Friday 2nd March 2007 London 2600 meeting report
Here is a flavour of some of the sort of things we chatted about this month.. This is not a substitute for coming along to the meetings in person:
- CCTV surveillance cameras and technologies and their implications for privacy and security.
- First hand experience of the The Great FireWall of China censorship and political oppression. Some ideas about helping the digitally oppressed e.g. WikiLeaks "anonymous mass leaking of confidential documents" project . Some discussion of legal, ethical and technical issues at the as yet unaffiliated WikiLeak blog
- Plausibly deniable multiple container, multiple pass phrase disk encryption e.g. TrueCrypt or Rubber Hose Cryptography etc.
- MI5 email subscription list shambles - some improvements to the system.
- Gary McKinnon - Appeal Court hearing against extradition to the USA for hacking US Military systems. Gary has suffered heart palpitations, and has had to go to hospital for a checkup and tests. The High Court Judges could make their decision anytime within next few months (no set deadline).
There is now a .Number 10 Downing Street website petition to the Prime Minister in support of Gary. - Sad death of one of the key IT designers and programmers responsible for thelarge scale infrastructure behind the Number 10 Downing street website e-petiton system. UPDATE: the news is now in the public domain:. posthumously on his own blog Chris Lightfoot 1978-2007, and with tributes from MySociety.org and NO2ID.net
- Lock picking demo, tools and toys:
- Metropolitan Police Service - where is their current Data Protection Register entry ?. Are all the Met's police and intelligence databases currently being run illegally ? Freedom of Information Act request aimed at the Information Commissioner's Office itself is now in progress.
- Strange or characteristic User Agent strings in webserver access log files - guess which organisation betrays its visits via "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; AWARELockDown2001; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" ?
- Default router password lists - useful for the javscript portscanner, which we discussed back in October 2006. Change your home ADSL router gateway passwords from "admin" or "password" etc., before some malicious script changes your DNS lookups to servers under the control of criminals.
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- Thanks to the people who spot mistakes in this report - how about contributing your own observations, either by email or in the Comments below ?
that was a pretty good meet up id say. All in all a lot of beer was drunk, Locks were picked and fun was had.