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Comment Re:Can this possibly be secure? (Score 1) 391

by b.emile (#36450058) Attached to: Music Pirates Won't Rush To iCloud For Forgiveness
Assuming it's based on what they purchased from LaLa, it's fairly trivial to get them to give you a good copy of an arbitrary track. I tried this when LaLa debuted their "cloud music service", which would scan your library, matching tracks by, as far as I could tell, tags only. I took a random MP3 file, re-tagged it to a track that I didn't own, and ran the Lala scanner. Sure enough, it showed up on Lala as a track that I owned and could listen to an unlimited number of times online. Of course at that point Lala didn't let you re-download matched tracks as Apple will, so it was limited. But I'm forced to assume that if you have the patience, you could get Apple to give you 256Kbps MP3s of albums you don't actually own.
Education

Submission + - linux is not a crime

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A colleague of mine submitted a personal laptop (macbook) to IT of a department of a major university in the University of California to be checked prior to access being granted to the network. The response was:
"Hi,
I am currently setting up your laptop for xxxxxxxxx department. I noticed you have Ubuntu and Windows running on Virtual Box. We cannot have linux computers on the network , and cannot have any copies of Windows running that aren't joined to the xxxxxxxxx Network. Also, there is Bittorrent software on the computer which isn't allowed.
I can remote the bittorrent and the Virtual machiens and then the computer will be able to be added. Would you like me to do this? Any files or programs that you have installed on them will be lost.
Thanks,
xxxxxxxxx"

I am surprised at the policy against linux, especially given the amount of research that gets done in the University of California using linux and other open source projects. Is this a trend? Do they have a basis for security concerns regarding linux?
The other sad thing is the banning of bittorrent, which is simply a file-downloading program.
Government

Submission + - Internet Access is a Human Right, UN Report Says (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by purkinje
purkinje writes: Disconnecting people from the internet is a violation of human rights and is against international law, says a UN report released yesterday. The report comes just after several governments in the Middle East restricted internet access during unrest there, and a year after France and the UK passed three-strikes laws to disconnect users illegally sharing files. People have a right to both dimensions of internet access, the report says: unfettered access to content and the technology and infrastructure needed to get online in the first place.

Submission + - The War On Photography: Legal Analysis (ssrn.com)

Submitted by YIAAL
YIAAL writes: We've seen increasing numbers of stories about photographers facing arrest or assault by police and security officers simply for taking pictures — often pictures of law enforcement misconduct. Although photographers have a legal right to take pictures in pretty much any public place, this article by Morgan Manning concludes that the legal remedies for violations of that right are inadequate and often entirely unworkable. Is law-enforcement education the solution, or do we need new civil rights laws — maybe with attorney fees and heavy damages — to protect photographers from being hassled?
Encryption

Submission + - OpenSSL Timing Attack Steals Private Keys (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Remote timing attacks have been a problem for cryptosystems for more than 20 years. A new paper shows that such attacks are still practical and can be used to steal the private key of a TLS server running OpenSSL. The researchers, Billy Bob Brumley and Nicola Tuveri of Aalto University School of Science, focused their efforts on OpenSSL's implementation of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), and they were able to develop an attack that allowed them to steal the private key of an OpenSSL server.
In an interview, Brumley says that the attack is just a symptom of other problems. "Perhaps the scariest part is that the piece of code introducing the vulnerability has been in the library since roughly 2005. This shows that identifying timing attack vulnerabilities is a daunting task. This isn't the first timing attack vulnerability discovered in OpenSSL, and I can guarantee it won't be the last."

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