Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Security

U-Turn On UK ID Cards 143

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the from-bad-to-worse dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The UK appears to be watering down its national ID card system, with the revelation by the government that it will now only check the cards against a central biometric database in a minority of cases. Critics are saying it not only renders the whole scheme pointless, but will pose a security risk by making it far easier to use copied or cloned cards. 'But an Identity and Passport Service spokesman denied the system would be vulnerable to fraud: 'The majority of instances where people use their identity cards will be day-to-day situations where the cards offer a convenient method of proving identity such as a young person proving their age to buy alcohol,' he said.'"
Security

Vista Exploit Surfaces on Russian Hacker Site 103

Posted by Zonk from the exploits-show-up-in-the-funnest-places dept.
Datamation writes "Exploit code for Windows Vista (though at this point only proof-of-concept code) has been published to a Russian hacker site, Eweek reports. Certain strings sent through the 'MessageBox' API apparently cause memory corruption. Though this is obviously cause for concern, at the moment it would seem access to the system would already be required to make use of the exploit. Determina has an analysis of the bug. Just last week, Trend Micro reported that Vista zero-days are being sold at underground hacker sites for $50,000."

Comment Not quite doubly linked lists (Score 1) 328

by NoMercy (#16967822) Attached to: LSI Patents the Doubly-Linked List
It appears to be a patent on having two list pointers in a structure (auxulary pointer so you can sort the list in a diferent order). Funny even the linux kernel has a really fancy (arguably patentable) way of doing this using very simple macros. Though yes this could also cover doubly linked lists.

For prior art I'd give /usr/src/Linux/include/scsi/scsi_cmnd.h - struct scsi_cmnd: Belongs to two doubly linked lists, though not for storing in diferent orders, it's because that structure happens to have mutiple systems tracking it.

This is probably a patent from some engineer who's been pushed by his boss to come up with things to patent because he's not done one recently. Personally I'm accredited on a couple of software patents, but being UK ones, there is a fairly heavy ammount of proof that this is a concept of tangable value, eg you can't patent a linked list because it's not going to do anything, but you could patent an application of it which makes the thing your product does do it better/faster/etc.

Slashdot Top Deals

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein

Close