Army's faulty computer system hurts operations - Charles Hoskinson. MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall St. Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word" AIDS Vaccine Breakthrough. Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets - Technology. By Jeffrey R. Young Washington Computer networks proved their organizing power during the recent uprisings in the Middle East, in which Facebook pages amplified street protests that toppled dictators.
But those same networks showed their weaknesses as well, such as when the Egyptian government walled off most of its citizens from the Internet in an attempt to silence protesters. That has led scholars and activists increasingly to consider the Internet's wiring as a disputed political frontier. For example, one weekend each month, a small group of computer programmers gathers at a residence here to build a homemade Internet—named Project Byzantium—that could go online if parts of the current global Internet becomes blocked by a repressive government.
Using an approach called a "mesh network," the system would set up an informal wireless network connecting users with other nearby computers, which in turn would pass along the signals. He is not the only one with such apprehensions. Bazaar 2.0. SSL/TLS Vulnerability Details to be Released Friday. I'm getting a lot of emails asking about articles that ultimately reference this upcoming talk: "BEAST: Surprising crypto attack against HTTPS" ( I don't have any extra details. Anything that I write now will be unnecessary speculation. It sounds like it will be interesting; their presentation last year on Padded Oracle Attacks (the crypto Oracle, not the database) certainly was. UPDATE: Dr J links us to "A CHALLENGING BUT FEASIBLE BLOCKWISE-ADAPTIVE CHOSEN-PLAINTEXT ATTACK ON SSL" that may describe the attack. This attack requires that the attacker be able to sniff the traffic and run code on the victims machine to inject the chosen-plaintext into the stream.
My recommendation is still to wait until we see the details before formulating a response, but sight-unseen the following steps couldn't hurt: Users: Don't bank using someone else's wifi.