"Open source OS now a serious competitor, says Ballmer
At the Microsoft Most Valued Professionals conference held in London this week, chief executive Steve Ballmer acknowledged the growing threat of Linux. "

vnunet.com Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat

"A transparent token the size of a postage stamp and costing just a penny to make can be used to generate an immensely powerful cryptographic key."

Tom, your a security guru...what are your thoughts on this?

New Scientist - Transparent token is cryptographic key

Unmask is a python script that allows you to break the anonymity of e-mail or other text. It works by doing basic statistical matching against stored "signatures." It may require some tweaking to fit your particular use to it (un-anonymizing IRC chats, email, web pages on FreeNet, etc). Another fun parlor game use is using it to distinguish between two groups of any kind. Male/Female, Engineers/Computer Scientists, Scientists/Liberal Arts Majors, etc. If you improve it in some way, please send me (dave@immunitysec.com) a note. Unmask is released under the GNU GPL v2.0.

Unmask

An entire website dedicated to the life of the LED. I dig it.

LED

...could make up the majority of message traffic on the Internet by the end of 2002, according to data from three e-mail service providers. "

News: Spam hits 36 percent of e-mail traffic

"The Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) Security Team is issuing an alert about an increased level of hacking activity that the PSS Security Team has been tracking. The activity seems to involve similar hacking attempts. These hacking attempts show similar symptoms and behaviors. The PSS Security team has isolated the major similarities. This article lists these similarities, so that you can take any appropriate action to:
Detect these hacking attempts.
Respond to any hacking attempts you detect."

Q328691 - August 30, 2002 PSS Hacking Alert

I highly advise trying this out. It's really mind boggling in the "Enemy of the State" sort of way.

With my obsessive personality, I could sit and play with this _ALL_DAY_LONG_

"Keyhole's EarthViewer3D™ harnesses the power of NVIDIA GPUs. Fusing high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, elevation data, GPS coordinates, and overlay information about cities and businesses, EarthViewer3D delivers a streaming, 3D map of the entire globe to PCs powered with NVIDIA GPUs. "

Personal Product: EarthViewer3D

early adopt or not? sigh.

Xentex Technologies

"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Microsoft Corp. will tighten security around the personal information it collects from users of its Passport Internet services, as part of a settlement reached with the federal government. "

CNN.com - Microsoft settles Passport privacy case - August 8, 2002

It is the most romantic story in American cryptology. To keep the Japanese from getting American secrets in World War II, Navajos -- among the original Americans -- spoke over the radio in their native tongue.

In a sidebar to the movie review for "Windtalkers", David Kahn, author of the crypto classic _The Codebreakers_, retells the true story of Marine Corps codetalkers in World War II.

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah