Comment I'm sure (Score 1) 79
the Olympic dream will make Great Britain a more open and democratic society. Just like it did for China.
Comment Bummer (Score 1) 99
Sounds like inter-planetary multi-player Quake is still out of reach.
Comment Where is the link to the report? (Score 1) 269
Comment Asimov would like to know... (Score 2) 298
...what ever happened to the Three Laws of Robotics?
Comment Who will profit? (Score 1) 152
There is probably more then meets the eye here. The telecom regulator (OPTA) came into action after a complaint from a telco. It is not know what the complain is about but probably something about unfair competition ("we have to register as an ISP and the hotels get a free ride"). Currently OPTA is investigating if hotel wifi is a "public electronic communicationsnetwork". If they conclude hotel wifi falls into that definition then hotels (but also Starbucks and McDonalds) have to fulfill all obligations under the Dutch Telecommunications Act. And those are making the network ready for wiretapping and data retention. And that is not limited to responding to a wiretap warrant. They'll have to adjust their network so that they can execute the wiretap according to specs in the regulation. Those specs also require security measures for the wiretap equipment, screened personnel to handle warrants, etc. In the end hotels will conclude that this is costly and complicated. That is when the telco steps in (remember, they complained to the regulator). They can offer hotspots with all wiretap and data retention obligations already implemented. Profit!
Hotels can of course easily fix the problem - if open wifi turns out to fall within that definition in the law - by requiring a password for wifi access. After that it's not pubic wifi anymore.
Submission + - Mifare classic rfid chip cloned
vvpt writes: Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands have caused for quite some panic within the Dutch government. Their Digital Security group successfully reverse engineered [pdf] the CRYPTO-1 encryption algorithm of the Mifare Classic RFID chip produced by NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductors). The Mifare Classic is a contactless smartcard developed in the mid 90s. Worldwide around 1 billion of these cards have been sold. In The Netherlands about 1 millions card are used in both the public and private sector. The Dutch government admitted that it now has a national security issue to deal with: ministries, defense objects and many large corperations depend on the Mifare Classic for their access control. There is also a video available showing how this attack could be applied in the real world. The Dutch researchers have build on the previous work by Karsten Nohl and Henryk Plötz but used a different approach. The Dutch exploited weaknesses of the authentication protocol to reverse engineer the CRYPTO-1 encryption algorithm. They also found a way to relatively easily retrieve the key without carrying out a lengthy brute force attack.
Comment Re:Roaming Charges? (Score 2, Informative) 951
The new EU roaming tariff only applies when using a sim from a operator located in the EU. The aim is to harmonize roaming costs within the EU. So it doesn't apply to an AT&T sim.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/
Secondly, the tariff only applies to voice calls and NOT to SMS, MMS or GPRS/UMTS.
Thirdly, I have noticed that people seem to get charged for absurd amounts of data. It is quite impossible to verify that those amounts have actually been used. I have a theory that the calculation method used by the operators is responsible for charging people for amounts that are bigger then the actual use. It would be interesting to measure the actual use (possibly through a tcpdump) and compare this with the bill. I haven't seen any operator that explains in detail which calculation method (using increments) is used.
