Fierce deep-sea predator? Not so much: "We are looking at something verging on the incredibly bizarre. As she got older she got shorter and broader and was reduced to a giant gelatinous blob, carrying many thousands of eggs," he says. "Her shape was likely to have affected her behaviour and ability to hunt. I can't imagine her jetting herself around...

Cory Doctorow wanted a secret decoder wedding ring, and he asked me to help design it. I wanted something more than the standard secret decoder ring, so this is what I asked for: "I want each wheel to be the alphabet, with each letter having either a dot above, a dot below, or no dot at all. The first wheel...

This seems like a really dumb idea....

New paper: "What Californians Understand About Privacy Online," by Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jennifer King. From the abstract: A gulf exists between California consumers' understanding of online rules and common business practices. For instance, Californians who shop online believe that privacy policies prohibit third-party information sharing. A majority of Californians believes that privacy policies create the right to require a...

We spend far more effort defending our countries against specific movie-plot threats, rather than the real, broad threats. In the US during the months after the 9/11 attacks, we feared terrorists with scuba gear, terrorists with crop dusters and terrorists contaminating our milk supply. Both the UK and the US fear terrorists with small bottles of liquid. Our imaginations run...

Many throughout history....

Don't give someone your phone unless you trust them: There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is...

Interesting: Thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners can siphon cash from computer cash registers and cheat tax officials. [...] Zappers alter the electronic sales records in a cash register. To satisfy tax collectors, the tally of food orders, for example, must match the register's final cash total. To hide the removal...

Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable. It's become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off. And in...

Opinion The TSA's useless photo ID rules No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don't work. By Bruce Schneier August 28, 2008 The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to...

Photos here....

You know your industry has problems when mainstream comic strips make fun of you....

Weird story. Mr Jetley said he first realised his security password had been changed when a call centre staff member told him his code word did not match with the one on the computer. "I thought it was actually quite a funny response," he said. "But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it...

This is serious stuff. (Kim Zetter's posts on the topic are excellent; read them.) It's a man-in-the-middle attack. "The Internet's Biggest Security Hole" (the title of that first link) has been that interior relays have always been trusted even though they are not trustworthy....

So weird: A plane was forced to land when a passenger had an extreme allergic reaction to a leaking jar of mushroom soup, it was revealed today. The soup fell on the man from an overhead locker on a Ryanair flight to Dublin from Budapest. He reportedly suffered allergic swelling in his neck and struggled to breathe, forcing staff to...

Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped. It's unclear if this error is random or systematic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systematic --...

Laptops aboard the International Space Station have been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm. And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened....

It's all about the captions: ...doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption. The photographs presented by Colin...

In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of "full disclosure," asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free. The "Oyster card" used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and...

Interesting: the solution to one problem causes another. "The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don't work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health. "Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections." Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario...