] People who know they're being watched, and that their
] innocent actions can result in police scrutiny, are
] people who become scared to step out of line. They know
] that they can be put on a "bad list" at any time. People
] living in this kind of society are not free, despite any
] illusionary security they receive. It's contrary to all
] the ideals that went into founding the United States.

A fairly good article on why profiling doesn't work.

How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism / IDs and the illusion of security

Abstract

Security must be built into Internet Protocols for those protocols to offer their services securely. Many security problems can be traced to improper implementations. However, even a proper implementation will have security problems if the fundamental protocol is itself exploitable. Exactly how security should be implemented in a protocol will vary, because of the structure of the protocol itself. However, there are many protocols for which standard Internet security mechanisms, already developed, may be applicable. The precise one that is appropriate in any given situation can vary. We review a number of different choices, explaining the properties of each.

RFC 3631: Security Mechanisms for the Internet

Visitors to CEATEC 2003 (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) met Morph3, a human-like robot about 30-centimetres tall developed by researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. It can perform back flips and karate moves thanks to 138 pressure sensors, 30 different onboard motors and 14 computer processors.

Martial arts robots hit Asian tech fair

For those interested, NGSS has just published a paper describing how to defeat the mechanism built into Windows 2003 Server to prevent exploitation of stack based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. previous work done in this area presented methods that only worked in highly specific scenarios - the new methods presented in this paper are generic. The paper can be downloaded from http://www.nextgenss.com/papers/defeating-w2k3-stack-protection.pdf .

Cheers,
David Litchfield
NGSSoftware Ltd

paper: Windows 2003 Server - Defeating the stack protection mechanism

Abstract
This paper considers the problem of using wireless LAN location-sensing for security applications. Recently, Bayesian methods have been successfully used to determine location from wireless LAN signals, but such methods have the drawback that a model must first be built from training data. The introduction of model error can drastically reduce the robustness of the location estimates and such errors can be actively induced by malicious users intent on hiding their location. This paper provides a technique for increasing robustness in the face of model error and experimentally validates this technique by testing against unmodeled hardware, modulation of power levels, and the placement of devices outside the trained workspace. Our results have interesting ramifications for location privacy in wireless networks.

paper: Wireless LAN Location-Sensing for Security Applications