Submission + - Canadian passport security full of online holes
twilight30 writes: Tuesday's Globe and Mail is reporting that 'A security flaw in Passport Canada's website has allowed easy access to the personal information — including social insurance numbers, dates of birth and driver's licence numbers — of people applying for new passports. The breach was discovered last week by an Ontario man completing his own passport application. He found he could easily view the applications of others by altering one character in the Internet address displayed by his Web browser. "I was expecting the site to tell me that I couldn't do that," said Jamie Laning of Huntsville. "I'm just curious about these things so I tried it, and boom, there was somebody else's name and somebody else's data." That data included social insurance numbers, driver's licence numbers and addresses.'
Submission + - Protecting IM from the NSA, a Canadian's view 3
holden writes: "Ian Goldberg, leading security researcher, professor at the university of waterloo, cypherpunk and co-creator of the Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) protocol recently gave a talk on protecting your IM conversations. He discusses OTR and its importance in today's world with warrant-less wire tapping and all that bad stuff. With OTR users benefit from being able to have truly private conversations over IM, by using encryption to obtain authentication, deniability, and perfect forward secrecy, while working within their existing IM infrastructure. With the recent NSA wiretapping activities and increasing Big Brother presence, security and OTR are increasingly important. An avi of the talk is available by http as well as by bittorrent and a bunch of other formats."
Submission + - Montreal to provide free WiFi access (cyberpresse.ca)
dermoth666 writes: Montreal is about to conclude a deal with Ile sans fil, Montreal's free WiFi non-lucrative organization. In a document obtained yesterday by La Presse, Montreal will be offering 200 000$ per year to Ile sans fil to install and maintain 400 access points in parks and public places. The proposal still has to go trough Montreal's executive committee, but if it pass it means Montreal will get totally free wireless access spread across the city. The article is in french only as it seems no english papers have covered this news yet.
