All posts by Paul Raven

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Exchanging mugshots to make crypto passwords

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recursive PDAA Romanian computer scientist has come up with a new way to generate secure communications pairing between devices like PDAs: get their owners to take photos of one another, and use the biometrics of their faces to generate the password. [image by James Jordan]

The PDA compares the two photos and generates a security code for making a safe connection. The users can then use this connection to exchange confidential information. The photos are stored as a template that contains the essential features for recognition.

I haven’t read the full paper, but it strikes me that there’s an obvious flaw here – in that anyone stealing one of the two devices can use the pre-generated connection key, meaning it’s still only as secure as whatever password or locking system its owner has installed on it (clever crypto types, please feel free to explain why I’m wrong about that). But even so, an interesting proof-of-concept.

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UK fan-fic writer on obscenity charge

In addition to the worry that their favourite author or franchise might try suing them for breach of copyright and intellectual property theft, UK writers of the more, ah, racey forms of fan-fiction have a new concern – being charged under the Obscene Publications laws.

The fan-fic in question is a kind of splatter-core horror-porn tribute to a British girl band who can’t sing in tune without digital processing, and Darryn Walker’s trial will be the first prosecution of written material under the relevant laws in twenty years. If the action against Walker is successful, it’s very bad news for slash fiction writers. [via TechDirt]

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Open-source DRM? WTF?

If there are two concepts in the computing world that could be more antithetical than Open Source and Digital Rights Management, I can’t imagine what they might be[1]. But it’s real: an outfit called Marlin say they’re ready to take on the software behemoths with DRM systems that “works in a way that doesn’t hold consumers hostage [… and] allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.”

Well, bravo to them for making the effort. I give it a maximum of two weeks of the system being out ‘in the wild’ before someone cracks it open like a seasonal hazelnut.

[ 1 – Unless you count ‘Apple’ and ‘Value For Money’, I guess… 😉 ]

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The dark side of social networks

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network of metal strutsWhile you were busy updating your status on Facebook, social networks became a scientific discipline as well as an internet phenomenon… and the leading boffin in the field reckons that – contrary to popular belief – the internet is making us more insular, less diverse, and more prone to polarised ideological thinking.

Using the current election as a model, Krebs says that the internet does not bring people with different ideas together. Instead, people seek out groups with similar ideologies, which makes them less prone to objective, flexible thinking. And no matter how extreme the idea, there’s someone out there on the web who will build a forum around it.

Psychological research has shown that when people find their “political mirrors,” they immediately build clusters around their ideas. This is why politicians’ use of confrontational language like, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists,” seems to work.

It’s not all negativity, though; Krebs believes that social networks can be useful tools once the “strong individuals or groups that can lead to group-thinking shifts” are identified… which should make the marketing types happy, if no one else. [image by dominik99]

But even so, this doesn’t exactly feel like news – my memories of school are a bit fuzzy, but I think I remember the social cliques working exactly the same way. Maybe what Krebs is observing is just an amplification of a long-standing human tendency?

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The Earth’s cooking… so let’s move it further away from the sun!

solar systemTowing an entire planet out of trouble… sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? About as gloriously pulpy a sci-fi plot as you could ever think up. Thankfully it’s not the latest geoengineering idea designed to cope with global warming, but a suggestion on how we might cope with the expansion of the Sun as it ages, which won’t be a problem for a good billion years or so. Then again, it won’t be a problem for us at all unless we get through the next century or two…

Either which way, moving entire planets isn’t something that could be accomplished in a timescale of any great use to humans in a solar emergency, but it makes a nice hypothetical scenario for scientists modelling the dynamics of planetary systems. [image by alicepopkorn]