Why do people think this is anything other than a publicity stunt to generate internet-chatter and pimp their name about a bit?

The details of the challenge are almost certainly irrelevant - anyone can apply for GCHQ jobs directly with them, without having to complete a challenge.

The more their name is banded around forums and sites like slashdot the better, as they'll get more people applying for their jobs, which can only be good for them.

You have to show your passport anyway, so obviously from that point on they know exactly who you are anyway. No-one seems to be up in arms about that, so what's the problem with facial recognition scanners?

A linux build is available here. It's an firefox addon file (xpi). I have it up and running on Ubuntu fine. You'll need libpcap installed obviously.

You need to make sure you run firesheep-backend --fix-permissions as root manually before it'll work. You'll find this in Firefox's plugins directory.

All info taken from here.

Standard passenger airports in the UK have used birds of prey for this purpose for decades...

I'm sure the same is probably true for airports all over the world.

I wouldn't be in any doubt that the Chinese would decide that it's illegal. You can't really just call it "Connecting to your home computer from China" when the only reason you're doing that is to circumvent their filter. It'd be a pretty feeble defence!

Is asking a question on how to circumvent the Chinese filtering system really appropriate? It's highly illegal, and you've been pretty blatent about what you want to do and that you don't care.

I'm surprised the question made it to the front page.

They don't check anything. I'm constantly requesting copies of birth certificates (genealogy) and I've never been asked anything. Just find the person whose certificate you're after, look them up in the BMD indexes and bingo bango, one officially approved birth certificate arrives in the post a week or so later.

Yes, it's an offence to be unable to produce it, but you have 7 days to do so at a police station of your choice. See the Road Traffic Act.

Yeah mine does the same.

My point was more that the cloned chips are using ripped off code with no guarantee that it's not been hacked about and will work properly. 9 times out of 10 the cloned chips will probably work fine. I'm just making people aware that the cheap ones do contain code that's been ripped off from another manufacturer and sold on for profit.

People can make up their own mind then as to what they want to do.

Not necessarily. There are a number of protocol that may be used, CAN is just one of them. See here for a list.

I've looked into this a fair amount and one thing I will say is beware of fake ELM ICs.

The ELM327 IC is what the vast majority of these scanners will be based on. The ones at www.scantool.net will use genuine ELM ICs, but the ones like this one and this one will almost certainly use non-genuine ELM ICs.

The ELM327 chip is just a PIC with some custom firmware on it. A few years ago someone managed to get the firmware off one of these PICs and since then the fake ones have really taken off. Whereas the genuine ELMs have frequent updates, the fake ones obviously don't.

I've had an @googlemail.co.uk address for a long while, and if you sent mail to youraddress@gmail.com instead of youraddress@googlemail.co.uk you always ended up receiving the mail fine.

The only difference for UK people wishing to 'convert' their email address to @gmail.com is what's displayed on the gmail.com site when you log in.