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 »
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 »
Another twist to the whole discussion about accuracy on Wikipedia, as well as the news that some individuals obsessively monitor and tweak their biographies on the site: the ABC reports that Student Reporters Expose ‘Royal’ Sex Offender: Student reporters at a Minnesota high school exposed a prospective transfer who said he was a member of… Read More »
A reader points out that the NYT piece on the dangers of metadata I posted about earlier didn’t mention Microsoft’s Remove Hidden Data utility, which you can find here. (This link should work; the earlier one didn’t. Apols) “The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden… Read More »
Good piece by the NYT’s Tom Zeller Jr on metadata and the downfalls it’s caused: Sleuths mine information by reading between lines – Technology from the International Herald Tribune: If you use Microsoft Word, open a document, go to the File menu and choose Properties. You should see some metadata. Third-party programs are available that… Read More »