Only $99.99: Keep tabs on your child at all times with this small but sophisticated device that combines GPS and cellular technology to provide you with real-time location updates. The small and lightweight Little Buddy transmitter fits easily into a backpack, lunchbox or other receptacle, making it easy for your child to carry so you can check his or her...

Ross Anderson has put together a great resource page on security and psychology: At a deeper level, the psychology of security touches on fundamental scientific and philosophical problems. The 'Machiavellian Brain' hypothesis states that we evolved high intelligence not to make better tools, but to use other monkeys better as tools: primates who were better at deception, or at detecting...

Interesting story of a 2006 Wal-Mart hack from, probably, Minsk....

From Wired: In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" -- information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV...

Impressive....

Draw a squid, win Jeff Vandermeer`s Ambergris novels....

Earlier this month, Joanna Rutkowska implemented the "evil maid" attack against TrueCrypt. The same kind of attack should work against any whole-disk encryption, including PGP Disk and BitLocker. Basically, the attack works like this: Step 1: Attacker gains access to your shut-down computer and boots it from a separate volume. The attacker writes a hacked bootloader onto your system, then...

James Bamford -- author of The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America writes about the NSA's new data center in Utah as he reviews another book: The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency: Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report...

According to the Telegraph: Mr Ballmer said: "We got some uneven reception when [Vista] first launched in large part because we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility. I don't think from a word-of-mouth perspective we ever recovered from that." Commentary: Vista's failure and Ballmer's faulting security is a bit of being careful for what...

From the Courier-Mail: A man who established a sophisticated network of peepholes and cameras to spy on his flatmates has escaped a jail sentence after police were unable to crack an encryption code on his home computer. [...] They found a series of holes drilled in to walls and ceilings throughout the Surfers Paradise apartment with wires leading back to...

Story here. Basically, a woman posts a horrible story of how she was mistreated by the TSA, and the TSA responds by releasing the video showing that she was lying. There was a similar story in 2007. Then, I wrote: Why is it that we all -- myself included -- believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume...

All it takes is a computer that can track every card: The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in...

Nice article summing up six years of Microsoft Patch Tuesdays: The total number of flaws disclosed and patched by the software maker so far this year stands at around 160, more than the 155 or so that Microsoft reported for all of 2008. The number of flaws reported in Microsoft products over the last two years is more than double...

"Fugitive caught after updating his status on Facebook." Investigators scoured social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace but initially could find no trace of him and were unable to pin down his location in Mexico. Several months later, a secret service agent, Seth Reeg, checked Facebook again and up popped MaxiSopo. His photo showed him partying in front of...

Cool. It's from this page....

A few years ago, a company began to sell a liquid with identification codes suspended in it. The idea was that you would paint it on your stuff as proof of ownership. I commented that I would paint it on someone else's stuff, then call the police. I was reminded of this recently when a group of Israeli scientists demonstrated...

Great pictures....

Good article: Zachary's offense? [He's six years old.] Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces...

Fascinating....

Excellent survey....