The Register has been following the story of a massive archive of "dirty tricks" that Microsoft performed during a lawsuit. Recently, the archive disappeared from the Internet, but now it's back in the form of torrents.

As time goes by, companies may find that any mistakes they make or rules they bend will be preserved forever online regardless of anything they try to do about it.

So now they're using smart cameras to analyze you based on your not just appearance, but the way you walk, and your actions.

A student walked into the middle of the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert.

In another video, a car pulled into a parking lot and the driver got out, a box springing up around him. It moved with the driver as he went from car to car, looking in the windows instead of heading into the building.

In both cases, the camera knew what was normal – the layout of the room with the suspicious bag and the location of the office door and parking spots in the parking lot. Alerts were triggered when the unknown bag was added and when the driver didn't go directly into the building after parking his car.

Fantastic. So now, you have to explain yourself every time you do something "out of the ordinary". Stoop down to tie your shoe on the way into the office and get picked up by security for not heading straight into the building.

Yes technology has a lot of potentially legitimate uses, but total surveillance has far more potential for abuse.

And the cameras can only see so much – they can't stop some threats, like a bomber with explosives in a backpack. They can't see what you are wearing under your jacket – yet.

They can already do this with backscatter x-ray.

In an independent study, Ponemon (not to be confused with Pokemon) conducted a survey of over 7000 people accross the nation as to what their trust level was for various government agencies. Specifically, do we trust the government to safeguard our personal information?

Not surprisingly, once you're out of the top 5, the trust level is in the 60% range or lower. Considering that there are a lot more than 5 government agencies, it seems there's not a lot of trust in government. Anyway, the report is very short so give it a quick read.

Ars Technica has an article about the IRS wanting eBay to turn over information on its users' earnings.

This pretty much sums up the issue:

With so many people making part or all of their living through eBay, the government wants its cut. This isn't an issue of any new taxes, but an attempt to collect the income tax that is already required. Because eBay does not report information about its sellers to the government, income reporting is left up to individuals, and the temptation not to list eBay revenue as income can be a strong one—and in some cases, it's not always clear when one has to do so.

And,

eBay isn't the only Internet business that has been feeling the heat in recent months. The government is also considering how to apply tax laws to virtual worlds and goods, and it faces some of the same problems that it does with eBay. While some sellers can make a good living out of hawking such items, few report the profits as taxable income, and Uncle Sam wants its cut.

To me this seems like one of those things you know is wrong, even if you can't articulate exactly why. Second Lifers, and Warcrafters beware.

Schneier writes about a recent attack against home routers that takes advantage of the fact that most people never change the default passwords on their equipment.

One of his commenters said it best:

It has long been standard security practice that when logging in to a new system with a default password, the first required step is to have the user create a new password. If routers did this and refused to function until a customized password was set, none of these problems would occur.

Or more simply put, it's a problem that would never exist and would dissapear tomorrow if router manufacturers would bother to make a simple and practically free programming change before shipping them out.

In an analysis of studies done showing violent video games leading to real world violence, Dr. Christopher Ferguson explains that current work doesn't take into account real-world situations and other violence factors such as family life.

The overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behavior in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behavior and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects' tendencies towards violence, such as family environment.

Here's one for you. People who are violent already are drawn to violent video games. Duh.

Privacy.org points to an article explaining that the backscatter x-ray will be fielded in Phoenix. This X-ray device can penetrate clothes, but not skin making a pornographic video of them. Yes this allows the TSA to see if you're carrying bombs or guns, but it also removes your clothing.

Most things don't work and drivers are hard to find so there's been quite a call for an easy to access list of Vista compatible drivers. This is a site I found linked on Slashdot of just such a thing.

When XP came out, I noticed that the cheapies (the really skanky brands) had 256MB of RAM while all the others came with 512. This is because 256 was the minimum recommended RAM size from Microsoft so it was technically "acceptable". The fact is, just because it runs doesn't mean it runs well.

Well Vista is the same, only worse. The minimum recommended RAM size is a laughable 512 MB. I just recently upgraded to 1GB in my home XP machine and have been very seriously considering at least another 1GB for performance.

Well, this Computerworld article recommends 4GB for Vista and explains why. From the article:

For instance, Dell offers a Windows Vista Capable configuration that isn't capable of much, according to what Dell says about it on its Web site: "Great for … Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games."

To coin a phrase: lol.

Here's another case of fielding a new product without fully evaluating it first. A computer programmer played with a "in-flight game system" finding out that due to common programming mistakes, he was able to crash the system. Every seat has a small screen that can be used to play games or watch movies and every screen went blank when he did this.

Most interestingly, he says that he's glad the crash didn't affect the flight system to which a commenter posted:

as an airplane avionics technician, i can tell you that any and all navigation and control electronics are totally isolated into themselves. anything that can work on it's own, does, and anything that needs to share info does it through solid hard-wiring. There are common data busses to reduce weight from too much wiring, but again, totally isolated. Airlines know better than to link everything together in a network.

Airlines know better? Well, it's nice to see that they know something because they sure did fail on security, pricing, and simple service.

There are some that say that (once again) Microsoft is taking credit for "innovations" that are really just features that have been on a Mac for a long time.

This is a damn funny article explaining who is the worst of the worst and why. Notable inclusions are AOL and Amazon.com. For those of you who read my articles, you know that I already recommend that you avoid Amazon.com. Here are some extremely quotable sections

America Online

America Online's privacy intrusion efforts are so aggressive and offensive, that the only explanation seems to be that AOL thought its clientele was so naïve they would never catch on to the company's privacy invasions.

and…

Amazon.com

Amazon.com is currently among the world leaders in distributing information about its users to advertisers, and if they continue this practice the recent advancements in data mining by Amazon threaten to make shopping online with any form of anonymity a thing of the past.

and (not surprisingly)…

Microsoft

Perhaps the most insidious method of privacy invasion Microsoft employs is the “Windows Live ID?? (formerly Microsoft .NET Passport). The Windows Live ID collects data from the majority of Microsoft networks including MSN, Hotmail, and Xbox Live, and stores them in a central database.

Most of the others were data rape companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom which have already been in the news for the way they treat consumer information. Some that I didn't expect, but am not surprised about are Yahoo and Google.

Thanks to the EFF newsletter for the link!

Have you been targetted by a "takedown" letter threatening you if you didn't take down your posted video? The EFF is looking for you.

Were you or someone you know unfairly caught in Viacom's dragnet? If your video was hit with a bogus takedown, contact information@eff.org — we may be able to help you directly or help find another lawyer who can. In this situation, as in so many others, EFF will work to make sure that copyright claims don't squelch free speech.

Wow. Apparently, Tony Blair doesn't know jack about the real world. Removing freedoms from everyone to stop a select few indivuduals who probably won't be hurt by the new technology is the act of an idiot or a madman (see any reference to President Bush).

I highly doubt any card they create will be that secure. Look that the complete failure of the new RFID passports for instance.

Remember that neat gizmo in Back to the Future II? The one where Doc put some garbage into "Mr. Fusion" to power his time machine? If not, shame on you. Go rent the movie.

Anyway, they've now figured out how to make a machine that turns garbage of almost ANY variety into fuel and electricity. Not only does the start-up process only take a normal household amount of electricity to start, but it's over 100% self sustaining in that it produces more electricity than it uses while destroying anything from dirty diapers to old rusty metal. The only waste it produces is a gas that can be used for fuel.

Wow.

Come home to a robbed house, but they didn't break in? Your insurance company may give you grief if you don't know about this trick for opening any door with no traces.

Here's a video that explains how to "bump" locks, or to make a simple modification to your front door key to open any lock by that manufacturer. This would be classified as "What the hell?" as in, the manufacturers know about this problem, but aren't doing anything about it. Thankfully, videos like this may force them to make some quick changes as criminals learn this ridiculously easy technique and use it.

All it takes is one hacker to break a protection scheme and make DRM worthless. This is why geeks have been saying that DRM only hurts regular people and won't stop the software pirates.

CASPIAN warns that Verichip, the ones who have brought the human-implant RFID to the market had to publish a report of risks associated with the technology to satisfy the Securities and Exchanges Commission before they could IPO. In almost 20 pages of risks (holly clap!) they still neglected to mention that their RFID chips can be cloned… easily. So much for their claim to "tighten security in facilities like nuclear power plants".

"Potential investors should be told how a hacker can simply walk by a chipped person and clone his or her VeriChip signal, a threatdemonstrated by security researcher Jonathan Westhues months ago," says McIntyre, who is a former federal bank examiner.

And most creepily:

The VeriChip implant is a glass encapsulated RFID tag that is injected into the flesh to uniquely number and identify individuals. The tag can be read by radio waves from a few inches away. The highly controversial device is being marketed as a way to access secure areas, link to medical records, and serve as a payment instrument when associated with a credit card or pre-paid account.

So you get to be tagged like an animal with something you can't get rid of without surgury, and because your credit card information is in it, all someone has to do to steal your identity is stand near you for a few seconds. Wonderful.

Let's be clear about this: Human implantation of RFID is the most dangerous development in technology ever created. I really need to write an article about this sometime…

Though the RIAA would like you to believe it, it seems that P2P doesn't actually affect music sales at all. That's kind of embarassing for the RIAA who no longer has any justification for thier music property crusade.

Of course, I always said that most people who use P2P to get music wouldn't have bought the CDs in the first place. Therefore, the number of people who download music doesn't necessarily equal the number of CDs that would have been sold.

Today on Schneier's blog, he describes in farily decent detail why the DRM in Windows Vista is bad.

Some choice bits:

And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM doesn't work, and just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system ever invented, Microsoft's won't keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft's bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to.