legal
Data Hiding at the Airport
According to the EFF blog, customs has taken to randomly searching electronic devices for suspicious data. It is somewhat mysterious what they are searching them for — given only a few minutes and a technically unskilled border guard doing the searching, it’s hard to imagine them actually finding anything better hidden than a file on [...]
Ad Replacers Let Dan Kaminsky RickRoll the Entire Web
I’ve talked before about ad replacers, where ISPs dynamically edit the contents of web traffic for their customers, replacing ads on web sites with ads of their own. This is a threat to the business model of the internet, as if done on a wide scale it would render small, advertiser-supported websites unable to support [...]
Surveillance and Ubiquity
HexView has an article about tracking vehicles with RFID tire pressure monitors. The devices are found in tires and transmit tire pressure to the engine control module, which sounds innocuous enough, but to prevent modules from reading neighboring cars’ tires by accident, they also transmit a unique ID. Thus, you can follow a car around [...]
Ad Replacers and the Future of the Internet
A company named Phorm (formerly 121Media) has introduced a new product for ISPs. The idea is that the ISP installs this product (basically a transparent proxy) on their network, and as their customers surf the web, the OIX proxy replaces advertisements on web pages with advertisements on the Phorm network. To make it more palatable, [...]
Record Companies Still Don’t Understand DRM
So, there’s been a lot of news about Qtrax, a new music download service approved by the major record labels. It sounds like a good thing for consumers — a Songbird-based browser lets you select pretty much any song imaginable, including the entire catalog of songs available from iTunes, and download it freely and legally. [...]
