McGraw, authors of Exploiting Online Games, in “Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds” (SecurityFocus: 20 December 2007):
The more I dug into online game security, the more interesting things became. There are multiple threads intersecting in our book: hackers who cheat in online games and are [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006):
Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. …
Electronic voting is not transparent - it is not even translucent. There is no way [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, politics, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
DVD players are factory-built with a set of keys. When a DVD is inserted, the player runs through every key it knows until one unlocks the disc. Once this disc key is known, the player uses it to retrieve a title key from the [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
The attacks on FairPlay have been enlightening because of what they illustrate about the current state of DRM. They show, for instance, that modern DRM schemes are difficult to bypass, ignore, or strip out with a few lines of code. In contrast to older [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
A third approach [to subverting Apple's DRM] came from PyMusique, software originally written so that Linux users could access the iTunes Music Store. The software took advantage of the fact that iTMS transmits DRM-free songs to its customers and relies on iTunes to add [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
… the main principles of hacking, which state that information should circulate as widely as possible, and that breaking into systems is acceptable if you cause no harm.
Related posts
The origins of 2600
The Chinese Internet threat
More problems with voting, election 2008
Failure every 30 years produces better design
Your [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, language & literature, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
The event was organized by 2600, a quarterly magazine whose name refers to one of the great discoveries in hacker history: that the plastic whistles given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the early 1970s could be slightly modified to create sound waves [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, technology, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Federico Biancuzzi’s “John the Ripper 1.7, by Solar Designer“:
John the Ripper 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots [...]
Posted on April 8th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Trusted Computing Best Practices“:
The language [in the Trusted Computing Group's best practices document] has too much wiggle room for companies to break interoperability under the guise of security: “Furthermore, implementations and deployments of TCG specifications should not introduce any new interoperability obstacles that are not for the purpose of security.”
That sounds good, [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off
From “Cartridge Expiration Date Workarounds“:
In light of the lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard over the expiration date of their cartridges, two ways to fix the problem:
1) Remove and reinsert the battery of the printer’s memory chip
2) Preemptive: Change the parameters of the printer driver
Search for hp*.ini … In it there is a parameter something like pencheck. It [...]
Posted on March 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s "Great Hackers":
… In programming, as in many fields, the hard part isn’t solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. …
What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that’s an understatement. Good hackers find it [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, technology | Comments Off