Kjella writes "A little over a week ago we discussed the EU's forbidding of disconnecting users from the Internet. But even after having passed with an 88% approval in the European Parliament, and passing through the European Commission, it was all undone last week. The European Council, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, removed the amendment before passing the Telecom package. This means that there's now nothing stopping France's controversial 'three strikes' law from going into effect. What hope is there for a 'parliament' where near-unanimous agreement can be completely undone so easily?"

rifles only writes "A German techie has found a remarkably simple way to discern some of the content of encrypted volumes containing images. The encrypted images don't reveal themselves totally, but in many cases do let an attacker see the outline of a high-contrast image. The attack works regardless of the encryption algorithm used (the widely-used AES for instance), and affects all utilities that use single symmetric keys. More significant to police around the world struggling with criminal and terrorist use of encryption, the attack also breaks the ability of users to 'hide' separate encrypted volumes inside already encrypted volumes, whose existence can now for the first time be revealed." The discoverer of this attack works for a company making full-disk encryption software; their product, TurboCrypt, has already been enhanced to defeat the attack. Other on-the-fly encryption products will probably be similarly enhanced, as the discoverer asserts: "To our knowledge is the described method free of patents and the author can confirm that he hasn't applied for protection."