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From Risk Digest, via a mailing list:
ATM vulnerabilities and citibank's gag attempt
Ross Anderson
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:58:47 +0000
Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_gag.pdf
I have written to the judge opposing the order:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_response.pdf
The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf
These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal' case.
The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting: http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm
Source URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/22/58/6
Clicker, a shareware app for OS X that lets you have some control over iTunes, DVD player, Keynote, and Powerpoint by using a Sony Ericsson bluetooth phone (like the t68i) as a remote control. Wow.
"Further, Sony Ericsson Clicker has a built in 'proximity sensor', allowing you to trigger actions when you leave or come back to your Mac." Double wow. This is the first cool use of bluetooth I've heard.
Excellent. Apple's new Safari browser is getting tabs. As soon as they post it for download I'll switch to that as my main browser. This is a small thing that makes me strangely happy.
If someone decides to teach a class on weblog theory they now have the perfect introductory text. Nothing new here if you've been following along, but it's great to have it all layed out in one place. Excellent collection of links. Very nice job.
These tools are being developed and we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate the anticipated political model enabled by technology to support some of the basic attributes of democracy, which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order through emergent properties, which will enable a form of emergent direct democracy capable of managing complex issues more effectively than the current form of representative democracy.We can hope, right?
William Gibson has had the camera/cellphone ah-ha moment. These things really will be a big deal.
Heh. I just got an email that had, at first glance, no headers. Weird. Then I realized what was going on - they were there, but not visible because they were white text on a white background (I could see them if I selected the text.)
How in the world can you specify the text color of email headers? It makes no sense that you can do that.
Wow, I actually did some work on this site yesterday. Amazing. And I revised my links over there on the left. But I'm still finding it hard to post much of anything.
Maybe you can help. Got something that should go on this page? (Your guess is as good as mine...) Why not send it in? Use the lonely contact link. Other bored readers will thank you.
I have not one single insightful thing to say about google buying blogger. This must be the most important blog related story ever, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why.
Obviously I'm reaching here, but maybe it has something to do with internet developing beyond a polling type consciousness. The old model goes like this: check a bunch of sites, see if anything new is happening; wait n seconds; check again; repeat. That's polling. You can make it near instantaneous by reducing n towards zero, but it's still polling. This is what gives us the 15 minutes of lag on google news.
Perhaps with the acquisition of blogger, internet (which, if conscious, is so through google) moves to something like trigger based consciousness. Instead of having to constantly check to see if anything is happening, it will already know when anything is happening because people will be blogging it through google's system. Bloggers become the neurons of the active consciousness.
The rate of posting (combined somehow mathamagically with outbound link targets) becomes the standing wave of consciousness for internet.
Wow. Very large crowd. Great vibe. Great day.
We're eating some oysters at the bar in grand central and warming up a bit. Not sure we accomplished anything, but it was fun trying.
We'll be at the anti-war march protest on Saturday. Meet on the steps on the NY Public Library at 11:30 if you want to join us.