There is an insightful article in the Economist titled “Learning to live with Big Brother”. It makes some interesting points about the state of government (and commercial) surveillance as it stands today, and how it might evolve over the next several years. Here are some choice quotes that I liked:
Britain used to pride itself on [...]
There are widely spreading rumors that Comcast is actively trying to degrade the performance of BitTorrent file transfers on its broadband cable modem network. Since BT uses a complex peer-to-peer architecture, stopping it is not as simple as just blocking a few port numbers. So, it looks like Comcast has resorted to sending spoofed TCP [...]
A 19 year old screwing around with his (former) friend’s MySpace account, and spoofing a stupid email to his mother… This only made the news because the teenager in this case happens to be mayor of a small town. Ah, if only this were the worst thing our politicians did.
Source: Hillsdale’s teen mayor convicted in [...]
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This article in CIO tells a great story about the current state of forensics and anti-forensics. It really exposes the bleak state of affairs when it comes to relying on digital evidence in criminal investigations. Several anti-forensic tools are mentioned, including Slacker (hides data in slack space), Timestomp (arbitrarily sets timestamps on files), and MosDef [...]
Do you trust standard RFID cards to perform a security function? Probably; most companies use electronic access cards based on RFID, such as those made by HID, to open doors. Unfortunately, they’re not much more secure than a secret handshake - someone could easily watch you do it, and then repeat it himself as needed. [...]
