For years people have learned from hacking — its the most ancient human art. But, it seems the US has slid so far from its foundation, that now the sheer construction and presentation of information can within itself be considered in some way criminal.
A judge acting as thought-cop told 3 MIT students they were not to discuss their latest hack. Since the halt order, the availability of the information in the presentation has fluctuated. Decius makes mention of the evolving legal manifestation on Memestreams.
I believe information like this ought to be free, and so: a complete form of the content of the halted Defcon presentation is right here (in PDF format). Enjoy.
The day might come when biometrics completely replaces the function served with passwords. But will it matter? The fact is, that that biometric reality grows closer every day. Right now, hardware becoming cheap and software environments becoming virtual, has many such realities racing at us like a wild mustang. But, I know you. You’re human, you need to see it in action. Well, do I have the perfect software for you. You or anyone can download for free something called Ophcrack. Ophcrack uses Rainbow Tables (and well). Take a look at it here, where Lifehacker has a gallery of screenshots of Ophcrack at work under Windows.
What does all that mean? I’ll keep it simple. Ophcrack can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423″ in 160 seconds (or for more here for Thomas Ptacek’s work on the subject or here where Darknet talks about its history). Anyone with Computer or Network Security experience (or that has tried to guess a password) will tell you, thats expected to be a difficult password to crack, and being cracked in 160 seconds is jaw dropping. “Fgpyyih804423″ is not very human relative and by that I mean its not a word in any language, nor a composite of any word in any language ( its not even some tokenized expression). In fact, the string of characters looks to be (because it is) quite random.
Worried yet? If not, some forward thinking might get you bit concerned. Implementations of biometrics really don’t solve this issue (they’re conceptually the same). They just make the string’s identity larger and thereby, by today’s standards, more difficult to crack. But, as technology grows to facilitate biometrics, so will that which is used to subvert biometrics and in not so different ways than we see here. So, my question to you is, what will you do, when you can’t trust your own reflection?
This guy from JustLinux, saikee , might be your hero. It all depends on how computer savvy you are. But, let’s say for the sake of discussion, you’re savvy enough to dual boot Windows XP & Ubuntu Linux, as an example. Now, sure, some people are saying, “dual wha? Ubuntu?” Some may not even know what Linux is. All “dual boot” means is running more than one Operating System on your computer and having the capacity to select which one you want to use when you turn on the computer. But, even if you are savvy enough to dual boot (which isn’t very savvy at all, evidently) than you’re only 143 Operating Systems behind. Better get your hiking boots, you’ve got some footwork ahead if you want to catch up. saikee posted information on his new setup on JustLinux a while back… which boots only 145 different Operating Systems! “Can you run tha–” — “Yes.”
Science allows scientists to practice theory. Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Therefore, through programming, Computer Science allows computer scientists to combine theory and practice; nothing works and no one knows why. Therefore, let us not forget as stated quite sharply in Taligent’s Guide to Designing Programs, there is no code faster than no code.