"Homeland Alert displays the current Homeland Security Advisory status for the entire country in the menu bar. Homeland Alert checks continuously for changes in this status of homeland security and updates the display as needed. [Mac OS X Only]"

Macs always have entertaining warez...

OSX Homeland Security Advisor

"Roomba dancing robot vacuums and sweeps automatically -- even when you're asleep or out of the house."

Roomba Floor Vac Robot

"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."

Marie asked for my comments on this.

The fact that the token cannot be copied doesn't mean the ones and zeros read from it cannot be copied, so this actually doesn't make a very good "cryptographic key." All you need to open cryptography is the ones and zeros. Not a card. Furthermore, the articles talk about reading the key from multiple angles, but cryptographic systems only have one password, so this is a capability mismatch again.

In an environment like an ATM machine where you are fairly certain that you are actually reading from a physical card this might be a more secure (albeit expensive) replacement for a magnetic strip. It may also find its way into door locks. However, you won't find such a reader in your computer nor for scanning credit cards, as in such environments there is no way to be sure that the "key" is actually coming from such a card and not from something else.

So in sum, the technology is interesting, but its not all that useful.

My comments on the optical keys

"The glass spheres scatter laser light so that it falls in a speckle pattern on a surface on the far side that is divided into a grid of pixels. The intensity of light in each pixel is the fingerprint that is compared against a pre-recorded version to verify the token. "

Cheap trick secures secrets

This is the ULTIMATE firewire hub!

CharisMac - Hubzilla

"Much of the form and function of cities, in both a social and physical sense, is designed to minimize the time and cost of searching for people and information. The whole host of wireless applications will dramatically change the 'cost structure' of the city."

The interaction of urbanism and information technology

"The key was XML tags, data-field identifiers that are communicable across platforms. The private vendors coded their software to define the name, address and other identifying information into distinct fields so that e-mail can be sent directly into correspondence software. Even the sorting could be done electronically - staff assistants direct an incoming message directly to the LC handling that issue, all electronically. "

IDing districts in Congressional Email

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

"A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a flood of data, security experts said Saturday. "

Fun Fun... Patch you stuff...

Linux worm creating P2P attack network - Tech News - CNET.com

"AES may have been broken. Serpent, too. Or maybe not. In either case, there's no need to panic. Yet. But there might be soon. Maybe."

Bruce Schneier on possible weaknesses in encryption systems