ACPO is no longer tolerable as an organisation. It’s a freefloating lobby for ever-greater authoritarianism. Seriously. Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that…
Read More No. Just No. Just No.Via comp.risks, across the wire the electric message came: German students crack encryption on over 2bn RFID smartcards made by NXP Semiconductor. The cards in question are NXP’s MiFare Classic type, and are used for public transport….but also for access control in sensitive government installations, it turns out. Inevitably, NXP threw up its hands –…
Read More Can Haz RFID? Noes? I HAZ FN FAL!So they arrested Viktor Bout, in the same week the ID cards scheme saw its latest rightward slither and the government’s ragingly impossible road-pricing scheme bit the dust. And I cleared my to-do list on our report on new forms of voice and messaging. What next, it rains ponies? as PZ Myers said. Something like…
Read More What next, ponies?In Texas, a man suspected of homicide has escaped from prison. How he did it tells us something about the inevitable failure of ID cards, and the importance of false positives. Via Bruce Schneier. What happened? Well, the suspected killer was in a cell with another remand prisoner, a car thief named Garcia. He memorised…
Read More Well, it went through!Except when they’re from Sony, of course. Sony, the company that offers you peace of mind; you *know* who hacked your stuff! I can’t think of anything particularly intelligent to say about this except that it’s bloody obvious something like this would happen. Recalling the original Sony rootkit, didn’t someone very quickly demonstrate it was…
Read More Biometrics Are Secure!The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Agency, BKA) recently decided to try out one of those face recognition programs on CCTV cameras placed in a railway station in the city of Mainz. And what happened? Well, having installed the software in October last year, they recruited 200 regular travellers as volunteers, whose faces were recorded in…
Read More CCTV Face Recognition: Not Just Evil, Useless Too