A Peculiar Blog

The folks at Kaspersky Labs have run into a new variant of a nasty little bugger known as Gpcode. This virus encrypts files on the infected computer and then demands payment for a key that will allow the victim to decrypt the files and recover their data.
Thing is, this version of Gpcode is using [...]

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, is now claiming that TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chips that are installed on many new motherboards will make it impossible to pirate game software.
While it’s true that the TPM chips he’s talking about will present a seriously increased challenge, there’s no doubt at all in my mind that determined hackers, [...]

I just read a very informative article about one person’s experience with using a commercial service to recover the contents of a “dead” hard drive.
I think this article is well worth reading by anyone that keeps any kind of “sensitive” information on their hard drives. It seems that even if you take the drive [...]

After a LONG time without updates, version 1.2.5-Beta of Mixminion Message Sender is now available.
There’s been several changes / tweaks in the code (see the changelog below) and I’ve created a new distribution that includes Mixminion ready to run “out of the box”.
I have not yet been able to compile Win32 binaries of the latest [...]

There’s a piece in the NYTimes about lawyers having to fly all over the place and take all sorts of measures because they’re afraid of their contact with clients being monitored by the US government.
While I’m never going to be sympathetic to terrorists & their supporters, it’s part of how things are *supposed* to be [...]

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the fact that there are government agencies doing a lot of snooping on all manner of Internet traffic. It’s also safe to say that since 9-11 this snooping has escalated massively. Now, the FBI is trying to get access to data that the NSA has [...]

Identity theft is getting to be a really big issue these days. It’s in the news all the time, usually two or three times a week you’ll see the talking heads relating yet another story about identity theft or something that this or that congresscritter is proposing to do about it. Theres the [...]

Anyone considering traveling outside of the US would do well to read this item on the Wired.com blog about a recent federal appeals court decision that border agents can search laptops, phones and other electronics without cause (and presumably without a warrant either).
What it means is that anyone crossing the border needs to be aware [...]

We can now raise a cheer for a group of a group of bright people in the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, Germany along with colleagues from the University of Virginia have succeeded in cracking the encryption scheme used on the Mifare Classic RFID chip sold by NXP.
It turns out that the proprietary encryption scheme [...]

First, I’ll quote the “official” announcement that appeared on the Freenet support list this morning:
Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. To use it, you must download the Freenet software, available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating systems. Once you [...]