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Schneier: Fixing Airport Security
Maximum PC: 21 Essential Steps to Make Your PC Better/Faster/Stronger
Category: Computing
John Markoff for the New York times writes about Ghostnet which is thought to be a Chinese state-sponsored cyber-spying operation and the computer security investigators based at the University of Toronto that uncovered it. Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness
It’s like The Cuckoo’s Egg mark II although everyone is taking this discovery a lot more seriously than they did Clifford Stoll’s 20 years ago.
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64 Things Every Geek Should Know
If you consider yourself a geek, or aspire to the honor of geekhood, here’s an essential checklist of must-have geek skills.
Minimise the risk of infection with these essential tips
Alan Travis for The Guardian writes that a report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has found that a quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and clearly breach European data protection and rights laws.
Claiming to be the most comprehensive map so far of Britain’s “database state”, the report says that 11 of the 46 biggest schemes, including the national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England, should be given a “red light” and immediately scrapped or redesigned.
The report Database State was produced by Ross Anderson and his team at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The report says that more than half of Whitehall’s 46 databases and systems have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness, and could fall foul of a legal challenge.
Professor Ross Anderson from Cambridge, who wrote the report, and Michael Wills, the minister in the Justice Department, discuss the need to have an open debate.
Telegraph: Only incompetence will save us from Orwell’s surveillance state
The vast amount of data now being generated, and the impossibility of looking at it all, is, together with bureaucratic incompetence, the best guarantee we have that we’re not going to wake up one morning and find we are living in a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
True to an extent but the worry is that eventually when the state realises that the flaw in the system is the human element they will move towards more and more automated systems that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with and doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.*
Seriously though, the failures of major IT projects like the NHS database might be the one thing that prevents the implementation of the National Identity Register and if they don’t then I can guarantee that Britain will end up with one hell of a flawed database with people being misidentified as benefit cheats or fraudsters or in extreme cases terrorist suspects due to the incompetence of the data entry.
* The Terminator (1984)
Almost half of the used hard drives purchased on eBay by computer forensics company Kessler International were found to contain easily recoverable personal data.
“The average person who knows anything about computers could plug in these disks and just go surfing,” Kessler said. “I know they found a guy’s foot fetish on one disk. He’d been downloading loads and loads of stuff on feet. With what we got on that disk — his name, address and all of his contacts — it would have been extremely embarrassing if we were somebody who wanted to blackmail him.”
But of course it’s not just embarrassing information that can be found but also crucial data such as passwords and banking information.
Fortunately Lifehacker has a comprehensive guide to erasing all that data.
Plus if you want to be doubly sure that nobody can recover the data from your old hard drive then hwy not dispose of it with extreme prejudice.
The Times reports that the UK has no machines to read its own ID cards
The first ID cards are here – but no one in the UK can read them
Thousands of ID cards have already been issued to foreign residents in the UK as part of the government’s £4.7 billion scheme, but no one can read the details stored on them
If the government cannot roll out a workable identity card system to cover foreign residents then this gives me great confidence that they will bungle the introduction of the ID card system that will cover all residents of the UK.
If nobody has the equipment to read the biometric data on the cards then it renders the entire system redundant and poses the question of what was the purpose of all the expense.
