Beret

The U.S. scientific innovation infrastructure has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership that included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC XRX, the research operations of IBM IBM, DARPA, NASA, and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside efforts at “pure” research, with the two streams often feeding one another. With abundant corporate and venture-capital funding for eventual commercialization, these research labs have made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs. Consider a few of the crown jewels from Bell Labs alone:

• The first public demonstration of fax transmission (1925)
• First long-distance TV transmission (1927)
• Invention of the transistor (1947)
• Invention of photovoltaic cell (1954)
• Creation of the UNIX operating system (1969)
• Technology for cellular telephony (1978)

(via azspot)

urif:

Check out this 1991 video, starting at minute 23. We are in 2009 now. After you’ve watched it, repeat with me:

To everyone building desktop development tools:

SHAME ON US ALL!

“Mere mortals can use this very, very powerful peice of software”

Also, his favorite font is Stencil, 24pt bold.

(via inky)

Tony Flick - Hacking the Smart Grid

Recent penetration tests have shown that proper security mechanisms are not currently built into components of the smart grid … an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to turn off electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes.

They discuss design flaws of private tracker announces (passkeys and client side trust) and extensively detail the weaknesses the of BitTorrent’s encryption scheme. (RC4, improper use of static strings, unnecessary hashing, etc.)

In the end it fails to even provide the simple obfuscation against throttling it was designed to do.

So what is the solution to all of these problems? MSE [BT encryption] should never have been built! Let me be very clear, MSE was built by people who don’t fully understand the cryptographic systems they are using. MSE is wasteful of resources and does not provide the type of protection that the authors desired. In fact, the solution to traffic shaping and keeping your data a secret existed long before BitTorrent. The answer is SSL, which is now called TLS. TLS is both efficient and effective, two things that MSE is not.

ps: I’ve only read one Black hat paper yet and skimmed 2. But I already feel less secure. (BH09 media archives)