Flaws in the scramble for safer driving

Technology can bring some great advantages to a person's life. How many readers would find themselves at a loss if the Internet was taken away or if their notebook was banned? A lot - and to be fair, this phone example is based on safety issues. People are more likely to have an accident if they are driving while talking on a phone or, worse, texting while driving.

Some, like in the case of Ray LaHood, often attack a perceived problem but create others at the same time. Stopping a passenger from using a phone would be akin to banning all speaking while in a car. It could also create other kinds of safety issues like not being able to call the police in a road rage situation, for example. By extension, you would have to ban all CBs, walkie-talkies, police radios and so on because these would be causing the same kinds of danger.

How technology is used can cause dangerous situations

How technology is used can cause dangerous situations, as anyone driving behind someone using a phone can confirm. While it is doubtful that such a law could ever be passed or even enforced here in the Land of Smiles, I do encourage readers not to text or hold a phone to your ear while driving.

So how private are your conversations on the world's services? It was recently reported that senior officials from the FBI went to Silicon Valley to talk to the likes of Google and Facebook. The subject was easier wiretapping of online services. The FBI wants any US-based services to ensure that any communications can be unscrambled by them as required.

This would, of course, mean a redesign of the current encryption services many providers include so the FBI could tap in and have access to the decrypted conversations. It would impact VoIP, Skype-like services and mobile phone conversations and giants like Google and Yahoo. It would also mean that certain groups of people would simply move their usage to a non-US based service, taking profits away from the US providers.

Large enough key

With a large enough key, the chances of cracking anything is currently impossible, so while they may be able to break 512-bit products, 4,096 is still a world away. At best they might catch a few unintelligent people, but at worse they will impact the profitability of the whole communications network and drive people away from US products and services.

More bad news for those using 64-bit Windows operating systems. It's bad enough that drivers are hard to find but now a 32-bit rootkit has been upgraded to infect your 64-bit Windows 7 installation. TDL or Alureon has managed to bypass the added security Microsoft worked at putting in the OS to stop this kind of thing from happening. The rootkit infects the master boot record, makes some changes and slips in via the driver's pathway. In other words, some clever individual figured out how to bypass the security and upload a malicious DLL.

Android continues to add to its market penetration and while it is not number one yet, it is a solid number two in the mobile devices market. This calls into question why Microsoft is making it so difficult for manufacturers to meet its conditions and not be able to map on to existing hardware. HTC is an excellent example - the latest Win 7 device is almost exactly the same as their previous upper-end model, apart from the removal of a single button to conform with MS's four-button rule. Given HTC's market share, it should have just said: "Let us do it our way, or we will use other operating systems from now on."

When you think of pay as you go, the security technology associated with that is SAH-1. Most people have a four or six-digit password or PIN associated with this. Using rented computing resources, a German security guy has shown he can crack the system for passwords of six or fewer in length in a couple of minutes. The amusing part is that he did it with GPUs - ie graphics processing units - for the cost of a few dollars' rental time.

His proof of concept was not so much about how he did it - brute force - or how quick it was, but rather the potential impact on cloud computing where PAYG is the primary commercial model.

Slide-out keyboard

For those iPhone users who are missing a slide-out keyboard, there is one available. No, not from Apple but a third party - Box wave. It's called the Keyboard Buddy and orders are being taken now for an iPhone case that not only solves your antenna problem but comes with a slide-out keyboard. It has its own battery on board and connects via Bluetooth. It comes with a mini USB cable for charging and will last over a month on a single charge, according to the manufacturer's specs. It does, of course, add some thickness to your iPhone, but that is to be expected. It costs $70 plus shipping and will be available by the middle of the month.

As for my contribution to things hidden, I found out that if I press Info, Menu and Mute on my Samsung TV remote, and then Power, I get access to the TV's service menu. Of course, I found this with a quick Internet search after my TV started playing up, so no points for clever hacking.