It seems that the Pirate Bay may have a secondary hull opposed to what the MPAA first thought.

The Pirate Bay site is now back up and running, It's usable but not fully operational at the time of writing. Previously the front page of the pirate bays website had down played the raid and stated they intended to return service within a couple days... well... tada.

The current site proudly displays a new logo and a title reading "The Police Bay", in the traditional fashion of defiance TPB has held over the past few years.

Pirate bay google search trends show how their popularity has grown over the years. As you can see it's on a stendy slope of increased usage over 3 years, and it doesn't look like it's going to be stopped after all this either!

The only way I can see them killing sites like TPB is to outlaw facilitation entirely in all countries. Now this might be easy in a couple, but generally you'd be asking the planet to ban freedom of information - since thats all TPB does. TPB just links to .torrent files and provides a tracker to keep the BT system that those .torrent files use running. They did nothing wrong!

If you were to banned any sort of fasiliation wouldn't that present problems for completely legit businesses like google, yahoo, microsoft (anyone that runs an internet search). After all, it's trival to use google for example as you're personal mp3 locator.

They also now have servers in three other locations as hinted by piratpartiet.se (poor english translation). Servers in Holland, Russia and Ukraine are now appearently running TPB.

Go TPB. (>'.')>

Microsoft Finds (Random) Way to Secure Vista - about damn time. I hope this works. Even if just so those guys who keep on going "use *nix its more secure" have to think of another reason to hate windows. Course, its not like this would stop all attacks, just make them harder.

Wrestling with Windows' hidden "features" - stupid article that sounds like he was scared from one vunerability into writing that. However that vuln does seem concerning. He says he doesn't know all the locations that IE checks for shortcuts before sites but he lists a couple. I was thinking of writing some code to check it, but I'm too busy. I started but got distracted and moved onto other things. Still. I wonder how often this is used in the wild as an attack vector. It was news to me also.

Physicist home chemical business raided seems abit excessive. I mean as far as they knew it was all above board right?

Also for those not paying attention the pirate bay was raided yesterday or so, seized servers and took documents by swedish police. As well as downing the pirate bays main website they also downed associated sites, which have no connection to anything remotely illegal. TPB are reportedly in the process of bring up operations again on non-swedish systems they've purchased which awaiting the outcome of the investigation. I can't see them shutting the pirate bay down, ignoring the fact that hitting TPB wont do anything to stop what they are trying to stop. See here and latter here for more information.

Since I am strongly against the UK identity register i wanted to plug this site no2id.net.

What provoked me to actually post this was reading some absurd synopsis for a fiction novel about the future of the system and its effects. The synopsis itself is far fetched (in my opinion), but the points raised are valid and concerning.

Not least that the Chip and PIN system is fallible for UK credit & debit cards, allowing criminals to siphoning off funds. Or even employees - the trusted few who operate and interact with the system - cracking PINs, stealing cash, selling off information and so forth. This is all linked in the synopsis as research. It makes for disturbing reading. Hell, not long ago there was a suspension of APACS systems in shell service stations after employees siphoned out funds earlier this year. Quote

"These Pin pads are supposed to be tamper resistant, they are supposed to shut down, so that has obviously failed," said Apacs spokeswoman Sandra Quinn.

I'm not sure how secure this ID system would be. Several things could go wrong, the card could be faked, the database would be hacked, data stolen or inserted. In my humble paranoided (though rationally I feel in this case) opinion its only a matter of time.

It's cool that the UK government are embasing technology - and I'm proud to be associated with a nation trying to enhance our lifes with it, but at the moment I don't feel that they are completely technically equiped and haven't thought it out properly. No assurances (that I've read) have been given about how the data is planned to be protected.

Is there encryption? Is there strong physical security? What communication network will it utilise? How easy is it to attack that network and capture data traffic? How easily would it be for system "guardians" to sell off all our personal data? Hell, it's not just the technical security thats the a problem, its do we trust guys who may dislike their job and want to make a huge profit.

Take mail voting as a simple example of how a distributed new system failed horribly to ensure confidence. The reason that system failed was because it was easy to forge or prevent voters access. Also look at the E-voting systems and how they can go wrong

The United Kingdom and other European countries have begun initiatives to convert all or part of their voting to electronic balloting (kiosk/DREs and/or Internet-based) systems. Europe appears to be rushing ahead to deploy computer voting technologies with serious sociological and technological downsides, such as lack of auditability, and increased opportunities for vote selling, monitoring, coercion, and denial of service attacks.

I get the feeling the same sort of problems will araise with the ID register.

But thats not forgetting the expense! That UK citizens are being charged to be made into more of a number than we are already.

It's ridiculous. Say no! Or at least, not yet!