Bruce Sterling on the Wikileaks saga:

Assange didn't liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn't a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else's national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It's just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

[Via The Null Device]

Professor Ross Anderson's response to a request by the UK Cards Association¹ that the university take down an MPhil thesis published by a student that included information about the No-PIN attack and "give [the UK Cards Association] comfort about [the university's] policy towards future disclosures." may not be as pithy as the best reply ever committed to paper, but it's equally robust:

Your letter of December 1st to Stephen Jolly has only this week been passed to me to deal with. I'm afraid it contains a number of misconceptions and factual errors.

First, your letter was not correctly addressed. The University of Cambridge is a self-governing community of scholars rather than a corporate hierarchy. [...] Omar's work was not 'published by the university' as you claim but by him. If you wanted him to take his thesis offline, you should have asked him.

However, given that the material on the No-PIN attack appears on my page as well as Omar's and Steven's, and given that Mr Jolly passed the matter to me to deal with, I expect that I can save us all a lot of time by answering directly.

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. [...]

[Via James Nicoll]

1. That's 'cards' as in credit/debit cards, not playing cards or collectible card games. ↩

Tim Bray's post about taking a Samsung Galaxy Tab out on the road raised an issue that I haven't seen mentioned in the reviews of the new generation of tablet computers:

… at this point in history [the Galaxy Tab's] primary use is starting conversations. Obviously, when you're surrounded by Android-lovin' Japanese geeks at Google Developer Day Tokyo, you're going to draw a crowd. But I also got chatted up by lots of random strangers, notably including my waiter at a restaurant in the Copenhagen train station.

Which has revealed a feature that the Tab needs; a button in Gmail called "in strange hands". The device is profoundly shareable, but mine has my Google email, full of threads that are distinctly not for public eyes. So I need to switch to disable that while letting people look at interesting web sites or play games or check stock prices or whatever.

Given that one of the use cases for iPad-type computers is as a family resource that can be left lying around for anyone to pick up and use if they want to indulge in a bit of web browsing while watching the TV, I'd have thought that some sort of user login system would need to be baked in to the operating system. Actually, it never occurred to me that a modern portable computer, regardless of form factor, wouldn't have that ability.¹

I know the new generation of tablet computers typically don't store much of a user's data locally, preferring to access data in the cloud, but I take it that the apps and web browsers installed on a tablet still use cookies² to store a user's login details for their various online accounts. Without some form of user login – or, at the very least, a quick way to enable Fast User Switching and go into 'Guest Mode' – won't passing the family iPad over to your teenage son also mean handing them the login details to Dad's email and online banking account, Mum's Amazon account, his sister's blog's admin page and who knows what else besides?³

Admittedly, a lot of home users – especially of Windows-based systems, in my experience – will only ever set up a single user account on their PC anyway. But they do at least have the option on Windows – or any other modern desktop OS – of setting up restricted user accounts for some users and of quickly logging out of one account so that another user can log in. It seems to me that an eminently shareable piece of kit like a tablet computer would demand at least that level of security.

1. Admittedly my current portable computer – a slightly-battered-but-still-functional Palm T|X – doesn't have the facility to set up different user accounts. But then, it's not the type of computer that gets passed from person to person: like a smartphone, it's inherently a personal device. I'm sure Apple would love it if households bought every family member over the age of 10 their own iPad, but that's not going to be a commonplace scenario any time soon. ↩
2. Or a keychain, or some other device-specific system that provides similar functionality. ↩
3. True, some web site login pages allow you to specify whether the cookie stores only your user name, or your user name and password. However, I'll bet that in a lot of cases convenience wins out over security and users default to letting the system store both credentials so that to access the site is to log into the site. ↩

Remember Paul Chambers, the Twitter terrorist? Back in January, when the harsh winter was threatening to close Doncaster's Robin Hood airport, he posted:

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Guess what happened next:

I never expected to be charged, but a month later I was: not under the offence of making a bomb threat, for which I was originally arrested, but under the communications act for the offence of sending a menacing message. [...] Even after all the preceding absurdity and near-breakdown-inducing stress, I was confident common sense would prevail in my day in court.

Unfortunately, yesterday I was found guilty and ordered to pay £1,000 in fines and legal costs, which I have to find along with my own legal costs of another £1,000. I am considering an appeal, though I have no means, having left my job due to the circumstances.

I wonder if our new Justice Secretary has any thoughts about whether taking Chambers to court really served the interests of justice.

Laszlo Thoth is determined to have some fun with the secret questions and answers he supplies to his bank:

A real live human operator always asks the question and waits for a real live answer. This measure has the potential to not just improve my account security but add entertainment value as well:

[...]

Q: The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men.

A: Go forth, and kill. Zardoz has spoken.

[...]

[Via Waxy.org Links]

Fingerprints? DNA? Iris scanning? Old news. Nose scanning is the wave of the future:

[Bath University...] researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.

They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up.

Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance. [...]

Presumably when you walk up to an ATM you'll be required to turn to the right, so the camera can capture your profile.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Not the sort of message you want to see when you walk up to an ATM.

Was this tweet from unhappy traveller Paul Chambers in poor taste?

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Depends who he was talking to. I'd imagine that any family/friends/acquaintances were following him on Twitter probably knew his sense of humour and, quite possibly, his travel plans.¹

Was this a textbook case of an official overreaction?

A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life.

Hell, yes! Unless, that is, the prosecution reveal that their trawl through Chambers' computer has revealed evidence that he actually is a spectacularly dim terrorist wannabe.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

As an added bonus, I'll bet Chambers will be on various watch lists for the rest of his days, or until officials everywhere develop a sense of proportion in dealing with 'terrorist threats.'²

[Via Groc's various musings]

1. He was due to fly out from the airport the following week. ↩
2. Again, I won't be holding my breath while I await the blessed day. ↩

Oh no! Santa's been hacked…

You're probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it's a terrible black eye for Santa. [...]

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Perhaps it would be best if we just shut down all online banking systems now:

New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim's dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.

The sophisticated hack uses a Trojan horse program installed on the victim's machine that alters html coding before it's displayed in the user's browser, to either erase evidence of a money transfer transaction entirely from a bank statement, or alter the amount of money transfers and balances. [...]

Alternatively, and more realistically, banks need to start routinely requiring confirmation of transactions via some means not involving the user's web browser: ringing the user on a preset phone number to confirm that they authorised any transaction to a new recipient, or any transaction over a certain value.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

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. ↩

Credit where it's due: Bruce Schneier certainly knows how to come up with an arresting post title. How can you scroll past a post entitled Security Considerations in the Design of the Human Penis?

(Shouldn't that be "Security Considerations in the Evolution of the Human Penis"?)

Physical Security Maxims:

Rohrbach’s Maxim: No security device, system, or program will ever be used properly (the way it was designed) all the time.

Rohrbach Was An Optimist Maxim: Few security devices, systems, or programs will ever be used properly.

[Via Schneier on Security]

The next generation of CAPTCHAs?

[Via mystyk, commenting at MetaFilter]