Wikipedia spin-detector online

27B Stroke6: "Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages."

This is absolutely brilliant.. Corporations, governments, individuals caught in the act of "anonymously" editing unfavorable entries. Hats off Mr. Griffith. You have added to our world. :)

Scientists to create artificial life

Telegraph: "Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacterium into another.

In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists in the US took the whole genetic makeup - or genome - of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species.

This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process.

The team that carried out the first “species transplant” says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory."


File under "What could possibly go wrong?"

SSH key spoofing at Tor exit nodes?

Seul.org: Looks like someone is running 'evil' TOR exit nodes that are trying to do man-in-the-middle attacks against SSH run through them... Interesting.

Hard to be secure when you can't trust the exit point...

ATT Hacked. Credit card data stolen.

Reuters: "SAN FRANCISCO - Hackers broke into one of AT&T Inc.'s computer networks and stole credit card data and other personal information from several thousand customers who shopped at the telecommunication giant's online store."


Well, on the bright side, they should have no difficulty apprehending them, as all traffic is already routed through the NSA...

Well, the Germans were always good at numbering people...

SecurityFocus: "The U.S. government is going forward with the public deployment of its electronic passport, ordering millions of the wireless chips from semiconductor firm Infineon to place in the back cover of the nation's travel document, the German company announced on Monday."

"at the latest Black Hat Briefings security conference, a German researchers showed how someone could read the data out from a passport and clone the functions of the digital document using a smart-card chip. The Smart Card Alliance, an industry group, dismissed the significance of the finding."


Note: The cloneable insecure identity-laden spychips can easily be negated with a few seconds in a microwave before traveling...