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Reviews TV

Lost: 4.05 The Constant

Yet another enigmatic episode title following last week’s Eggtown and the previous week’s The Economist, but the meaning becomes clear halfway through the episode. This was truly an awesome episode and ties with The Economist as being the best hour of television of the year. I anticipate writing that again for forthcoming episodes as Lost in season four is coming close to knocking The Wire off it’s top spot on the podium.

A time travel story which doesn’t have any paradoxes and doesn’t retcon previous storylines that we know about but in fact serves to fill in the gaps and explain past events.

Penny and Desmond’s phone call got me all misty eyed it was beautiful and played so well.

Confirms time-shift in transiting to and from the island although only physically as electromagnetic waves are unaffected so radio communications are real time. Does this explain why Desmond was in prison because he went AWOL during this period.

Does it explain Jacob? Is he trapped between two times?

Charles Widmore bought at auction the journal of the First Mate of The Black Rock. He definitely knows about the island and did almost certainly set Desmond up somehow so he’d get stranded there during the yacht race.

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Computing

Chip ‘n Pin security compromised

Research carried out by Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson of the Computer Laboratory Security Group at the University of Cambridge, has shown how to compromise supposedly tamper-proof Chip and PIN terminals.

Without specialist equipment and with little technical knowledge fraudsters would be able to acquire all the necessary information to clone a user’s credit or debit card.

The full results of the team are published their academic paper. [via]

In Chip & PIN card transactions, customers insert their card and enter their PIN into a PIN Entry Device (PED). We have demonstrated that two popular PEDs, the Ingenico i3300 and Dione Xtreme, fail to adequately protect card details and PINs. Fraudsters, with basic technical skills, can record this information and create fake cards which may be used to withdraw cash from ATMs abroad, and even some in the UK. These failures are despite the terminals being certified secure under the Visa approval scheme, and in the case of the Ingenico, the Common Criteria system. Our results expose significant failings in the entire evaluation and certification process.

Newsnight coverage of the research.

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Security Uncategorized

Dispatches on Security Theatre and airport chaos

Dispatches: Checking-in To Airport Chaos

Andrew Gilligan investigates the priorities and business tactics of the airports industry, asking how secure our airports are and who will be the winners and losers from airport expansion?

Explosives expert Sidney Alford highlights how ill-thought out and arbitrary the security rules regarding the carrying liquids is by creating an explosive that could be carried on in bottles of no more than 100ml and mixed on board and assuming there were co-conspirators on board an even greater amount could be accumulated. Alford doesn’t explain what exactly the liquids he was using are but does say that they are not particularly tightly controlled substances and can be sourced from several disparate industries in which their use is commonplace. so an amateur such as a terrorist could with a little research carry out exactly the same process.

Other experts such as Norman shanks BAA head of security 1991-1996 says that the industry always reacts to the last known threat.

Philip Baum Editor of Aviation Security International says it is all just security theatre and that he cannot cite a single example of when a bomb has been detected by the x-ray machines alone. He has carried out tests for governments and the results are very worrying one test involving a woman carrying bomb parts through 24 different airports every single one failed to detect a single component that she carried. Other results show that operators succeeded only 73% of the time to detect guns or knives.

Behaviour pattern recognition where staff are trained to spot suspicious behaviour was deemed not to be testable by the department of Transport and so the programme wasn’t implemented. They are far keener on technological answers!
I’m not sure why BAA don’t implement such procedures anyway. Where does responsibility lie? What role do they and the DoT play?

BAA also didn’t respond quickly enough to deal with the new security procedures and the result was huge queues at their airports whereas other airports owned for example by local government returned to normality pretty soon after the security scare.

Airlines are not happy with the way that BAA measures queues and would appear to be undercounting them and it is in their interest to lie as they are required to refund landing fees if queues are over a certain point. Independent surveys find their airports to be far less satisfactory than BAAs own surveys.

Almost seems designed to create long waiting times in BAAs airport shopping areas to maximise their retail revenues.

Expansion plans the government seems to have been influenced by BAA to allow the Heathrow third runway to be built ironically the CAA indicates there might not be sufficient airspace to accommodate the scale of predicted traffic growth.

Categories
Computing

Exploit of DRAM vulnerability leads to attack vector on disk encryption

Ed Felten and his colleagues have released an amazing research result which leads to an attack on hard disk encryption systems such as TrueCrypt, BitLocker and FileVault. Through the process of rapidly reducing the temperature of the memory chips in a computer they can extract the data contained within which would include the encryption key neccessary to decrypt the computer’s hard drive. [via]

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. We show that this phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials.

This is a very interesting piece of research but I don’t believe that it actually yields a practicable attack on hard disk encryption as long as the user maintains control of their computer in the thirty seconds or less following shutdown.

Just make sure that you don’t leave your laptop laying around whilst in sleep mode or locked by a screensaver password, but a user with enough security sense to have hard disk encryption on there computer is unlikely to do that anyway.

Declan McCullagh gives his analysis of the research in this article Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds.

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Copyright Politics Uncategorized

Illegal downloaders ‘face UK ban’

British internet users face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material.

The Government’s resolve on the issue has apparently been stiffened following similar proposals made by the governments of the US and France. The proposal is designed to bolster the UK’s creative industries but it is questionable how much impact it will have on piracy and how willing Internet Service Providers will be to cut off their revenue by banning their own customers.

Categories
Comics Reviews TV

Smallville sufferance

I don’t know why I continue to watch Smallville as it just pisses me off that there seems to be far too little movement towards Clark becoming Superman. I guess the producers figured that the endpoint of the show would be when he finally took up the mantle that was his destiny.

But it’s dragged on for six and a half seasons now, and he’s in his early twenties it’s about time that the character got his journalism degree ( the whole Clark and the gang go to college thing was dropped pretty quickly), stopped bumming around on the family farm and started frigging flying.

Categories
Reviews TV

Review: Ashes to Ashes

One of the stand out shows on the BBC of the last few years was Life on Mars (BBC|Wikipedia), which saw DCI Sam Tyler played by John Simm waking up in the year 1973 after being hit by a car in 2006.

Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?

The first episode of Ashes to Ashes (BBC|Wikipedia) the sequel series was screened last night and though I thought it was good fun and I enjoyed it a great deal at the moment I feel it isn’t quite in the same league as Life on Mars.

I liked the mystery and ambiguity over Sam’s predicament in Life on Mars but the final episode of that is like the first page of Ashes to ashes and it’s pretty clear that Alex is gravely injured from the gunshot and is probably experiencing the alternate universe of Gene Hunt (based on the report of Sam Tyler’s that she’d just read) as she dies.

With the Geneverse being clearly not based in reality from the outset in this show they’ve decided to go all out and create a bit of a pastiche of Miami Vice albeit set in London. Hopefully the Miami Vice idea of flash cars, speedboats and automatic weapons doesn’t survive beyond this first episode as fun as it was it was frankly a bit rubbish.

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost: 4.02 Confirmed Dead

Episode two of the new season continues at the same heights of quality established in the season three finale and begins with a great WTF moment – the discovery on the ocean floor of the wreckage of Oceanic 815! Then cut to Daniel Faraday the guy that parachuted onto the Island as the end of the last episode inexplicably crying at having seen the wreckage on the TV news. Presumably this is a flashback.

Locke is acting like Colonel Kurtz – nice one Sawyer.

I think Ben is more of a manipulator than an outright liar as he mostly does tell the truth but spins it in such a way as to make people do what he wants them to do. He is pretty much several steps ahead of anyone else and so it’s never clear what his motives or intentions ultimately are.

It’s only a matter of time ’til he gets us Johnny and he’s already worked out how he’s gonna do it.

Again Sawyer’s perception of others is spot on in my opinion.

Faraday proves to be just what the viewers are seeking as he’s pretty forthcoming as to answering questions and seems pretty knowledgeable. Confirms that the freighter isn’t there to rescue them but is cut off from revealing what their primary mission is by another new character Miles Straum, Ghostbuster. Lost has skirted near to the supernatural before but Miles’s ability to converse with the dead is right in that zone.

Meanwhile the third of the people from the freighter Charlotte Staples Lewis is out of the frying pan and into the fire when having landed badly from the helicopter she’s now discovered by Locke’s party. In flashback we’ve seen her discover in Tunisia a Dharma collar round the skeleton of a polar bear, evidence of multiple Dharma sites round the globe or some freaky dimensional rift thing. “You’ve been living here this entire time?” Is it just me or does her incredulity here suggest that in the outside world a greater period has passed than the 90 days that have passed on the Island.

This might tie up with the fact that it doesn’t seem long enough for Frank Lapidus to have fallen to being a pilot for a Caribbean tours company from having been an airline pilot for Oceanic. But then as he was almost the pilot of Oceanic 815 he might have felt survivors guilt and quit immediately.

Bullet proof vest, guns and Naomi’s “Tell my sister that I love her” indeed being a code heavily suggests that the freighties came expecting trouble. But trouble from whom? They’ve come for Ben and if they have any knowledge of him and the Others then it seems like a wise precaution. But none of them were particularly surprised by the Oceanic 815’s survivors presence on the Island and it has to be remembered that they in their encounters with the Others have proved themselves to be dangerous also.

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Uncategorized

Archbishop of Canterbury: Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK seems “unavoidable”.

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting some aspects of Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

I don’t think the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is unavoidable nor desirable. Just because some British citizens don’t relate to the legal system does not mean that a parallel legal system that they’d be more comfortable with should be adopted. As it is it could be argued that British prisons are full of people that don’t relate to the British legal system should we adopt a separate system for them too. One legal system for drug dealers and another for the rest of us.

This is not the way the British legislative process works nor should it be.

Although if you believe crackpots like Melanie Phillips it is inevitable anyway because of the Government’s appeasement to Islamic extremists and the onset of the Islamification of Europe.

I don’t see how having separate systems brings out social cohesion either as surely it does the exact opposite and only serves to increase the differences between communities.

Also it seems unworkable to me. Which system would take primacy when one party wanted their case heard in a Sharia court but the other party didn’t or in the case of something like adultery which the British legal system doesn’t take a view on but Sharia law does.

He suggests that marital disputes could be dealt with in a Sharia court but in the case of marriages and divorces British civil law takes precedence over Canon law of the Church of England so why should Muslims have it any different.

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Uncategorized

Homicide: The real life on the streets

Using Google maps The Baltimore Sun have plotted all the murders that were committed in 2007 and so far in 2008. As well as switching between the year that the murders took place in the results can be filtered by age, gender and race and it can be seen that a disproportionate number of them are young black men.

That last statistic won’t surprise viewers of The Wire though.