Chipped

February 12th, 2010

Ross Anderson et al: Chip and PIN is Broken.

The UK Cards Association: "Our research suggests that criminal interest in chip-based attacks is minimal at this time as they are unable to find ways to make sufficient amounts of money from any of the plausible attack scenarios." (Emphasis added.)

[Via Memex 1.1]

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You're gonna have to answer to Steve Jobs…

February 10th, 2010

The terms & conditions for using iTunes include a boilerplate clause1 barring persons in embargoed countries, or who are on various US government lists, from downloading and installing iTunes, or using that software for "any purposes prohibited by United States law." Or, to put it another way:

[All] the Al-Qaeda operatives holed up in the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, dodging drone attacks while listening to Britney Spears songs downloaded with iTunes are in violation of the terms and conditions, even if they paid for the music!

[Via Bruce Schneier]

  1. Prompted, most likely, by the fact that iTunes uses encryption to protect some of the content it downloads. Since the 1970s, encryption software has been in the same class as munitions – i.e. something that shouldn't be exported to hostile powers. ↩

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Stick Figure AES

September 26th, 2009

A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard. Impressively geeky, yet perfectly intelligible.1

[Via The Browser]

  1. Until the maths arrives in Act 4, at which point I decided that I'd learned quite enough about encryption for one day. ↩

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