] The government revealed last month that Reid, who is
] serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to trying
] to blow up an airliner with explosives concealed in his
] shoes, wrote a letter to Moussaoui. The contents of that
] letter were not revealed, but a source familiar with the
] case said it was an offer to testify during Moussaoui's
] trial.
 . . .
] The judge said Moussaoui "disputes an apparent
] determination by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that
] a recent letter from Mr. Moussaoui to Mr. Reid may
] contain embedded or 'coded' messages, and requests a copy
] of the report supporting the FBI's finding."

I'd be interested in seeing that report too. For now it smells suspiciously like, "we'll say there's a code even if we don't know there'a code, just because there *might* be a code," like all those steganography rumors.

For the record, I do support the idea that all communications between imprisoned terrorists should be screened, with the exception of attorney-client communications. I just hate the "maybe there's a code!" rumors when they're not based on anything other than paranoia.

Al Qaeda's Moussaoui & Reid corresponding in code?

crankymessiah wrote:
] ] LONDON, England (Reuters) -- An armada of small, faded
] ] yellow toy ducks is expected to make landfall in Britain
] ] within weeks at the end of an epic 11-year voyage from
] ] the Pacific Ocean.
] ]
] ] They are the survivors of a consignment of 29,000 bath
] ] toys washed overboard from a container ship in 1992 that
] ] have since floated across the ocean, round the United
] ] States, through the Arctic and past Greenland.

My first reaction when I saw this was, "hoax?" But I dug into it, and it seems to be real. There's a webpage here with links to the various stories about the ducks:
 http://www.seabean.com/duckies/

And a "beachcomber" site that even has an executable which tracks the locations of the ducks over time (it ran in full-screen mode on XP, though your mileage may vary on other OSes):

 http://www.beachcombers.org/images/images.htm
(click on North Pacific Toy Spill)

And here's a pic of one of the washed ashore ducks:
 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/31/eveningnews/main566138.shtml

In my mind's eye, I was picturing a flotilla of rubber ducks dotting the waves as far as the eye could see, but it's actually probably more like an asteroid field, where you could go days without seeing one, even if you're right in the center of "duck-density". ;)

Fun story!

(8/11/2003 update: Switched link to point to MSNBC article)

England braces for rubber duck invasion

] Melissa Fleming, a spokes woman for the International
] Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, says: "As
] many as 400 potentially lethal radioactive sources are
] still missing from the inventory at al-Tuwaitha."

(sigh)

Tuwaitha: Lethal Radioactive Material Still Missing from Iraqi site

This is the page that announces the winners from last weekend's Def Con "Wi-Fi Shootout", where the competition was to see what's the farthest distance that someone could pick up a wireless signal with a commercial or homemade antenna.

At Def Con closing ceremonies, we heard that the winner (with a homemade antenna) weighed in with an impressive 35.2 mile range. Unfortunately though, they didn't have pics of the antennas to show us. This URL, however, *does* have more details and pics of some of the various contraptions that were assembled in the Nevada desert.

Congrats to the winners!

Defcon Wireless Shootout

] A software engineer from Oregon pleaded guilty Wednesday
] to aiding the Taleban and now faces the likelihood of
] seven to 10 years in jail.
]
] The Justice Department says Maher Hawash, a naturalized
] American citizen of Palestinian descent, pleaded guilty
] to a charge of conspiring to supply services to the
] Taleban following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York
] and Washington.

Hawash was guilty

] A widely publicized project to transform a man-made
] platform off the coast of England into a haven for
] controversial Web businesses has failed due to political,
] technical and management problems, one of the project's
] founders said.

I attended this talk at Def Con last weekend, and got some additional impressions than what made it into the article. For one, it was obvious that we were hearing only one side of the story, so there was a definite "sour grapes" feel to parts of the talk. And as the speaker himself mentioned, some problems were caused by the way he and his associate would spend more time traveling around and *talking* about HavenCo, than actually spending time there and running it.

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk? | CNET News.com

] Fadia says there have been unconfirmed reports that
] intelligence agencies had recruited cyber saboteurs from
] the annual DEFCON hackers conference in Las Vegas.
]
] Fadia says he has worked for a non-Indian intelligence
] agency, helping to break algorithms used to encrypt data
] suspected to belong to a terrorist group. The data was
] hidden in an image using steganography and encrypted
] three times using three customised algorithms.

Oh?

] But Fadia does not impress everyone, particularly
] hardcore security and cryptography enthusiasts. Some
] seasoned techies in India dismiss him as just another
] fad.

I'd be very interested to learn what this "non-India intelligence agency" is, since this is the first I've heard of this "data suspected to belong to a terrorist group". Which group? What data? Which agency? Or did this Fadia guy just come up with a line that sounded good on his resume, but without anything to back it up?

Rumors of Steganography from an India Investigator

] Secondly there is the Tux JPEG. Starting at offset 0x1080
] in the game save is a JPEG image. This is obvious from
] the text JFIF which is present in all JPEG headers. If
] you extract out this block, you get a nice little picture
] of Tux. Seems like a harmless little addition by a linux
] fanatic. It is typical of linuxheads to stick stuff like
] this everywhere. In reality, the real hack is encrypted
] and stored in this image. The practice of storing data in
] images is known as steganography. Perhaps this doesn't
] count, as it stores the data in the header and not in the
] actual image data. It's still rather devious.

Cute. :)

Xbox hack steganographically hidden in Linux penguin

] There exists a series of 'nonsense' postings in Usenet.
] (Please no jokes about Usenet already being full of
] nonsense). Obviously computer generated. These often
] have Arabic names interspersed in the content.
]
] One speculation is they might just be 'merry pranksters'
] posting vast amounts of nonsense to confuse Usenet
] readers.
]
] Another speculation is this might be the 'increased
] al-Qaeda chatter' we hear about when the Home Land
] Security changes the color to a redder hue. Note the
] increase just after Dec. 22 (the date that the Shoe
] Bomber was captured trying to blow up Miami to Paris,
] flight AA 63). We need to do a lot more research on this.

Some of it also looks to me like random computer-generated fiction sent to lists such as "alt.test". Still, I agree it's worth checking.

Al-Qaeda Chatter on UseNet?

This is one of the blog-aggregator sites that includes a Memestreams feed.

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