] At last, the secret of how to make MD5 collisions is out!

MD5 collision method published

bmitchell wrote:
] Researchers that reverse engineer software to discover
] programming flaws can no longer legally publish their findings
] in France after a court fined a security expert on Tuesday.

This is unfortunate if true. France has already shown little hesitation in suing american sites that violate french law. I wonder if they're going to start fining security companies anytime a new vunlerability is published?

RE: Publishing exploit code ruled illegal in france

An 800-kilometre-wide sea, surviving as broken plates, appears to
lie just beneath the surface in observations from the Mars Express
spacecraft. The sea is just 5 degrees north of the Martian equator
and would be the first discovery of a large body of water outside
the planet's polar ice caps.

'Pack ice' suggests frozen sea on Mars

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer...

[...]

He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

Update: false, but definitely something that could have been in Strange Brew

Man peed way out of avalanche

Lexus cars may be vulnerable to viruses that infect them via mobile phones. Landcruiser 100 models LX470 and LS430 have been discovered with infected operating systems that transfer within a range of 15 feet.

Mobile virus infects Lexus cars

] The novel The Da Vinci Code is renewing interest in
] solving the puzzle of a cryptographic sculpture located
] at CIA headquarters. Only three people know the solution,
] but the sculptor now says two of them only think they
] know it.

Big front-page top-link article on Kryptos at Wired. Coolness. :)

I've been working with the reporter on this article for awhile now, and she really did her homework. I helped her get in touch with both Jim Sanborn and Ed Scheidt for interviews, and we tried really hard to get interviews with William Webster, Jim Gillogly, and even Dan Brown. I'm also pleased that the reporter posted an actual transcript of her Sanborn interview, since that gives us more to work with on analyzing his comments!

- Elonka :)

Wired News - New Sanborn Interview

Acidus wrote:
] ] The complex version: Onion Routing is a connection-oriented
] ] anonymizing communication service. Users choose a
] ] source-routed path through a set of nodes, and negotiate a
] ] "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node
] ] knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic
] ] flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at
] ] each node, which reveals the downstream node.
]
] What about traffic analysis? While I don't know much about
] this, I had a talk about this very same thing with Decius not
] too long ago. Don't you need some type of anonymous cloud
] takes and "holds" your request for some random length of time?
] That way if enough people are inject requests into the cloud,
] there is no way to match an incoming transmition cloud with
] one leaving the cloud.

It's a performance tradeoff, and it is thought that even the typical padding and reordering is not sufficient. The design document has this to say:

No mixing, padding, or traffic shaping (yet): Onion Routing originally called for batching and reordering cells as they arrived, assumed padding between ORs, and in later designs added padding between onion proxies (users) and ORs [27,41]. Tradeoffs between padding protection and cost were discussed, and traffic shaping algorithms were theorized [49] to provide good security without expensive padding, but no concrete padding scheme was suggested. Recent research [1] and deployment experience [4] suggest that this level of resource use is not practical or economical; and even full link padding is still vulnerable [33]. Thus, until we have a proven and convenient design for traffic shaping or low-latency mixing that improves anonymity against a realistic adversary, we leave these strategies out.

They suggest (but dont say outright) that reordering & batching may occur at some point. It would certainly give me more warm fuzzies if it did.

http://freehaven.net/tor/cvs/doc/design-paper/tor-design.html

makes for an interesting read...

RE: Onion Routing 2.0: tor

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

No model yet proposed explains all observed gully features, the scientists note. However, their data points them toward gully creation due to subsurface water. Carbon dioxide, melting ground ice, dry landslide, and snowmelt models, they explain, "inadequately conform to the MGS observations and are the least likely mechanisms of gully formation proposed to date."

Mars Gullies Likely Formed By Underground Aquifers

Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.

The new species - dubbed "the Hobbit" due to its small size - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

'Hobbit' joins human family tree