err....this is news?

being mildly paranoid about interweb safety I run Apples/Linuxes without flash, with noscript and betterprivacy and with OpenDNS blocking pages and pages of domains and stuff in the cloud before it gets near me, (like the entire .cn domain)

recently, I attempted to buy a weeks holiday in spain, nice resort 600 squid, but I couldn't complete the booking, I got 99% of the way through - but something didn't let it go through. I started tinkering and permitted scripts, allowed this allowed that, but it wasn't until I let loose the dogs of GoogleAnalytics that the payment page worked - problem was the price changed to 300 squid!

I said YES and paid. (imagining that if it was a flaw in the backend that the famous company would phone me up for a chat and say NO) got email a day later thanking me and the enclosed receipt showed that holiday was 600 squid plus 300 squid special discount, so yes, either it wasn't an error after-all, or 'special discount' mentioned nowhere else is just a way of reconciling a puzzling GIGO transaction. I assume the first option. Shields now back-up, to be taken down step-by-step next year?

it sometimes pays to be paranoid

I went to primary school in the 60's

next to Leeds Holt Park - when it was Holt Farm, a real farm with horses and fields of barley. ASDA arrived in the 70's, a big PFI school replaced the Holt Park school last year and stole the Farrar Lane (neolithic road) 10,000yr old common field as fenced-off playing fields. The 'postponed' £25M PFI Health Centre Hub would have been useful, in view of aging Britain. Anyway, I went to play IT in Europe decades ago - best wishes to you all!

The High Farm pub is still open in the Holt Farm buildings, decent beer!

Germanium Transistors

I found a box of old 1960's Germanium transistors, AF-117's in my loft. When I knocked up a test circuit - each transistor I tried was faulty. bit of googling led me to

http://www.vintage-radio.com/repair-restore-information/transistor_transistor-faults.html

which mentions that these AF117 series have mostly been 'killed' by dendritic growth.

NASA did some analysis of dendritic growth (in satellites) and found some naughty little tin crystals were able to self assemble to at least 10millimetres in length!

http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/

N1 is a fine phone

Living in Italy, I had to order it from Goooogle via the UK. cost around €440 eventually compared to grey imports into Italy around €700! everything more or less works, some finger-itis occurs (triggering the next icon 'stead of the desired one) - some marketplace free apps are starting to give my Gphone a big doubleclick footprint, openDNS has sorted that. The alarm never worked - until I bought yesterday the Google bluetooth Alarm-Dock, today it rang for the first time in a month - then wouldn't stop - I had to make hard reset to stop the beeping. My wife's nice iPhone is boring in its placid functionality - I value the Nexus flexibility - but it's not worth over 400 quid.

Using an 1090MHz SSR ADS-B radar receiver

(which is networked) I was able to see a single flight from Scotland today; the overall number of flights is down from around 960 General Aviation in the air over Europe at any particular second , to around 300 at present. There is little flight activity until you get down to the Alps.

Below the Alps the traffic is running at 25% of normal volume, based on direct reception of the aircraft L-band squawk codes.

red light safety cameras @AC21.21gmt

except in Italy, where many had commune installed red light safety cameras, 99% of these cameras then disappeared overnight when the camera manufacturer was arrested. truffe/semafori truccati

Allegedly, It turns out that the manufacturer/mayors changed the timing of the Amber light down from the legally mandated 'codice della strada' around 4 to 5 seconds to an en-criminalising 2 seconds. there might have been other 'tricks' involved as these were purely revenue cameras (some small village areas Travedona Monate near Varese made around a megaeuro per annum)

I don't know what the legal ramifications on appeals were as I wasn't caught by even the short Amber period.

It was amazing how fast the suspect installations all were removed!

By the way , France is VERY heavily investing in radar installations in 2009/2010 and remember that you need a fluorescent jacket for each (potential) person in the car = on the spot fine if not.

Italy , with a well defined constitution and 'code of the route' states that the following systems have been homologated and approved with info on www.trasporti.gov.it

T RED (decreto di approvazione n. 3458 del 15/12/05; estensioni n. 19403 del 27/7/06 e n. 48534 del 9/6/08).

- T RED Speed (approvazione 34047 del 16/4/08).

- Vista RED (approvazione162 del 23/2/06; estensioni 60298 dell'11/12/06 e 57768 dell'11/7/08).

- Photored F17A (conferma approvazione 1130 del 18/3/04; estensione 16708 del 19/2/07).

- Photored F17D (approvazione 47017 dell'11/5/2009).

- Velocar Red&Speed (decreto di approvazione 56214 dell'8/7/08)

- Traffistar SR 520 (approvazione 47177 del 4/6/08).

- L'Autostop k20 (conferma approvazione 1135 del 18/3/04).

- il Traffiphot III G (conferma approvazione 1132 del 18/3/04).

- L'Italian Red Speed TM (conferma approvazione 1131 del 18/3/04)

I think it wouldn't be possible to examine or contest the software!

tiny form factor

allows the 32gb microSD to fit neatly inside a hollowed-out Euro/Pound/Dollar.

the hollow pound is quite expensive at around 30 dollars from spy-coins.makersmarket.com, I guess their mailing list is now carefully watched!

Plus this is no doubt highly illegal, isn't it still treason to deface The Queen's currency??

rumour has it that one in 5 pound coins is already a dud, but is it a hollow dud???

However the UPCOMING IN 2010 ACTA free trade agreement may render stop and seize of all digital data/code/mp3/mp4 a requirement at every border crossing, though this might be my misconception.

"Oh sorry officer, I accidentally carry all my 'secret' data inside a coin - faraday cage - doesn't everyone?".

Anyway , a coin is less corrosive than the old 'microSD wrapped in clingfilm/saranwrap kept in the mouth' stunt.

('ta to SchneierBlog for the empty cash)

points mean..

...prizes!

The Русский Федерация was offering 100,000 euros for a Gold, AND "a 4 x 4 car"

Silver medal was many euros, and no car - not TWO ladas as some wags might have it!

I owned a Жигули once.......honest

a previous MacD scam

was based on the Franchise, the fact that MacD University had required identical layout on each McPatty outlet created in the UK. Once a particular gang had worked out where the overnight cash safe was located then cue many identical 'take-away' attacks with a big yellow digger and forklift and, lo', soon the layout was randomised.

pc's compromised

the security buzz around French/Swiss Cybersecurité in November 2009 was that most PC's with wired keyboards TRANSMIT the key scan routines. Full plaintext was recovered in the basement of a 5th floor apartment block from a PC typing on the top floor. Mac's were slightly worse than bog standard PC's as the new thin alu block keyboard emits slightly more power than an el'cheapo plastic PC thing. The reason you haven't heard too much about this is that University of Lausanne where this research is being done was immediately (allegedly) hit by a lawsuit from the Wanking industry - oops spelling a bit off, must be my keyboard, - as the Uni claimed that A** machines were also susceptible. sorry trying again **M machines, last try *T* machines. Anyway, you need a National Instruments USRP software defined radio and a decent digital storage oscilloscope. Intentionally beaming nanowaves around INSIDE the box, or even around peripherals doesn't worry me in the least provided it is designed with some reasonable validation and authentication into the protocols from day one.

today's Security Update 2010-001

which I installed on its own has stuffed my 2006 10.6.2 macbook pro into a continuous reboot & "no-entry" sign. Repair attempts say No valid packages detected, which may mean the 600meg BaseSystem.pkg hs been moved/disabled. It's now a complete re-install of Snow Leper, BEFORE I can get anywhere near the Bootcamp update. some low level of complaints that MBP & iMac may have been affected by the sec update. Some users report total satisfaction. As a sys-admin I have however issued the CAUTION CAUTION DO NOT notice for todays offerings.

Macbook anyone?

there's already an open-sauce ad-hoc sensor network of Macbooks' accelerometers - I'm not making this up (iSeismograph) which uses the embedded Kionix KXM52-1050 three-axis accelerometer chip (dynamic range of +/- 2g and a bandwidth up to 1.5 KHz) WHY? I hear you scream , it's because Cupertino is in a wobbly bit of the planet, and quoting a 2008 paper directly "Because the MacBook laptop hardware provides an inexpensive sensor and data acquisition system, it can be placed in the field (such as mounted on a bridge) and used for real-time health monitoring applications." By health they mean BIG structure health etcetera and by mounting - I think it involves BIG clamps. However some Califrnians just leave their MB's on the table doing iSiesmo during the night...........so HP are going to buy a trillion MBP's??? ?????

airport security

this ex-AQ operative did manage to transit at least 2 airports and spend a night in prison before surprising the Prince at the ramadan Maglis, whilst fully loaded!. This does not bode well for general airport screening developments!!! take of yer shoes, yer belt and ...

silly question re 3G @ 900MHz

will the current generation of smartphones and 3G business phones be able to use the 3G waveform at 900megs?, I presume that eg my Nokia E65 has the 3G radio hardwired to the 2GHz antenna and the 2G radio to the 900 antenna? I've only opened the phone to repair the screen myself, I never stripped the phone down to find the evolved antenna.

Any comments on which terminal hardware is used in Iceland and Australia?

"innocent" = original DNA sample destroyed?

just the profile is retained! Now the profile is a (very) lossy approximation to the actual 3 billion DNA base pairs of a human. The reason for keeping the original DNA sample is because <BOLD> the stored DNA profile is not unique </BOLD> each humans' DNA is unique but the profile - being a manageable number , isn't. When there is a false positive DNA profile match from a Slovenian crime scene with the UK DNA profile database this means Mr or Mrs or Child Innocent will be European Arrest Warrant transported ????. IF the original DNA sample was kept then this could be re-profiled at a higher resolution to exclude/include, which is what will still be done for all the 'guilty' samples.

PH knows more about DNA samples than I do

White House

I met a former US White House worker, he mentioned that on Day One of employment they fill in a signed, undated, resignation letter for automatic use should the administration find/put itself in deep $hit.

Tangentially what does PM/WackiJacqui think now about the benefits of widescale e-mail monitoring? (and subsequent leaking)

I haven't seen much following/analysis of the e-mail leakage trail, would they perchance have been leaked from another "impartial" bunch of serious civil servants nearby Gloucester??

Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant

if you look at the most recently construction started Finnish Reactor, some say it will have realistically taken around 19 years from planning to construction! Wikipedia claims that the license was issued in April 2000, and that the electrical generation date is currently (!) sometime in 2012, but will probably be later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

So lets see, no turbines 'cos they interfere with Eastenders, it's 2009, so if we start planning now, in the UK there'll be enough power to actually WATCH Eastenders in 2009 +19, plus a couple of years for PFI troughing and consultancy reports = lights ON around 2030? do we mind waiting??

of course if we just invest in (lukewarm) Fusion, that'll be ready about 2059, they tell me

A whole Database

bringing this story back to an IT footing, some MP last night was explaining that the 'whole parliamentary shopping database' is onsale in a dodgy pub somewhere for around 300 thousand pounds!

rant

it's shocking! how low and how reasonable those terms are!!!!!, why just one Random MP (Jacqui) has managed to burn through around 150 thousand pounds 'expenses' since 2001 (source:SUN), plus there's another 645 of these MP heroes.

using bad maths thats 150k x 646 = around 97 million quid

That means the illegal stolen £300k memory stick whole-parliamentary-database could quickly pay for itself!!!!!!!! A bargain at half the price if it could cure rampant MP quantitative expense easing.

Now this precedent has been set, I wonder how much a mem-stick of Waki-Jacqui's national Überdatabase would sell for?? Radio4 mentioned that the Land Registry online database is currently being sociologically hacked, with skilful gangs silently transferring property ownership and selling your house away from under you!

in the same vein "illegal Überdatabase mem-stick " (c) (tm) copies would be a best seller,

may I just have a final chortle at Wacquis/Timneys come-uppance, according to the Hamburg adbendblatte.de the films were (Titel aus dem Angebot: "Schmutzige Anfängerinnen" oder "Verdorbene Amateure") "Dirty beginners" or "Corrupt Amateurs"!!!! /rant

thirteen

point five six megahertz is the frequency for this (nearly) iso14443 RFID. One of the weaknesses/threats is that your mail could be scanned at 13MHz and any interesting letters/mail-sacks that ping back are either a credit card/ePass/european citizens card or whatever. I have an HP4700 ipaq PDA with CF based 13.56MHz antenna podule, I could be scanning your mail now, but I'm not! There's also a possible man-in-the-middle 'relay attack' against eCC, but the relay reader would have to be within centimetres of your card,the attack is possible due to the up to 5 seconds transaction windows that have been defined. Watch out when consumer RFID starts to implement the 900MHz band like for USA eDriving licence & passport cards, =big read range. Personally I will terminate with prejudice my eCC, provided the postman delivered it in the first place!

arrested?

Shirley, wasn't someone anciently arrested near Droitwich for having wallpapered his dwelling in bacofoil, then used the BBC Light Program on longwaves to power his Lights!!! I'm sure 'theft of electricity' type laws were used, (theoretically his abode would have cast an RF shadow) In these modern times, surely Intels devices would now need to each have a TV License!!! they might get away with a B/W at 47 quid? If I was Intel I'd start to mention 'powered by Ley Lines', they'd sell ten times more!

RFID distance

I've recently ordered a cryogenic low noise front end amplifier to go with an array of 900MHz antennas for trying to extend/understand the read distance of this US EDL style rfid. The rfid might get some energy from the cloud of GSM (850MHz in the 'states), it's not power at the resonant frequency, but there should be some field strength there to assist in the long range interrogation. I'm sure I'll not get up to the 70km read range of battlefield active IFF rfid's, but probably 100's of metres! I can easily stuff out many kilowatts erp of read requests and remember folks, Q2 2009 is when the ICAO extended biometrics (fingerprints) mandatedly arrive at euro 13MHz ePass, get your passport renewal in NOW to have a reasonable Jpeg based biometric for the next decade!

two lcd's

TV system I saw had an enormous LED backlight then two differently polarised LCD screens in series, hence requiring the luser mounted left/right polaroid glasses. OK for Italians, watching TV indoors wearing sunglasses!!

Other webstuff mentioned that there are around 4 other competing 3D technologies, I wish there was actually some RF Spectrum defined to carry all those important 3d Jordan pixels across the airwaves.

Anyway we have to be nice to SKY as don't they still employ the NDS spetsnaz?, strange how the two French satellite systems TPS and ABsat were on Hotbird until recently (...with new Viacess keys leaked regularly) now there's just a monopoly CANALsat using , surprise, NDS encryption technology on Astra. Do I really need a decoder card posted to a French address or can I just buy in a French supermarket? Ciel, non merci!

@killer app

that killer app is UWB (ultrawideband) based RFID systems where you build up a radar style presence cloud of tagged items. The typical ISO-14443A 13.56MHz stuff (eg shiny rabbits & ePassports) is only centimetres talk distance. pulsed UWB at 6GHz has been demonstrated over a kilometer with incredibly low almost undetectable power levels. see multispectral.com, tags are a few dollars each, development system around 14k.

now where did I leave my coat?

Pure Dab Highway...

is quite a nice DAB Radio, I emailed Pure (now Apple?!?) before Christmas asking if anything of theirs can handle DAB+ which is in some use here in central EU-land. They very helpfully explained that the Highway hardware can already handle the DAB+ waveform but they would need to release a codec upgrade, which Pure plan to do soon (due to codec licensing issues there will be a nominal charge) I'm also considering the http://www.starwaves.com/truckbox/TruckBox_english.pdf which does analogue/digital LW/MF/HF/VHF-RDS, DAB , DAB+ and digital radio mondiale for the new BBC worldservice pan-european joint operation with Deutsche Welle!

I certainly approve of the innovative UK use of MPEG 4 HE AAC v2 Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex over Medium and Shortwave frequencies, the BBC/DW drm signals are specifically NOT aimed at the UK, but should be receivable.

Parenthetically, I've just taken delivery of a few GNURadio USRP2's for beta-testing, these universal open source radios are programmable and do RF to Ethernet, just about any frequency/mode/waveform, one of these USRP's was detained by MI5 at LHR in 2008!

The USRP2 is *much better*, although around U$D 1400 plus accessories each.

The Starwave Truckbox is around 250 euros and the Pure Highway is around 69 quid/sorry euros.

@Passive RFID range

it is basic supermarket passive technology, lives around 900MHz, with a big power amplifier and array antennas , cryo LNA, could be pushed to be read at around 8 metres (IMHO).

referring to "EPC RFID Tags in Security Applications: Passport Cards, Enhanced Drivers Licenses, and Beyond" <http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/staff/bios/ajuels/publications/EPC_RFID/Gen2authentication--22Oct08a.pdf>

more interesting is if US CBP have got round to disabling the KILL function yet?

quote from above paper "Kill-PIN selection

The KILL PIN is unprogrammed and not locked on the Washington State EDLs. We have verified that we can directly write this 32-bit KILL PIN."

Obligatory pro-mac comment

Nope, haven't seen WHS on sale here - but I bought the Time Capsule (500GB) on OS X leopard. It streams my media via 802.11n to the AppleTV. It backs-up via Time Machine the laptops, and when a system update (?) broke 10.5.5 on one laptop last week I seamlessly was able to scroll back and restore the MacBook.

as for skype

this has reached urban IT myth status; the german security people recently complained about problematic skype monitoring (although they have the lawful intercept trojan) but at the same time the austrian security people expressed that they had no problem with monitoring skype type VOIP. Methinks there was a reason to pay the estonians a few billion dollars and get the servers moved to wherever eBays head office is, maryland?

coWPAatty anyone?

that is the open-source/blackhat approach to WPA crack by using many FPGA's and their idea wasn't to brute force WPA in realtime - but generate the 'rainbow hash' for the first 1000 common SSID's hence giving just a few seconds look up time. The months of brute force computation is done by precomputing beforehand - just you need somehow to persuade your eeeLaptot to accept a couple of terabyte HDD's containing reverse hash tables to do your warlaptotting.

I think we have to find out what the first thousand common SSID's are , then all use no. 1001, that will solve this minor security hole!??

the first few milliseconds

of any transmission is the signature here, the DARPA hand-held is (probably) basically a real time spectrum analyser with a memory of millions of emitters. It will categorise or allow individuals to be tracked by the switch-on time/frequency/power response of the hardware being followed - each tx has this unique signature, oh, except for my Software Defined Transmitters which can be programmed to 'spoof' the switch-on response of someone else...er....

@ does anyone have a good method to avoid all the shops selling "product" that

well there's <http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/> or you can just type into Google

"product x" -inurl:(kelkoo|bizrate|pixmania|dealtime|pricerunner|dooyoo|pricegrabber|pricewatch|resellerratings|ebay|shopbot|comparestoreprices|ciao|unbeatable|shopping|epinions|nextag|buy|bestwebbuys)

which in fact adds up to the same thing.

apologies for the way the redesign of El'Reg seems to break the logical connection between a negative sign and the inurl immediately behind it, whilst on my pathetically stylish 20" monitor and OS streaming the text way out to right field and making it slightly unreadable on the nano-goo grey borders, in fact I'll try a longer string and see where it goes(kelkoo|bizrate|pixmania|dealtime|pricerunner|dooyoo|pricegrabber|pricewatch|resellerratings|ebay|shopbot|comparestoreprices|ciao|unbeatable|shopping|epinions|nextag|buy|bestwebbuys|kelkoo|bizrate|pixmania|dealtime|pricerunner|dooyoo|pricegrabber|pricewatch|resellerratings|ebay|shopbot|comparestoreprices|ciao|unbeatable|shopping|epinions|nextag|buy|bestwebbuys)

Yes, the above text disappears right ---> with around 19 words painted in the void: El'Reg redesign 2.0 soon, methinks

You forgot a database!

Décret n° 2008-632 (and 2008-612) du 27 juin 2008 portant création d'un traitement automatisé de données à caractère personnel dénommé « EDVIGE » is giving rise to concern, whilst Décret n° 2008-631 (and 2008-609) du 27 juin 2008 establishes the << CRISTINA >> database. Which is basically EDVIGE on steroids with added espionage, and is a national defence secret. Well, obviously WAS a national defence secret....er.....whirling blades overhead!???

Well at least the French were sensible enough to establish 2 databases and then give one up!

Ou est mon anorak?, je vais prendre le Taxi

has happened

Recently, man (dutch) refused bankloan, walks into bank later - joins queue - *puts attache case down* all bank PC's 'stop'. Confusion/reboots/BSOD. Man goes home!

Six months later, security expert analysing CCTV frame by frame notices the *attache case*. man visited at home, many capacitors and other items of terror, is arrested. Maybe urban-myth, maybe current amateur SOTA cross-over from .mil technology?

Then there was the...

Peter Wright _Spycatcher

I'm sure he mentiond that one of the Security Services had full and total capability of seeing who voted for whom at each election, but didn't routinely use this tracking capability built into the numbered ballot papers. Is there another U-turn on the cards?

Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia...

all currently have 'merkin presidents! (OK, One is Canadian) - most seem to have served in 'merkin military intelligence at some point! or been 'neutral commentators' on CIA Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. The attempted coup-d'etat in Belarus and the machinations in Ukraine just point to a (successful) (Bill) Clinton-Era policy of surrounding the Russian Federation with a very pro-USA fence of 'tame' governments in order to impede a future Russian growth, as viewed from a 1990's perspective. Georgia/Saakashvili seems to have messed this strategy up (temporarily?) by playing soldiers with Vladimir, hence the immediate signing of the Missile Station in Poland with Ms. Rice last week. There seemed to be no fancy subterfuge about going after Iranian missiles this time!?

As for NASA, didn't Bill and State Dept friends factor this in at the time of laying such deep plots? Solved anyway - just buy Chinese access to the ISS.....

@Diebold? Don't they make ATM Machines, too?

we have a WinXP Diebold ATM at my local bank (PariBas-BNL) that shows looping blipvert videos perfectly but occasionally request a 20 digit pin code for the bank card when I only know 4 or 5 digits depending on the card. I've had a few "pin number not correct, card disabled" and the bank doesn't care - just suggests I use another ATM. I vote "No"!