TV mindreader let off jury duty - because court officials feared he may wreck trial

Drew McAdam's act includes reading thoughts, duplicating drawings done in secret and bending cutlery Uri Geller-style.

He turned up at court after being called to sit on a case.

But the 54-yearold was sent home after officials recognised him as the human lie detector on Five's Trisha chatshow.

A court source said: "Could you imagine being the accused and turning up to find yourself facing The Interrogator?

Data Destruction

How many times should a hard drive be overwritten before one can safely assume its data is no longer retrievable?

A lot of shady software vendors tell you that you should overwrite repeatedly with various patterns, such as the 35-pass method created by Peter Gutmann more than 30 years ago. Some of these packages are free, most of them cost some arbitrary amount of money. All of them are a waste of money.

Even Mr. Gutmann stated that any hard drives that came out after the early 90's MFM and RLL drives can simply be overwritten once with random data. Sticking a decommissioned hard drive into any unix-like box, or booting the system with a live-CD version of Linux, and simply overwriting it with "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/" will do the trick, and it won't cost you anything.

Unbreakable Encryption already Broken

After 10 years of hearing different theories of how quantum mechanics can be used to implement unbreakable encryption, a fellow Canadian has done the deed, and discovered a fairly simple method for deriving the secret keys used in an encrypted communication. It seems appropriate to mention that every time scientists start talking like salesmen, calling their "discoveries" unbreakable, unbeatable, undetectable, etc, someone comes along to prove the theory wrong. Ah well, better luck next time.

IBM hand out free malware at a security conference

Rather pathetic news today. IBM gave away USB sticks at the AusCERT security conference which were infected by a 2-year old virus that spreads when Windows automagically executes setup.exe / autorun.ini .  There's no excuse for such sloppiness, but of course, this will be ignored and brushed under the carpet.

Lie Detectors seem to work in Cartoon-land

Although it's questionable as to whether lie detectors actually detect lies, or just record varying levels of stress, they clearly work on the Simpsons. In a future post, I'll put together a few links on how to pass the lie detector, whether you are telling the truth or not.

Until then, you can see generally how they work on youtube.

Artificial Life Breakthrough

In the early 90's, a lot of studies went into artificial life. Are computer viruses alive? The J. Craig Venter Institute have created what appears to be the first Artificial Life entity that is truly alive and functional. Will the bad guys get ahold of this technology and use it to wage bio-warfare on humans like they did with computer viruses and worms on software and the Internet? Possibly. Time will tell if this technology manages to do a few useful things first.

Hacking the Hackers

Carders.cc, a German online forum dedicated to helping criminals trade and sell financial data stolen through hacking, has itself been hacked. The once-guarded contents of its servers are now being traded on public file-sharing networks, leading to the exposure of potentially identifying information on the forum’s users as well as countless passwords and credit card accounts swiped from unsuspecting victims.

Bears In A Honey Trap

In the Bible, Delilah seduced Samson in order to discover the source of his super-human strength. When she got what she was after, she sold the information and services to the enemy.  The use of Sex as a spy technique of compromise is exactly what makes James Bond style movies so fun to watch.

Using sex to dig up secret information is not always the stuff of fiction and mythology. A sexy girl named Katja Gerasimova, who seems to have a sexual affinity for pro-democracy activists, just happens to also be a spy for the Russian government. Once the deed has been done, she posts her raunchy sex and drug exploits on the web in order to expose the activists publicly, making them look like petty criminals and subsequently discrediting their political affiliations.

It isn't only Russia that uses sex to dig up and exploit secret information, but also India, China, Saudi Arabia, Poland, United States, and so on.

Fun with Secret Questions

Does your bank allow you to come up with your own "secret question", to be used as authentication when you phone in? Most people who get to create their own questions usually ask the regular things like "Mother's high school nickname" or "Colour of step-brother's best friend's neighbour's dog's nose".

Bruce Schneier, one of the few sane veterans of the internet security industry, has come up with a way to make it a lot more fun. One of my favourite examples:

Q: I've been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from my employer, and I don't care who knows it.
A: It's a good thing they're recording this call, because I'm going to have to report you.


Some of the ideas given in the Comments section are gold.