Lie Detector Leads to Execution of Innocent Man

Chiang Kuo-ching, a Taiwanese airman was executed in 1997 for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. Military investigators tortured a confession out of Chiang after he failed to pass a lie detector “test.” Since then, DNA evidence and a palm-print have incriminated a different person.

Clenching your butt at the wrong time will cause you to appear guilty on a polygraph. It's time to throw this system out with the water dousers.

Scientists Can Use WiFi to Count Your Breaths and Spy on You

Wireless networks which measure received signal strength (RSS) can be used to reliably detect human breathing and estimate the breathing rate, an application we call "BreathTaking". Although an individual link cannot reliably detect breathing, the collective spectral content of a network of devices reliably indicates the presence and rate of breathing.

Award BIOS Flashing Trojan

I used to talk about the possibility of a virus or worm writing boot code on hard drives, or flashing devices with new configurations, or even entirely new code. It seems there is now a trojan out there that does just that. Yes the site is in Chinese. But it describes a trojan that flashes Award BIOS code to add a few new functions on bootup.

Symantec has more details on how it infects the hard drive Master Boot Record (MBR) and specifically targets and alters the Award BIOS. Other BIOS brands are not affected.

Richard Branson lost his memoirs in blaze

Airline tycoon Richard Branson lost his autobiography and 15 years worth of handwritten notes when a fire ripped through his retreat in the British Virgin Islands.

This is a good time to remind everyone that your backups should be stored somewhere well away from the systems they are taken from. Otherwise they can both go up in smoke.