I'm sure I saw this when it came out, but its a good hack. The glow from your monitor can probably be seen out of your window. If you slowed things down really slow it wouldn't appear as a glow, but rather a strobe, as the electron gun in your monitor sweeps across rows of phosphorus. If you recorded the flashes, and knew the rate at which the gun was sweeping, you could reproduce the image displayed on the screen. Nice...

Optical Emission Security FAQ

] Pirates are the heroes of age-old adventure stories, but
] most of us forget that whole regions still depend on
] modern pirates. The coast around Malacca in Malaysia is
] such a spot, together with the Bay of Thailand and the
] Southern Chinese Sea. In South America the coast of
] Northern Brazil is another centre of pirate activity. On
] average every other day sees an attack, and whenever
] pirates strike they leave good manners at home. Typically
] all people on board of a ship are killed, unless they
] manage to escape with a rescue boat. Most pirates know in
] advance if the ship and its cargo is worth an attack,
] because they use state of the art equipment to monitor
] Inmarsat communications and even fax transmissions
] listing every single cargo item.

An interesting article on snooping Inmarsat

Inmarsat zapping

] The paper is organized into five sections and two
] appendixes. Section 1 is the introduction. Section 2
] reviews basic x86 concepts, including registers,
] assembly, runtime data structures, and the stack. Section
] 3 gives a brief introduction to viruses, their history,
] and their types. Section 4 delves into the Beagle virus
] disassembly, including describing the techniques and
] resources used in this process as well as presenting a
] high level functional flow of the virus. Section 5
] presents the conclusions of this research.

The answer is yes.

Slashdot | Can Reverse Engineering Help In Stopping Worms?

] Treemap is a space-constrained visualization of
] hierarchical structures. It is very effective in showing
] attributes of leaf nodes using size and color coding.
] Treemap enables users to compare nodes and sub-trees even
] at varying depth in the tree, and help them spot patterns
] and exceptions.

A very interesting way to visualize a large amount of data on screen at one time.

Smarrtmoney.com has a realtime interactive graph of the stock market using this technology, but its a premium feature.

Treemap: Home page

] Passwords alone won't be enough to get onto America Online
] under a new, optional log-on service that makes AOL the
] first major U.S. online business to offer customers a
] second layer of security.

This is odd. AOL rolls out two factor authentication. I've been wondering when the banks would start doing this.

MercuryNews.com | 09/20/2004 | AOL offers doubly secure log-ons

Old school british anti software piracy ads. One encourages you to rat out your school teachers for cash.

CLASSIC ANTI-PIRACY ADS

This is interesting, but let me quote another story:

] A coordinated online strike against Internet servers
] by terrorists, dubbed "electronic jihad," may or may
] not strike this week, security experts said. One
] security researcher in Moscow warned that Thursday
] would be the day in question.

A coordinated arial strike against corn silos by blue aliens, dubbed "Centauri Bebop," may or may not strike this week, SETI experts said. One SETI researcher in Arkansas warned that Thursday would be the day in question...

Electronic Jihad predicted on the 26th

] Eli Biham announced new results in cryptanalyzing SHA-1,
] including a collision in a reduced-round version of
] SHA-1. The full SHA-1 algorithm does 80 rounds of
] scrambling. At present, Biham and Chen can break
] versions of SHA-1 that use up to about 40 rounds, and
] they seem confident that their attacks can be extended to
] more rounds. This is a significant advance, but it's
] well short of the dramatic full break that was rumored.
]
] Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its
] use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the
] vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from
] SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate
] about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among
] practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will
] be.

Answer, not a 5 alarm fire, but if you write or maintain cryptography code you can still expect some work coming up.

Followup on SHA-1 break

] But experiments, one using a common laptop and another
] using a prototype Bluetooth "rifle" that captured data
] from a mobile phone a mile away, have demonstrated that
] such attacks aren't so far-fetched.
]
] Then, German researcher Herfurt developed a program
] called Bluebug that could turn certain mobile phones into
] a bug to transmit conversations in the vicinity of the
] device to an attacker's phone

Wired News: Security Cavities Ail Bluetooth

] We have found that by sending specially crafted packets
] to the client during the authentication process, an
] attacker is able to compromise and execute arbitrary code
] on the machine running PuTTY or PSCP.

CoreLabs: Vulnerability in PuTTY