hopes

NEW YORK CITY--Federal agents appeared at a hacker conference Friday morning looking for Julian Assange, the controversial figure who has become the public face of Wikileaks, an organizer said.

Eric Corley, publisher of 2600 Magazine and organizer of The Next HOPE conference in midtown Manhattan, said five Homeland Security agents appeared at the conference a day before Wikileaks Editor in Chief Assange was scheduled to speak.

The conference program lists Assange--who has been at the center of a maelstrom of positive and negative publicity relating to the arrest of a U.S. serviceman and videos the serviceman may have provided … Read more

NEW YORK--Be warned: If you take a snapshot with your iPhone or other camera-enabled gadget, it may divulge more information about you than your photographic abilities.

At the Next HOPE hacker conference here on Friday, a security researcher demonstrated how he scanned over 2.5 million photo links posted to Twitter and extracted exact latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in over 65,000 photos -- typically without the user's knowledge.

"It's a privacy fail," says Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs, who plans to release the software and data collection this evening.

It works this way: the … Read more

Hope doesn't merely float. Hope displays audacity.

So I am able to bring you the daring news that so many of you, staring into screens, screaming for a third dimension, a fourth, or even a fifth, have been waiting for since hair appeared in your armpits. Yes, model Hope Dworaczyk will, in the June issue of Playboy, hitting newsstands Friday, become the first of the magazine many playmates to be featured in three glorious, luscious, enticing, overwhelming dimensions.

You will be able to clutch your Playboy magazine, open it wide, put on your 3D spectacles, and view Hope's … Read more

I am finally reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s mesmerizing book The Black Swan – The Impact of The Highly Improbable, and I am intrigued by the parallels you can draw to Obama’s campaign (they may be quite a stretch, but those are the best, no?)

In a chapter titled “Living in the Antechamber of Hope,” Taleb refers to empirical research showing that on average venture capitalists capitalize better on innovations than the actual innovator, that publishers make more money with books than writers, that agents do better than artists, and that R&D managers do better than scientists: “The … Read more

Klipsch may be one of the oldest American speaker companies, but that doesn't stop it from manufacturing iPod, computer, stereo and home theater speakers, along with a full line of professional cinema and music speakers.

Paul W. Klipsch founded the company that bears his name in Hope, Ark. in 1946. And incredibly enough, the Arkansas plant is still building the company's higher-end speakers.

I reviewed Klipsch's new flagship speaker, the Palladium P-39F ($20,000/pair), for Home Entertainment magazine, and I had a blast. The new speaker forgoes Klipsch's traditional, square-edged aesthetic; for the Palladium project … Read more

The Last HOPE conference may have ended a couple weeks ago, but the audio lives on. The guys at 2600 just released MP3 recordings of the conference lectures. Each talk is available in both 16kbps and 64kbps.

A limited number of the radio broadcasts that originated during the conference are also available at radio.hope.net/archive.

Some of the talks are detailed in the CNET coverage of the conference.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Do you block your phone number from appearing on Caller ID? If so, don't count on it. At The Last HOPE hacker conference, Kevin Mitnick, arguably the most famous hacker of all, demonstrated how call blocking can be hacked, and the hidden phone number exposed.

The hack starts with a VoIP telephone number. Mitnick uses Flowroute as his provider, but he told me afterwards that the same thing can also be accomplished with a few other VoIP providers.

He starts by forwarding calls to an Asterisk server that he maintains.

According to Wikipedia, "Asterisk is an open source/… Read more

Lots of travelers have their checked luggage abused, but it takes a hacker to find out what really goes on behind closed doors. The first such hacker, who goes by the name "Algormor," is on the case.

In a presentation at the just-concluded hacker conference The Last HOPE, Algormor explained his method and motivation, and offered a glimpse behind the curtain.

No doubt, many can relate to his motivation, which started with one too many "Notice of Baggage Inspection" tags from the Transportation Security Administration. The last straw was when a zipper on his luggage was … Read more

A team of computer scientists has published source code that can in some circumstances bypass encryption used in Microsoft's BitLocker and Apple's FileVault and be used to view the contents of supposedly secure files.

We reported in February on their research, which describes how the contents of a computer's memory could be dumped to a hard drive and the encryption keys forcibly extracted.

The source code includes tools for imaging the target computer's memory through USB and Netboot, and analyzing the memory image to extract AES and RSA encryption keys, even if they're partially degraded. … Read more