This is fantastic work: In total, the researchers identified approximately 2.7 billion DNA base pairs, which is around 90 percent the size of the human genome. There’s nothing particularly special about that size, especially considering that the axolotl genome is 10 times larger than the human genome. It’s going to take some time to fully … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Genome Analyzed” »
Author: infossl
Story of how Tiffany & Company moved all of its inventory from one store to another. Short summary: careful auditing and a lot of police. Powered by WPeMatico
Yesterday’s Microsoft Windows patches included a fix for a critical vulnerability in the system’s crypto library. A spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing certificate to sign a malicious executable, making it appear the file was … Read More “Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA” »
Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: … Read More “Artificial Personas and Public Discourse” »
A Croatian recipe. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. Powered by WPeMatico
Special Services Group, a company that sells surveillance tools to the FBI, DEA, ICE, and other US government agencies, has had its secret sales brochure published. Motherboard received the brochure as part of a FOIA request to the Irvine Police Department in California. “The Tombstone Cam is our newest video concealment offering the ability to … Read More “Police Surveillance Tools from Special Services Group” »
There’s a new, practical, collision attack against SHA-1: In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: on an Nvidia GTX 970, identical-prefix collisions can now be computed with … Read More “New SHA-1 Attack” »
BusKill is designed to wipe your laptop (Linux only) if it is snatched from you in a public place: The idea is to connect the BusKill cable to your Linux laptop on one end, and to your belt, on the other end. When someone yanks your laptop from your lap or table, the USB cable … Read More “USB Cable Kill Switch for Laptops” »
Here’s a physical-world example of why master keys are a bad idea. It’s a video of two postal thieves using a master key to open apartment building mailboxes. Changing the master key for physical mailboxes is a logistical nightmare, which is why this problem won’t be fixed anytime soon. Powered by WPeMatico
Fantastic video: Scientists had used a specialized camera system developed by Widder called the Medusa, which uses red light undetectable to deep sea creatures and has allowed scientists to discover species and observe elusive ones. The probe was outfitted with a fake jellyfish that mimicked the invertebrates’ bioluminescent defense mechanism, which can signal to larger … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Video from the Gulf of Mexico” »
