Secrets in the TCP - code, messages and more...

Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a 'got it' message. If no such acknowledgment arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again in a system known as TCP's retransmission mechanism. The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred,'  'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message?

As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."  It's out there... now read more at slashdot

Stats on the MAlWar

The May edition of the MessageLabs Intelligence monthly provided this information regarding the ongoing fight against viruses, spam and other unwelcome content.

    Report Highlights:
        * Spam - 90.4% in May (an increase of 5.1% since April)
        * Viruses - One in 317.8 emails in May contained malware (a decrease of 0.01% since April)
        * Phishing - One in 404.7 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.11% since April)
        * Malicious websites - 1,149 new sites blocked per day (a decrease of 67.7% since April)
        * Spammers continue to abuse reputable domains and web-based malware more likely to be found on older domains
        * Geographic location determines at what time of day you receive spam
        * “Russian” spam squarely rooted in Cutwail botnet

Read full paper from source: Symantec

Why we are technically discontent and disconnected...

Technology is 'The knack of so arranging a world that we need not
experience it' - Max Frisch

Sony CEO: "Nothing good from the Internet, period."

From the boingboing  visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period." , Lynton wasn't just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it." – Read more here

The rise of American Idiot...

What we have created with our advanced IT systems cold fusion, stopped hunger, cured cancer?

Nope we twitter away our day to expand the new idiots.

Charles Pierce -   The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise.
It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

   This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable.    

He's brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool...

Hidden valuable natural resource is being exploited...

From newscientist

 

Click image to see spectrum

Google is backing a political campaign to force the US government to release full details of how one of our most valuable natural resources is being exploited - radio communications spectrum.

 

A post on Google's policy blog lauds a bill being introduced to Congress that would require the Federal Communications Commission to "take a full inventory of our nation's spectrum resources between the 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands."

You can already see a representation of how the spectrum is divided in the graphic above, or in pdf form here. But the bill would make available full details of who is using which chunks of spectrum for what, and how efficiently. As the Google post puts it, "is a sizable portion of useful spectrum simply lying fallow?"

 

The internet giant was one of many that lobbied sucessfully to get spectrum freed up by the demise of analogue TV signals allocated to new kinds of mobile devices. That will supposedly allow the development of technology dubbed "Wi-Fi on steroids" by its proponents, and shape our technological future - allowing faster portable connections and high-speed broadband in remote areas, for example.

 

Similarly, making it publicly known how the rest of the radio spectrum is being used, and what is left, could change how we communicate for years to come.

 

The only secure PC, a book...

See more awesome illustrations of 'pop up book PC'

The SUM of my Substance...

Warrantless Tracking Is Legal, Says Wisconsin Court

Slashdot - A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."

Windows 7 ready?

When the internet went... to hell

Mathematical Illiteracy

This may be the stupidest example of risk assessment I've ever seen. It's a video clip from a recent Daily Show, about he dangers of the Large Hadron Collider. The segment starts off slow, but then there's an exchange with high school science teacher Walter L. Wagner, who insists the device has a 50-50 chance of destroying the world:

"If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen or it's going to not happen, and so the best guess is 1 in 2."

"I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter."

This is followed by clips of news shows taking the guy seriously.

Read full by schneier