A number of smartphone providers have been talking about adding fingerprint readers to phones to make the security stronger. Over 40% of serious crime involves smart devices and half of those crimes are violent in some way, many at knife-point. Does anyone else worry that it won't take long for muggers to work out that if they take the phone they need to take your index finger too?

Given that much of the rise in crime in New York last year was due to people having the iOS devices stolen, how long will it be before muggings at knife-point typically also involve the thief stealing the owner's index finger too?

Those Porsches also use circular wheels rotating around a central axle. I mean geez, that's so 4th Millennium BC; even Mesopotamians sports carts were using those. Can't the Germans come up with something that's actually new?

The test that the competition regulators apply is "Will this reduce competition and consumer choice?" When Google bought Motorola Motorola was already a maker of Android phones and the immediate effect on the market was small. If Apple bought Nokia it would almost certainly want to kill Nokia's Windows phones, which would largely kill Windows Mobile, which would significantly reduce choice. There is no way that the EU would allow this and it seems unlikely that the US would allow it either (although that would be moot if the EU nixed it).

If you are going to check something at a checkpoint then it makes sense to stochastically sample with secondary checks to test your error rate. Apparently the TSA believe that there is a reason to limit the liquids through airport checkpoints and screen those liquids that they do allow through. Irrespective of if this is itself a rational position, if you believe that it is then it is also rational to check randomly sample liquids after the checkpoint.

It's important the appreciate that the Swedish arrest warrant for Svartholm isn't for file-sharing, it's for skipping bail and fleeing after his last round of appeals failed. Irrespective of the soundness of the original trail, the guy is a fugitive with a current conviction who's sentence has not been served. The charges he will face if he is caught now are far more serious than the ones he faced with Pirate Bay.

As someone who doesn't have US citizenship but who lives and works in the US, creating businesses that have hired hundreds of people (including plenty of H1-B holders) I have an alternate approach; I shall simply be avoiding Arizona as much as possible. I shall not be holding any group meetings there, I'll see what I can do to avoid conventions there or transfers through PHX and they can kiss goodbye to any prospect of my opening offices there. I'm probably too white to actually be harassed under this law but that doesn't make it any less disgusting to me.

Not only did Bruce demonstrate how useless the security at MSP is, but it's his home airport. My guess is that the TSA want all this extra 'security' to keep tabs on him.

Ultimately decisions about email encryption come down to what threats you think you might be protecting yourself against. I have a PGP key, and on occasion I use it to sign and decrypt emails when I think it matters. The rest of the time I send mail, over SSL, through my own mail server, which will use SMTP's 'startTLS' command whenever possible. Most people I know read their mail either using SSH on the machine that runs the mail server or over some SSL-protected IMAP or webmail interface. Thus, for most cases, the mail is encrypted in transit but never encrypted on the servers. If the threat is one of people eavesdropping then this keeps me safe; if the threat is one of hackers targeting one of the mail servers then it doesn't. Most of my mail doesn't warrant any more effort to achieve any more security.

While it's a bit more targeted at the "server" market rather than "router" market, the DreamPlug does all that you want. It has dual gigabit ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n, a 1.2GHz ARM processor (with a decent crypto co-processor that can handle full duplex gigabit VPN encryption), USB2 and eSATA ports for adding discs, an external SD card port and 4GB of flash inside for the FS. It even has both analogue and SP/DIF audio out in case you want to stream music into your server cupboard. It's very low power too (typically about 10 watts).

An acre-foot is a quite reasonable measure of volume if what you are interested in is collecting rain water in a place where land is sold by the acre and shallow depths remeasured in feet.

That said, I'd wholeheartedly vote for the US switching to metric measures if I had a vote.

When you're building any sort of security system the very first thing you need to do is decide what your threat model is. Then when you think about a solution you need to assess it against that model to see how it performs. If the threat here is kidnapping, the solution is useless since the bad guys will remove the tag. This solution is only ever going to help against "wandering" kids, but if the teachers think that the kids can't wander off then they are likely to pay less attention, which is means the kids will be at greater risk of injury from all sort of other things that the teachers would have spotted. The system almost certainly puts kids at greater risk than before.

I had the pleasure of meeting HRH the Duke of Edinburgh at an event once and, upon hearing that I worked in cryptography, he told me about his time working signals in the British navy during the second world war. He said he had always been fascinated by the operation of the British TypeX equipment that he used back then. I don't suppose that he did any code breaking but he certainly was using codes well before the Cypherpunks came along.

I'm still waiting for the photo of the fish on the bicycle so that I an get back to my ex about all those presents she claimed weren't useful...

... while the code for Android is GPLv2, the move of various other projects towards GPLv3 is only going to make this sort of problem worse. The 'anti-Tivoisation' clause basically demands that some authorised signing key gets distributed with any GPLv3 code that needs to be signed in order to run, and that the available signing key grants all the rights necessary for that code to function. While it is of course possible for users to completely rebuild the trust hierarchy with their own keys, very few people will be willing to do so. As a result it seems likely that any GPLv3 project will be unable to make effective use of signing as a mechanism for preventing the execution of rogue code, even if the license allows for it in theory.