Amazingly, this is even nerdier than Jibs...

Don't tell me you forgot about Jibs!

YouTube - Monzy performs at Stanford Univ.

This is what happens when you hire idiots that get their on-air graphics from a Google Search without even looking at the results.

WOW! Just, WOW.

Livin’ in Cowtown by Corey Spring » NBC Affiliate Gets Goo All Over Their Faces -- Uweekly.com

Good news, Memestreams.net is not currently censored in China!

Great Firewall of China | Test websites

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been found guilty on four of five counts in his perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Libby was convicted of:

# obstruction of justice when he intentionally deceived a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame;

# making a false statement by intentionally lying to FBI agents about a conversation with NBC newsman Tim Russert;

# perjury when he lied in court about his conversation with Russert;

# a second count of perjury when he lied in court about conversations with other reporters.

Does that make today Fitzmas?

'Scooter' Libby guilty on four of five counts - CNN.com

I had no idea. I think it's probably pretty healthy, all told, but surprising a bit. Maybe we'll eventually shrug off t those Puritan roots, after all...

Boink - Sex - Campus Exposure - Alexandra Jacobs - New York Times

"I did provide the information on vulnerabilities in Apple products, I provided them with code and they were given packet captures," he said.

In the future, Maynor said he won't work with Apple. "I do not feel comfortable keeping relations with the company and will not report future findings to them," he said.

What do we think? Jackass security guy out for glory or jackass corporate morons not respecting the community?

Mac Wi-Fi hijack demonstrated | News.blog | CNET News.com

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use," Boucher said in a statement. "Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market."

The legislation is being backed by the Consumer Electronics Association, the trade group of electronics-makers, among others.

Anyone been reading about this? This is just a notice... I haven't read the bill and have no analysis.

[EDIT 1 : The bill text is not available yet (12:30 PM 3/1/07) but the THOMAS record is here.

Digital 'Fair Use' Bill Introduced In Congress

This was an interesting article. I have some comments, though not really a cohesive reply...

Eighty-three percent of its respondents said they were satisfied with the content of the films they saw, but 60% nevertheless expected to spend less of their income on moviegoing in the future, citing dissatisfaction with the moviegoing experience and the emergence of better alternatives for their time and money.

This is the thing I understand the least. I love the experience of going to the theater, I like the sound and the big screen and I like, as the author indicates, the communality of it. I can sit on my couch alone and do a million things. In a town like this one, where the bars are shite and we haven't had a good concert in months, the movies are a way for me to at least be *around* people in a public place, and for only 10 bucks. Not bad. My movie going has increased dramatically in the past year or so. I now see between 2 and 4 movies per month at the theater and another 4 to 6 on DVD (though some of those are re-viewings of favorites). I know I'm the exception because I see less and less people at the theater.

We're becoming homebodies. I know it's asinine for *me* of a all people to say that, who rarely goes out socially, but it seems to be the trend.

...another phenomenon has battered the motion picture industry, attacking one of the very fundamentals of moviegoing: the movies' communal appeal. Before demographics became the marketing mantra, the movies were the art of the middle. They provided a common experience and language — a sense of unity. In the dark we were one.

Now, however, when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts — ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious — the movies can no longer be the art of the middle.
...
In effect, the conservative impulse of our politics that has promoted the individual rather than the community has helped undermine movies' communitarian appeal.

This I agree with wholeheartedly. I had a coworker about a year ago tell me that she refuses to go to the movies, even ones she's otherwise interested in "because of Hollywood's left-wing agenda". It was a politically motivated choice not just to not see particular movies, but to boycott the entire industry. This is that niche mentality at it's extreme, in which nothing outside one's personal belief system can be tolerated, because tolerance is a form of approval. I was floored by that moment... it really brought home just how divided we are these days.

Anyway, I do think the industry is endangered, for the reasons above and a number of others. I haven't even the faintest suggestion for a response. The world has to change and i guess the democratization of media (which I argued strongly in favor of a couple of days ago) has some negative aspects we ought to be concious of as we move forward. Primarily, we have to keep in mind that the point of all these media is to connect people... if we're all just sitting in our living rooms, connection is harder.

The movie magic is gone

This is rather magical, considering that the tag is credit card-thin and contains no battery. The trick is the same as for RFID tags. The reader constantly transmits a rather strong carrier; the tag derives its power and clock from this carrier, kind of like a crystal radio. The tag changes how much carrier it reflects back at the reader—loosely, it makes the circuit across its antenna more like a short or more like an open—to transmit its code. The reader and the tag both have antenna coils tuned to the carrier frequency; they work like a loosely-coupled resonant transformer.

I'm not sure this is a correct assumption in all cases. Certainly there are many passive cards (perhaps most of them?) which utilize the induced current from the sensor to drive the action of the card.

I believe, however, that there are also active cards, with an internal battery, which work by receiving an activation signal from the reader, thus causing them to transmit their ID. Crucially, the range of that transmission wouldn't be related to the power of the reader's signal, because it's generated internally. You could trigger the card to send it's ID from arbitrarily (as powerful as you could make the signal) far away, but the card's never going to transmit with enough power to be read at that same distance.

The one semi-sensible thing the HID representative said was that a cloning attack would be far more difficult for such active cards. Not impossible, just difficult. You really would have to get the cloning sensor within a couple of inches, perhaps less.

I know for a fact that I've had cards which contain batteries and when they fail, the reader does nothing... not denial, not error, nothing. This indicates to me that the card itself controls the power and therefore the range of the signal carrying the ID code.

That being said, if such a cloning attack is so hard, why is it so dangerous to release schematics for a cloner? It's paradoxical for the company to say simultaneously that the attack is almost impossible to execute and that it's a dangerous and irresponsible thing to discuss.

The truth is at the crossroads of all these things. For some cards, this is a danger, for others, much less so. Regardless, customers of these systems will get nervous and it'll cost the vendors time and money, possibly a lot of it. Ergo, no matter how real the threat is, the vendors will shut it down so as to save the implicit loss of customer trust. They should rely on their customers to listen to them when they say, "Yes, this was demonstrated, it's not a threat against X, Y and Z product lines because of A, B, C reasons and product line Q is being phased out for precisely these reasons." Twisting the legal system to derail security research is wrong.

Proximity Cards

HID has claimed that teaching others about the information violates two of the company's patents, IOActive's CEO Josh Pennell told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday. On the advice of lawyers, Pennell would not describe other details about the claims.

This really does seem completely insane. How, in any rational sense, can this violate patent law. I thought the only way to violate a patent was to produce a *product* which incorporates methods or technologies that have been patented. Are they trying to make the claim that since information is the product of this company and researcher that the words themselves are derivative works? I don't get it.

"If I say anything, HID will sue us," he said. "Large companies have lots of resources, and small companies, such as IOActive, don't."

It feels like July, '05 all over again. I feel bad for the researcher... maybe abaddon can send him one of those fancy White Hats with "Good" emblazoned on the front, just as a consolation.

Fuck HID.

I like the statement

Asked why HID hasn't addressed the issue in more recent proximity card systems, after knowledge of RFID threats became common, Carroll said that doing so would cause "major upheaval" among customers.

In other words, "we know our shit is insecure and it will cost us a lot to fix it and even more if our clients" -- government being the largest, presumably -- "get freaked out." What a bunch of garbage.

"These systems are installed all over the place. It's not just HID, but lots of companies, and there hasn't been a problem. Now we've got a person who's saying let's get publicity for our company and show everyone how to do it, and it puts everyone at risk. Where's the sense of responsibility?" Carroll said.

This is a direct re-hash of the arguments made against Mike 2 years ago. "It's all for publicity." "It's irresponsible."

Of course, it's totally ok to sweep known security issues under the carpet and pretend everything's secure for your government clients...

RFID Demo PULLED!