A good piece in The Washington Post about an anonymous young American hacker is coming under scrutiny (thanks, Techdirt) for possibly revealing, inadvertently, the location of the hacker. This may have been done by what is called metadata, or extra information, in the photograph that accompanied the article. The hacker’s face in the photo is only… Read More »
China is about to launch a new facial recognition system “which will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities”, according to today’s China Daily (no URL available yet.) The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved… Read More »
RFID tags and their security implications are returning to centre stage again. Adi Shamir, professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute, has shown that it’s possible to crack passwords on RFID tags using a cellphone. In theory this could mean anyone with a cellphone could monitor traffic between a tag and a reader and… Read More »
We should probably start being more careful about what we wish for. Google Talk is now offering, apparently because of public demand, histories of chats stored in your Gmail account. Useful stuff. But accessing those histories will involve seeing contextual ads next to them, as per ordinary Gmail messages. The relevant part of the FAQ says… Read More »
It seems people are catching onto Stuart Henshall’s trick of playing with your Skype name to get it at the top of people’s buddy lists. Two people on my list have put period marks at the beginning of their profile name, messing with the alphabetical order to get their names above all my legitimate friends. This… Read More »