According to a warning from cryptographer Adi Shamir, the man behind the “S” in the widely used RSA encyrption algorithm, increasingly sophisticated computer chips could possibly lead to undetected bugs in calculations. This increases the risk that these bugs could be used to crack public key encryption algorithms. Not just PCs could be affected but cellphones and any other device with a computer chip could as well. The real danger is that once a vulnerability is found millions of PCs could be attacked simultaneously. This is not a new phenomenon, as other calculation bugs have been discovered, such as, Pentium’s FDIV division bug and a recent multiplication error in Microsoft Excel.

Source: Information Week
Photo: Flickr

The U.K. army begain testing technology that can make a tank nearly invisible. In trials last week, the army was able to make a tank completely disapear.

This invisible technology works by projecting images of the surrounding landscape onto the surface of the tank (or any object to be hidden). This gives the effect of looking through the object as the landscape that would normally be obscured by the tank is now visible. The weakest point of this intricate and delicate system of cameras and projectors is that it would have to be able to handle intense conditions.



The invisible tank is expected to be battle ready by 2012. I think we will see invisibility technology in use with other military machinery by that time as well.

Source: DailyMail.co.uk

A Korean has unveiled the Black Eagle a.k.a. MD3000, a GPS unit with integrated “black box” for cars, similar to the ones used in aircraft. This isn’t the first black box for cars (see Eclipse), but it’s the first to be integrated with a GPS unit.
The unit’s camera records video of an accident for 18 seconds - 12 seconds before the accident and 6 seconds after. How does it know to record 12 second before an accident? Well, it’s not psychic (sorry), but it starts recording each time you reach a negative 1.1G acceleration in the vehicle. More pics [Navigadget]

J.K. Rowling is going to be livid. The latest, and last, Harry Potter book has been pirated and released for download. Unfortunately though, if you want to read it you’re going to have to download hundreds of high definition image files because it has been photographed and not scanned and OCR’d. The torrent is available on The Pirate Bay.

Whoever did this should probably be panicking right now. Some furniture and a hand are visible in the pictures, and whilst that’s not a lot to go on you can bet that the publisher is going to want to pursue this. They reportedly spent $20 million trying to keep the book under wraps, so it seems unlikely that they would just drop the matter now that it’s leaked.

Nobody needs an angry billionaire, 3 teenage wizards and some copyright lawyers chasing them over a crime that they didn’t even profit from.

Disclaimer: Of course, MoT doesn’t condone piracy. It’s naughty.

A new attack has been found in which Internet Explorer could be used to activate Firefox and run malicious code. It’s done through a Firefox protocol handler used to to execute ‘firefoxurl://’ commands. According to Vnunet, “If Internet Explorer is used on a page that tries to use the ‘firefoxurl://’ the browser will activate Firefox automatically and allow malicious code to be run in JavaScript.” The exploit was found by security reasearcher Thor Larholm, and there is currently no patch but Mozilla says they’re working on it.

Yay! What we know as the “computer virus” is now 25 years old. It all started in 1981 with an Apple II and 9th-grader named Richard Skrenta. He began by tricking his friends with pirated games they’d play. “I’d give out a new game, they’d get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen.” says Skrenta. An interesting beginning to the problem child of our modern digital age.

After Skenta’s friends banned him from their computers, he started infecting the school computers. Rigging it so the program could copy itself onto floppy disks the students used on the system. And that’s how ‘Elk Cloner’ came to be, the world’s first actual computer virus to spread itself. It wasn’t a mean virus, just popped a funny message up on the screen. Read [Machinist]

Last month, the data of over 1 million Ohio citizens was stolen, including names, social security numbers, and tax identification numbers. The Ohio state government originally estimated a loss of 64,000, the estimate was updated yesterday.

It all started when a 22-year-old intern took the data home as part of the state’s security procedures, in case the data was lost at the main location. No one knows if it was a laptop or some sort of storage device. The intern left the data in her car, then the data was stolen while the car was parked in her apartment complex over the weekend.

My question: why would they let an intern, or anyone for that matter, take that kind of data home with them? There are plenty of other ‘off-site storage’ options that actually are safer than leaving at an intern’s apartment complex parking lot all weekend.

Consumerist were intruiged by an article where a Geek Squad tech support guy admitted that they often copied porn off of customers machines. They rigged up a PC to record a video of all activity, and took it to have some software installed (do people actually pay for that?).

They caught the guy browsing through personal pictures and porn, before copying them to his USB thumbdrive. Tut-tut.

As they point out, the problem is that when your computer breaks down it’s already too late to hide your personal stuff, not that you should have to - if you hire a plumber, he doesn’t root through your personal belongings.

I’d hope that MoT readers wouldn’t need to go to Geek Squad to get software installed?

If you use Windows Vista, then you should know that over 20 Windows Vista features and services are collecting and giving your personal data to Microsoft. Microsoft should have these things listed out (like below) and put right in front of every Vista user’s face before they install the OS.

Which programs collect your data and send to Microsoft? Windows Update, Web Content, Digital Certificates, Auto Root Update, Windows Media Digital Rights Management, Windows Media Player, Malicious Software Removal/Clean On Upgrade, Network Connectivity Status Icon, Windows Time Service, and the IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAT) Traversal service (Teredo).

Read [Softpedia]

SAP has admitted hacking into Oracle’s network and carrying out, “inappropriate downloads.” Pretty much anything you download from a competitors hacked network is inappropriate, I would say. It was a subsidiary of SAP, TomorrowNow, that performed the espionage, and SAP said the themselves had not accessed the material.

SAP CEO, Henning Kagerman, said, “Even a single inappropriate download is unacceptable from my perspective. We regret very much that this occurred.” Oracle say that the act was, “corporate theft on a grand scale.”

A BBC article says that the downloaded material was ‘copyrighted software’, so I can only presume that it involved source code. If that’s the case then it could be a major problem. If coders at a company are proven to have seen a competitors code then that has implications on SAPs IP rights on their own code.