The UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys, a move which has outraged some security and civil rights experts.

The powers are contained within Part 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). RIPA was introduced in 2000, but the government has held back from bringing Part 3 into effect. Now, more than five years after the original act was passed, the Home Office is seeking to exercise the powers within Part Three of RIPA.

UK Government to force handover of encryption keys

Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.

That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers' ability to send e-mails to other victims -- a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests.

Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks.

Today, Reshef will wave a virtual white flag and surrender. The company will shut down this morning and its Web site will display a message informing its customers about the closure.

In the Fight Against Spam E-Mail, Goliath Wins Again

"They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution.
Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".

The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated."

Bus firm takes car sharers to court

On Monday, June 20th lawyers for BNetd (EFF & Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder) have argued (in an appeal) that conflict preemption renders EULA prohibitions against reverse engineering unlawful because they remove rights federal law (under 1201f) has granted. It's a fairly interesting case, with wide reaching implications.

Blizzard v. BNETD

[ A story about a web site filing a lawsuit to save themselves from having to edit robots.txt. Swell. Stupid french. ]

AFP Sues Google News for Copyright Infringement

[ General software laws in europe, each nation integrates the directives into their existing law a little different, but I found this an interesting description of how software copyrights work in europe in general. Of particular interest to me was articles 6
and 5(3).]

Council Directive of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs (91/250/EEC)

Spinner wrote:
] bucy wrote:
] ]
] ] I bought an old Portmaster 2e a few days ago to run serial
] ] consoles for a bunch of unix boxen. When we brought up its
] ] config, the domain name in it was netcom.com.
]
] I need help getting into mine.
] I have a console but login says "Host not found"
] have permutated switches and set only jumper...
]
] any help would be greatly appreciated.

First, you need to get in. Set dip switch 1 to the up position and use a username of !root and a password of override. You should get a login failure, but it should return a 16 character challenge string. Mail that string to override@portmasters.com and it will automatically respond. Lucent gave them authority to handle this sort of thing when they killed the portmaster line. When you get a response, login as !root again and use the response they give you as the password, and you should be in and can use set password to set a new password.

Next, you are going to want to erase the configuration to the factory default. Enter the following commands:

set console
set debug 0x72
erase configuration
reboot

You should then be able to login via S0 and perform your configuration.

RE: Anyone remember Netcom?

LOS ANGELES -- Outfitting every U.S. commercial passenger plane with anti-missile systems would be a costly and impractical defense against terrorists armed with shoulder-fired rockets, according to a study released Tuesday.

[From Schneier's blog...]
The Rand study also cited the unreliability of the system, and the problems of false alarms.

Identifying terrorism security countermeasures that aren't worth it...maybe it's the start of a trend.

Posted on January 26, 2005 at 08:42 AM

Report: Airline anti-missile system costly, unreliable

] Episode 78 - Cryptography (original air date: 01/11/2005)

Stankdawg's web radio program -- I was co-host for this week's episode. Check the link to download the MP3. We talked about some "Cryptography 101" stuff, including a brief overview of the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code and Kryptos. We ran out of time discussing the Cyrillic Projector, but may cover it in a future show.

Thanks to SD for inviting me!

Elonka :)

Binary Revolution - The Cryptography Episode

IN RECENT years the mobile phone has turned into an electronic jack-of-all-trades, the remote control for everyday life, a digital equivalent of the Swiss Army knife. A modern handset can function as a digital camera, music player, radio, games console and messaging device, as well as being a phone. On January 10th, trials began in South Korea of a new service that incorporates yet another device into the handset: television. TU Media, a joint venture between SK Telecom and Toshiba, a Japanese electronics firm, began beaming three of a planned 12 mobile-TV channels to special handsets, a service for which it plans to charge subscribers $11 a month. In Europe and America, meanwhile, Nokia, the world's leading handset-maker, is also testing mobile TV services: the most elaborate trial so far, with 500 users, will start soon in the English city of Oxford, in conjunction with O2, a European operator.

TV on your phone