"A World War Two code found strapped to the leg of a dead pigeon stuck in a chimney for the last 70 years
may never be broken, a British intelligence agency said on Friday."
— Rob
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Mark Frauenfelder at 4:27 pm • • 
Cryptocat Adventure! from Nadim Kobeissi on Vimeo.
Sean Bonner shared this cute video for Cryptocat, a web-based service that enables secure, encrypted online chatting and file transfer between two parties.
The creator of Cryptocat, a 22-year old named Nadim Kobeissi, says Cryptocat has earned him the dreaded "SSSS" mark of suspicion on his boarding passes. From Wired:
When he flies through the US, he’s generally had the notorious “SSSS” printed on his boarding pass, marking him for searches and interrogations — which Kobeissi says have focused on his development of the chat client.
His SSSS’s can mean hours of waiting, and Kobeissi says he has been searched, questioned, had his bags and even his passport taken away and returned later. But he’s kept his sense of humor about the experience, even joking from the airport on his Twitter account.
Cryptocat
CNET's Emil Protalinski reports that Osama bin Laden did not encrypt the thousands of files stored in the Pakistani compound where he was killed, and "17 of the 6,000 documents have now been publicly released."
(via @ioerror) — Xeni
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After
seizing an encrypted laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu, prosecutors headed into difficult waters: could she be forced to unlock it? A judge ordered her to give up the password, raising issues of unreasonable search and seizure and the right not to incriminate oneself. Fricosu's lawyers suggested she had forgotten it, but a showdown was averted:
she either turned the password over or they figured it out some other way. [Wired]
— Rob
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Glenn Fleishman at 9:42 am • •
The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart. Researchers have discovered, in some cases, that a lack of entropy—a lack of disorder in the selection of prime numbers—means by analogy that most buildings on the Web would stand in spite of gale winds and magnitude 10 earthquakes, while others can be pushed over with a finger or a breath. The weakness affects as many as 4 in 1,000 publicly available secured Web servers, but it appears in practice that few to no popular Web sites are at risk.
Read the rest
Seth Schoen at the EFF has a suggestion for an extra New Year's Resolution:
Full-disk encryption on all your computers.
— Rob
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