armb's journal

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf
"Over a range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input —
including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on."

If I'd seen some of the possible attacks on a TV show or in a film, I'd have thought it was implausible that so few safeguards were built into the system. In real life there almost certainly isn't someone wanting to compromise your car in this way, and they could use cruder and easier to detect physical methods anyway, but the way some of the protocol specifications have safety or security features that the actual implementations ignore is still worrying.

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/11/20/government-security-failure/
"HM Revenue and Customs has lost the data of 15 million child benefit recipients, and that the head of HMRC has resigned."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/20/database_bad_say_docs/
"three-quarters [of GPs] say records will be less secure once they are made available to NHS and social service staff on the central database."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/21/hmarc_ebay_auction/
Spoof eBay sale of the missing disks.

bruce_schneier has an interesting method for getting your expensive camera looked after on a plane if you can't carry it as hand luggage - check it in the same bag as a weapon. Starting pistols count as weapons for this purpose.

Possibly the most extreme example yet of DRM being actively evil, not merely a pain.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sony_secretly_i_1.html
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/31/2016223&tid=172&tid=158

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/01/sony_rootkit_drm/

I've been asked for a PIN number a few times recently while using a Switch card, so this explanation of why it might not be a good idea is timely. Key point:
"The intention is to reduce losses from banks and merchants resulting from fraud. [...] There are two ways that losses to fraud can be reduced:
1. by reducing the amount of fraud which takes place; and,
2. by not paying compensation to people who are defrauded."
Past experience suggests that banks might concentrate on the second.