Tales from the bits

Skype and other Internet-based phone systems have flaws that could potentially disclose the identities, locations and even digital files of the hundreds of millions of users of these systems. The research was conducted by Chao Zhang and Keith Ross of NYU-Poly; Stevens Le Blond of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany; and Arnaud [...]

InformationWeek Up until recently quantum cryptography thought to be secure to transmit cryptographic keys. Any attempt to eavesdrop the transmission could be easily detected (based on Heisenberg uncertainty principle).  This was proved wrong by the team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Max Planck [...]

BitLocker andTrueCryptare data encryption software packages. The question is which one to use and why? BitLocker comes with Windows 7 Ultimate edition. TrueCrypt is free open source software. Michael Pietroforte at 4SYSOPS has two very interesting articles. In the first article he comparesTrueCrypt 5 vs. Bitlocker. There are no significant speed differences between the two programs.  The [...]

Wall Steet Journal: Iraq militants used SkyGrabber a 26$ software to intercepted live video feeds from U.S Predator drones. The U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem when they found a laptop of a Shiite militant which contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. The capture of the feed was possible because the downlink [...]