Congratulations to Terry Pratchett for getting a knighthood!
Here’s a timely User Friendly cartoon on the subject..
Congratulations to Terry Pratchett for getting a knighthood!
Here’s a timely User Friendly cartoon on the subject..
Via Bruce Schneier, a redacted version of the NSA’s “American Cryptology during the Cold War, (1945-1989)“ has been released thank to a request from the George Washington Universities National Security Archive project.
It includes a rather interesting section (book 1, pages 18 and 19) on how, in 1947, the UK foreign intelligence agency, SIS, decrypted some KGB messages from Canberra that turned out to include classified UK intelligence military estimates. This caused the US to break off crypto intelligence sharing with Australia putting the British in an awkward situation; as Clement Attlee put it:
The intermingling of American and British knowledge in all these fields is so great that to be certain of of denying American classified information to the Australians, we should have to deny them the greater part of our own reports. We should thus be placed in a disagreeable dilemma of having to choose between cutting of relations with the United States in defence questions or cutting off relations with Australia.
It took 5 years, the establishment of ASIO and a change in government from Chifley to Menzies before the US would reestablish full resumption of cryptologic exchanges with Australia and the author of the history concludes that this has a very bad effect on early American intelligence efforts against China.
The cause of the original leak to the KGB ? Two “leftists” in the Australian diplomatic service…
Finally I’ve stumbled across packages of the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10) which is currently in beta.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
They’re part of the Digikam Experimental Personal Package Archive (PPA) and so track the latest development releases (0.10.0-rc1 as I write this) and work for me on Ubuntu Intrepid with KDE 4.2 (at the moment) – remember to install Marble!
Note
Many thanks to Maarten Fonville who previously provided packages that this story originally pointed to, and who commented with the above alternative archive.
Now this is, umm, interesting..
We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.
Trust no one..
(Via)
Courtesy of my kernel log:
Jan 1 10:59:59 quad kernel: [303561.577455] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
🙂
(Thanks to Jason White for pointing out that it was logged on the luv-main list)
Kogan, an Australian company who usually specialise in LCD’s, are making a mobile handset (the Agora) for Google Android (which uses the Linux kernel) with 3G, quad band GSM, GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, etc… It’s due to start shipping at the end of January and I’ve just pre-ordered mine to hopefully provide a more functional open source phone and let me hack more with my OpenMoko phone without having to worry about not having a working phone.