Andreaskem - Slashdot User

Submission + - Bavarian police looking for Skype trojan informant

Submitted by

Andreaskem

on Wednesday September 17, 2008 @07:39AM

Andreaskem writes: "Bavarian police searched the home of the spokesman for the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland) looking for an informant who leaked information about a government trojan used to eavesdrop on Skype conversations. (German article) There is a high probability that the trojan is used illegally. "The Bavarian authorities worked on the trojan without a legitimate basis and now try to silence critics," a criminal law specialist said.
The informant need not worry since "every information that could be used to identify him" is protected against unauthorized access. A server that was seized is also protected by strong encryption.
The trojan is supposedly capable of eavesdropping on Skype conversations and obtaining technical details of used software. It is deployed by e-mail or in place by the police. Moreover, it may be deleted or extended without a trace and provide access to SSL encrypted websites.
"After this search, the validity of the letter can no longer be questioned," the pirate party said, "Some of our officials seem to want to install the Big Brother state without the knowledge of the public"."

Submission + - Computer scientists develop P2P system that promis

Submitted by

Andreaskem

on Wednesday April 11, 2007 @05:59AM

Andreaskem writes: "A Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist says transferring large data files, such as movies and music, over the Internet could be sped up significantly if peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services were configured to share not only identical files, but also similar files.

"SET speeds up data transfers by simultaneously downloading different chunks of a desired data file from multiple sources, rather than downloading an entire file from one slow source. Even then, downloads can be slow because these networks can't find enough sources to use all of a receiver's download bandwidth. That's why SET takes the additional step of identifying files that are similar to the desired file... No one knows the degree of similarity between data files stored in computers around the world, but analyses suggest the types of files most commonly shared are likely to contain a number of similar elements. Many music files, for instance, may differ only in the artist-and-title headers, but are otherwise 99 percent similar.""

Submission + - Ultra-Dense Optical Storage on One Photon

Submitted by

Andreaskem

on Saturday January 20, 2007 @07:20AM

Andreaskem writes: "Physorg.com is running a story about Researchers being able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. From the article: 'It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera — this is like a 6-megapixel camera... You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information... We're showing it's possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels.'"

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