From deep within the laboratory of Edward W. Felten, we bring you the emperor in all his glory:

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at room temperature and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount successful attacks on popular disk encryption systems using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. We offer new algorithms for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay. Though we discuss several strategies for partially mitigating these risks, we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them.

From the archive:

After reading about these notebook search shenanigans I started using filevault and set a screensaver password, and I hope soon to be in a position to afford the seizure of my notebook at a border.

I have FileVault enabled at present on my mac, which i suppose is pretty secure.

My entire home directory is encrypted with FileVault. Assuming FV is secure (i don't really know), what're they gonna do about it?

Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

The internet must be getting old: eBay has given up its idealism.

For most of its 13 years, eBay has been run largely as a self-policed island, a place where order was preserved less by real world laws than by norms and customs and expectations and reputations that were almost entirely virtual.

The theory was that everyone would know who the crooks were by reading their feedback. Now the company has basically admitted that this model does not work.

Most sellers see eBay's response as a dramatic shift in the balance of power, and they are right. In future, the consumer will be king: buyers will easily be able to threaten sellers with negative feedback and sellers will find it much harder to strike back. Many sellers fear the new dictatorship of the consumer.

From the archive:

In my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

She clearly understands equality. Shame she doesn't also understand that the answer to bad speech is more speech.

In response to "bad" speech, more speech leads to self censorship, on the basis of financial self interest.

Democracy meets capitalism at its finest.

The death of self-rule on the internet

This highly recommended article is now freely available.

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

The Next Bubble, by Eric Janszen | Harper's, February 2008

The rescue operation brings to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's dictum that in the United States, the only respectable form of socialism is socialism for the rich.

Massive Bailout Planned for Banks

Database management systems are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.

Oracle and SQL Server come from an age when online transaction processing dominated and required techniques such as multi-threading and transaction locking.

Persistent storage is unnecessary ...

Abandon SQL; use Ruby.

Note that the paper under review here is actually from last September. It has become "news" again because of the authors' recent criticism of Google (and MapReduce, specifically).

Get me rewrite!

A Feb. 16 Page One article misstated the weight of Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 US military official in Iraq.

He weighs 245 pounds, not 285.

CORRECTIONS

Traditional, irregular, terrorist, and disruptive threats may no longer be separate threats or modes of war. Instead, we see an increased merging or blurring ... Future contingencies will present hybrid threats specifically designed to target US vulnerabilities.

Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars

Barron's: What's going right at Microsoft? Many investors think that it's past its prime.

Rosenberg: Investors don't appreciate the growth in Microsoft's earnings coming from the developing world. Ballmer has talked about this. Piracy in the developing world is going away. Part of it has to do with the way the code was written in the new Vista operating system and part of it is that, as countries become more developed, they can't allow software to be pirated and sold on the street.

Interesting perspective, but is it true? Here's James Fallows:

This weekend, on the street in Beijing, my wife and I found a good video store -- they're slightly more discreet than in Shanghai -- and loaded up on every movie I've just named (*), plus a bunch more, at a little under $1.40 each. Extortionate, compared with Shanghai, but the best we could do.

(*) Juno. There Will Be Blood. The Great Debaters. No Country for Old Men. Charlie Wilson's War. American Gangster. Sweeney Todd. Eastern Promises. I'm Not There.

Joe Rosenberg, on Microsoft | Barron's

Fortune offers a Flash animation showing the S&P 500 on a time line, alongside the US President and the Federal Reserve Chairman. Bear markets and recessions are highlighted for easy comparison.

50 years of market swings

It has been three years since the intelligence community was reorganized with passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in December 2004, and the results are not encouraging.

The DNI has become what intelligence professionals feared it would: an unnecessary bureaucratic contraption with an amazingly large staff.

Has this bureaucratic superstructure enhanced our intelligence capabilities?

This op-ed must be taken for what it is, but it's interesting to see this view getting ink.

An Intelligence Reform Reality Check