PaulSpoerry.com

“In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: ‘BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.” Bold statements huh? When will these people learn, copy protection never has and never will work against the people you’re trying to protect your content from. Yes, general users will not be able to copy your products, but they will also not be able to make fair use backups either. Often copy protection causes other headaches in terms of usability as well.

So… only eight months since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market.”

To celebrate Easter, SlySoft is offering a 20% discount on all products (except upgrades and t-shirts)

To redeem the coupon just enter the coupon code: easter

The DemocraKey was created in May of 2006. Within two days, over 60,000 people had read about the DemocraKey and built their own. It was featured on MSN, Digg, Lifehacker, and hundreds of other pages. Now, it’s entering version 2.0, where it becomes a complete, portable privacy suite. DemocraKey helps scan and surf securely from computer to computer. You can install it on a portable thumbdrive and now even on an iPod. Visit a friends house, surf from a kiosk, or just need some privacy? Pop it in and off you go. DemocraKey has built in TOR support in the browser, which can hide your internet activity. Sounds sweet, portable too!

Features

• Protect your computer from viruses with a security enhanced version of Firefox
• Visit sites that are blocked by your school/employer/government
• Hide your internet actions with Tor
• Encrypt personal emails with GPG
• Scan your computer with portable built in Antivirus software
• Runs from any portable media - iPod, USB key, Digital Camera…
• It’s FREE and Open Source!

Get DemocraKey!

Open source application Blue Lock monitors the proximity of your Bluetooth phone or device and automatically locks your computer whenever it’s out of range (e.g., you’ve walked away from your computer). The usefulness will depend on the strength of your Bluetooth devices, since it’s not really going to do its job if you’ve got a strong signal and receiver that keeps a connection from across the office. But if it works well with your Bluetooth devices, Blue Lock provides a simple way to keep your computer secure when you step away for a few seconds but forget to hit Win-L to lock your workstation. Blue Lock is free, Windows only.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that my phone DOES pair with my laptop, I couldn’t get Bluelock to work. I currently have an HTC Touch (Sprint Touch aka HTC Vogue). Bluelock flat out won’t find my phone. Ce la vi… maybe it’ll work for you cuz it sounds like an awesome concept.

Blue Lock website

1984… Orwell wasn’t off by that much. What’s more suprising than the fact that our government is abusing powers and spying on its own people is that more American’s don’t really care. It’s a sad state of affairs.

The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.

Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mueller raised the issue of the FBI’s controversial use of so-called national security letters in reference to an upcoming report on the topic by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year’s audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.

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 TrueCrypt v5.0 has been released.

TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g.., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).

New features:

• Ability to encrypt a system partition/drive (i.e. a partition/drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication (anyone who wants to gain access and use the system, read and write files, etc., needs to enter the correct password each time before the system starts). For more information, see the chapter System Encryption in the documentation.   (Windows Vista/XP/2003)
• Pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%   (Windows)
• Mac OS X version
• Graphical user interface for the Linux version of TrueCrypt
• XTS mode of operation, which was designed by Phillip Rogaway in 2003 and which was recently approved as the IEEE 1619 standard for cryptographic protection of data on block-oriented storage devices. XTS is faster and more secure than LRW mode (for more information on XTS mode, see the section Modes of Operation in the documentation).

  Note: New volumes created by this version of TrueCrypt can be encrypted only in XTS mode. However, volumes created by previous versions of TrueCrypt can still be mounted using this version of TrueCrypt.

• SHA-512 hash algorithm (replacing SHA-1, which is no longer available when creating new volumes).

  Note: To re-encrypt the header of an existing volume with a header key derived using HMAC-SHA-512 (PRF), select ‘Volumes‘ > ‘Set Header Key Derivation Algorithm‘.

Get TrueCrypt now.