VSC told the students nothing... In the Fall of last year there were rumors that VSC was open to selling the 60-year-old 91.1 WRVU. There was no more news until Monday June 6th. The call sign change to WFCL popped up unexpectedly Monday morning in the FCC database. The DJs on air used the wrong station ID for most of the day because they were not informed.

Then Tuesday afternoon the DJ on air was told that there was "urgent equipment maintenance" and hurried out the door... which they then locked behind him.

Decius writes:

You can listen to the last moments of WRVU at this link.

There is more detail along with news media links here. Its a fucking disgrace. Its transparently obvious that a bunch of people who don't like college radio saw an opportunity here to kill this station and pocket 3 million dollars in the process which they get to spend on their own projects. It a win, win for them and a travesty for music city.

Its hard for me to really express how disappointed and angry this makes me. This whole deal has been shady, from the fact that WRVU has no representation in the governing body of Vanderbilt Student Communications, to the pre-emptive registration of potential protest domain names by Vanderbilt Student Communications prior to the original announcement back in September, to the fact that the final pulling of the plug was not communicated to the public and was done during the summer when the students are away and cannot comment. Why Vandy tolerates such obvious underhandedness from its student communications leadership is beyond me.

Oh wait, its the money.

What a damn shame.

Totally unbelievable. I hope there is a huge fallout due to this. The Vanderbilt community should be enraged.

WRVU Is Dead

Hoder watch...

Search Engine video podcast: Free Hossein Derakhshan, even if he's kind of a jerk! Boing Boing

Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet

Many goverments require telecommunications companies to provide interfaces that law enforcement can use to monitor their customer's communications. If these interfaces are poorly designed, implemented, or managed they can provide a backdoor for attackers to perform surveillance without lawful authorization. Most lawful intercept technology is proprietary and difficult to peer review. Fortunately, Cisco has published the core architecture of it's lawful intercept technology in an Internet Draft and a number of public configuration guides.

This talk will review Cisco's architecture for lawful intercept from a security perspective. The talk will explain how a number of different weaknesses in its design coupled with publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities could enable a malicious person to access the interface and spy on communications without leaving a trace. The talk will explain what steps network operators need to take to protect this interface. The talk will also provide a set of recommendations for the redesign of the interface as well as SNMP authentication in general to better mitigate the security risks.

//BIO: Tom Cross

Black Hat Technical Security Conference: DC 2010 // Briefings

Texas Instruments (TI) ultimately failed to stand behind their misguided claim that calculator hobbyists violated copyright law by having public, online discussions about techniques to get more functionality from TI calculators. Yet the company continues to dig itself into new holes by issuing more improper take-down letters...

In fact, TI has sent an identical take-down demand to Mr. Smith's university complaining about the same OS keys having been posted on our client's student webpage, and demanding that the school take the materials down from that URL. Today, Mr. Smith filed a DMCA Section 512 counternotice to continue the fight.

Hey, Texas Instruments -- Stop Digging Holes | Electronic Frontier Foundation

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned Texas Instruments (TI) today not to pursue its baseless legal threats against calculator hobbyists who blogged about potential modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators....

"The DMCA should not be abused to censor online discussion by people who are behaving perfectly legally," said Tom Cross, who blogs at memestreams.net. "It's legal to engage in reverse engineering, and its legal to talk about reverse engineering."

Coverage on Slashdot, CNET, Ars, BoingBoing.

EFF Warns Texas Instruments to Stop Harassing Calculator Hobbyists | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"For three weeks only, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering his entire catalog in MP3 format completely free, including his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion."

All of Mojo Nixon in free, legal MP3 - Boing Boing

Decius wrote:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has graciously offered to provide me with pro bono legal representation regarding the threat I received from Texas Instruments. The EFF is also representing some other individuals who were served. There are some important principals at stake here and we may be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take a stand on them. Stay tuned...

The EFF is representing Decius vis-a-vis TI

Sacramento's homeless rate is rising quickly as people lose their homes and their jobs.

The sea of tents along Sacramento's American River is growing by the day. But here, there are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

First world shanty towns.

No property taxes! No homeowner associations! No pre-approval necessary! The property values can only go up! Strong job growth in the local underground economy! Get in while the gettin' is good!

CBS13 Investigates: Sacramento 'Tent City' - cbs13.com

This whole situation is quite interesting to me. Several years ago I gave a talk at PhreakNIC about how security researchers can make themselves a hard target to silence. Ironically, the video recorder malfunctioned about an hour before my talk, so there isn't a record of it.

From the looks of it, these guys planned this out well.. Verisign is just spinning this so they don't look like idiots. Don't see a valid argument that the security researchers were in any way unethical. I think concerns about Verisign attempting to obtain some kind of prior restraint on the researchers was completely warranted. Beyond that, given that the problem could be fixed long before their research could be replicated, no actual vulnerability was created by their disclosure.

Here is more information and commentary from Decius:

I previously commented on Verisign's incredulity at the fact that the researchers who produced a phoney SSL certificate didn't put them in the loop prior to public disclosure of their research.

It appears this incredulity has produced a bit of a debate. I'm linking Rob Graham who weighed in the subject:

The researchers behaved perfectly and responsibly. Their worry about being suppressed was justified, and their secrecy was an appropriate response. The very fact that Versign could quickly fix the problem in a day, but malicious hackers would need at least a month to replicate the feat, means that notifying Verisign ahead of time wasn't needed.

He links to a post from Alexander Sotirov who also took issue with Verisign's position:

In a recent post on his company blog, Verisign's vice president of marketing Tim Callan commented on the disclosure of our MD5 collision attack:

VeriSign did not receive any of [the] information ahead of the actual presentation, rendering it impossible for us to begin work on mitigating this issue prior to this morning.

I feel that this statement is inaccurate. Not only did we contact Verisign before our presentation to let them know about our research, we also strongly advised them to stop using MD5 as soon as possible and were given a chance to review their mitigation plans.

Callan responded in the thread on his blog.

Here are the facts as I understand them.

- The "trusted intermediary" was under a strict NDA with you and didn't feel it could reveal anything that was actually actionable or useful. Your NDA prevented the intermediary from telling us what would be announced, by whom, or when.

- You... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Errata Security: Versign's Bad Response to the MD5-SSL Crisis

one must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality. - Decius

I just wanted to make sure this quote was taken out of context and forever remembered...

The State and Your Garbage