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
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From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here’s another contender from Julian Bleecker …
“Blogjects” – objects which emit data about their use.
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Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Seth David Schoen’s “Wiretapping vulnerabilities” (Vitanuova: 9 March 2006):
Traditional wiretap threat model: the risks are detection of the tap, and obfuscation of content of communication. …
POTS is basically the same as it was 100 years ago — with central offices and circuit-switching. A phone from 100 years ago will pretty much still work today. [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Kim Zetter’s “The NSA is on the line — all of them” (Salon: 15 May 2006):
As fireworks showered New York Harbor [in 1976], the country was debating a three-decades-long agreement between Western Union and other telecommunications companies to surreptitiously supply the NSA, on a daily basis, with all telegrams sent to and from the [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg’s “Echelon’S Architect” (Cryptome: 21 May 2002):
After that, [Bruce McIndoe] started to design Echelon II, an enlargement of the original system.
Bruce McIndoe left the inner circle of the enormous espionage network in 1998, a network run by the National Security Agency, the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, in cooperation with [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From PR Newswire’s “OnStar Achieves Another First as Winner of Good Housekeeping’s ‘Good Buy’ Award for Best Servic” (3 December 2004):
Each month on average, OnStar receives about 700 airbag notifications and 11,000 emergency assistance calls, which include 4,000 Good Samaritan calls for a variety of emergency situations. In addition, each month OnStar advisors respond to [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Big Brother eyes ‘boost honesty’” (BBC News: 28 June 2006):
The feeling of being watched makes people act more honestly, even if the eyes are not real, a study suggests.
A Newcastle University team monitored how much money people put in a canteen “honesty box” when buying a drink.
They found people put nearly three times as [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Melissa Meagher’s “State Worker Spies on Boss, Loses His Job“:
For 22 years, [Vernon] Blake was a System Administrator for the Alabama Department of Transportation. It was a job he loved, with the exception of his supervisor. …
The running joke around the office? The boss blew off meetings and projects to play games on his [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Charles R. Smith’s “Big Brother on Board: OnStar Bugging Your Car“:
GM cars equipped with OnStar are supposed to be the leading edge of safety and technology. …
However, buried deep inside the OnStar system is a feature few suspected - the ability to eavesdrop on unsuspecting motorists.
The FBI found out about this passive listening feature [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 January 2004):
Last month Bush snuck into law one of the provisions of the failed PATRIOT ACT 2. The FBI can now obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. The institution can’t tell the target person that his records were taken by the FBI. And [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The Traveler describes for the first time in any book the secret computational immunology programs being developed in Britain. These programs behave like the leucocytes floating through our bloodstream. The programs wander through the Internet, searching, evaluating, and hiding in a person’s home PC, until they [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The passports contain a radio frequency identification chip (RFID) so that all our personal information can be instantly read by a machine at the airport. However, the State Department has refused to encrypt the information embedded in the chip, because it requires more complicated technology that [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, history, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
And everywhere we go, there are surveillance cameras – thousands of them – to photograph and record our image. Some of them are “smart” cameras, linked to computer programs that watch our movements in case we act differently from the rest of the crowd: if we [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Zachary Slobig’s “Police launch eye-in-the-sky technology above Los Angeles” (AFP: 17 June 2006):
Police launched the future of law enforcement into the smoggy Los Angeles sky in the form of a drone aircraft, bringing technology most commonly associated with combat zones to urban policing.
The unmanned aerial vehicle, which looks like a child’s remote control toy [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “VOIP Encryption” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.
One, you can listen in on another phone extension. This is the method preferred by siblings everywhere. If you have the right access, it’s the easiest. While it doesn’t work for cell phones, cordless phones are [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Eternal Value of Privacy” (Wired News: 18 May 2006):
The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
Some clever answers: “If [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Ryan Naraine’s “Microsoft Confirms Excel Zero-Day Attack Under Way” (eWeek: 16 June 2006):
Microsoft June 15 confirmed that a new, undocumented flaw in its widely used Excel spreadsheet program was being used in an attack against an unnamed target.
The company’s warning comes less than a month after a code-execution hole in Microsoft Word was exploited [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
Law enforcement likewise views privacy laws as an impediment, especially now that it has grown accustomed to accessing location data virtually at will. Take the MetroCard, the only way for New York City commuters to pay their transit fares since the elimination [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
What your salesman probably failed to tell you - and may not even realize - is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Fuzzy maths” (The Economist: 11 May 2006):
Slowly, the company is realising that it is so important that it may not be able to control the ramifications of its own actions. “As more and more data builds up in the company’s disk farms,†says Edward Felten, an expert on computer privacy at Princeton University, “the [...]
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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