Tag: Security
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MySpace Photos Leaked; Payback for Not Fixing Flaw?
Last week an anonymous person published a file containing half a million images, many of which had been gathered from private profiles on MySpace. This may be the most serious privacy breach yet at MySpace. Kevin Poulsen’s story at Wired News implies that the leak may have been deliberate payback for MySpace failing to fix…
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New $2B Dutch Transport Card is Insecure
The new Dutch transit card system, on which $2 billion has been spent, was recently shown by researchers to be insecure. Three attacks have been announced by separate research groups. Let’s look at what went wrong and why. The system, known as OV-chipkaart, uses contactless smart cards, a technology that allows small digital cards to…
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Second Life Welcomes Bank Regulators
Linden Lab, the company that runs the popular virtual world Second Life, announced Tuesday that all in-world “banks” must now be registered with real-world banking regulators: As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such…
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Latest voting system analysis from California
This summer, the California Secretary of State commissioned a first-ever “Top to Bottom Review” of all the electronic voting systems used in the state. In August, the results of the first round of review were published, finding significant security vulnerabilities and a variety of other problems with the three vendors reviewed at the time. (See…
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Further adventures in personal credit
In our last installment, I described how one of the mortgage vendors who I was considering for the loan for my new home failed to trigger the credit alerting mechanism (Debix) to which I was signed up. Since then, I’ve learned several interesting facts. First, the way that Debix operates is that they insert a…
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How Can Government Improve Cyber-Security?
Wednesday was the kickoff meeting of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, of which I am a member. The commissionhas thirty-four members and has four co-chairs: Congressmen Jim Langevin and Michael McCaul, Admiral Bobby Inman, and Scott Charney. It was organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security…
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Comcast Podcast
Recently I took part in a Technology Liberation Front podcast about the Comcast controversy, with Adam Thierer, Jerry Brito, Richard Bennett, and James L. Gattuso. There’s now a (slightly edited) transcript online.
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Economics of Eavesdropping For Pay
Following up on Andrew’s post about eavesdropping as a profit center for telecom companies, let’s take a quick look at the economics of eavesdropping for money. We’ll assume for the sake of argument that (1) telecom (i.e. transporting bits) is a commodity so competition forces providers to sell it essentially at cost, (2) the government…
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AT&T Explains Guilt by Association
According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse. What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very…
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The ease of applying for a home loan
I’m currently in the process of purchasing a new house. I called up a well-known national bank and said I wanted a mortgage. In the space of 30 minutes, I was pre-approved, had my rates locked in, and so forth. Pretty much the only identifying information I had to provide was the employer, salary, and…