28819979
submission
Alranor writes
"On January 17th, the FBI and the British police arranged a conference call to discuss their ongoing work to prevent and prosecute hackers around the world.
Anonymous have just released a recording of that call."
40036
submission
Alranor writes
"In a piece of news which is unlikely to surprise anyone, the Guardian is reporting today that the new and much hyped as secure biometric passports issued by the UK government are surprisingly easy to crack.
Some choice quotes from the article:
I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.
"The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES — that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat."
At this point, I have to ask, is there anything that the UK government have ever done in the IT / Computing field which they haven't royally messed up?"
