There's been more violence and bloodshed in Mexico. Over the weekend alone, 14 people were killed in three attacks in bars and nightclubs. Armed gunmen kicked in the doors and opened fire.[abclocal.go.com]

The study conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), showed that sanitizing SSDs of data is at best a difficult task and at worst nearly impossible. While overwriting data several times can ensure data erasure on many SSDs, the researchers found they were still able to recover data on some products.[computerworld.com]

The Indian military has a new weapon against terrorism, the world’s hottest chili. After conducting tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-sized “bhot jolokia” to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects.[timesofassam.com]

Immobilize and torture, you mean ...

For nearly two decades, the leaders of Al Qaeda have denounced the Arab world’s dictators as heretics and puppets of the West and called for their downfall. Now, people in country after country have risen to topple their leaders — and Al Qaeda has played absolutely no role.[nytimes.com]

Somebody is passing fake 50-dollar bills at Green Valley yard sales and those who accept them aren’t likely to get their money back.[gvnews.com]

Bastards ...

Police in Conyers, GA, near Atlanta, are investigating a case of a toddler who walked into a bank vault on Friday, just as the timers activated, locking the little girl inside the bank vault. A technician was rushed to the bank, escorted by the police at a 90-mile-per-hour clip, to drill out the lock and rescue the child.[huliq.com]

A female custodial worker told casino security that Altman, who was seated, said something to her as she swept the floor in front of him. She looked up and observed Altman had exposed himself.[citizensvoice.com]

 Welcome to the glamorous world of casino security ...

Mexican authorities on Friday found the bodies of three relatives of an anti-violence activist killed last year in the village of Guadalupe in the Juárez valley.[elpasotimes.com]

Also:

Four bodies with their heads severed have been dumped in the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, close to the border with the US, police say.[bbc.co.uk]

More likely than not, from some of the e-mail that I’ve seen that passed between Barr and one of his top coders, arrogance played a part in the debacle. The problem with the “can’t touch this” attitude is that it’s only valid while the people who want to take you down have better things to do.[eweek.com]

Richard's Second Natural Law of Security: It's cheaper to be invisible than it is to be invincible.

Infamous hacker The Jester has claimed responsibility for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks which crashed the web site run by the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.[v3.co.uk]

Don't fvck with the Wongs Anons ...

In response to complaints that a recent announcement of secure connections doesn't go far enough, Facebook said today that it's planning to roll out additional changes that would shield mobile devices and all apps from eavesdropping.[cnet.com]

What do you get the mariner who has everything? You could do worse than the Ego Compact Semi Submarine.[cnet.com]

A student fatally shot a teacher during a security-guard class at a downtown L.A. vocational school, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.[latimes.com]

Need a few more details here ...

"Every new agent who goes to the Secret Service academy goes through a week of training" in computer forensics, including how to deal with encrypted files and hard drives, U.S. Secret Service agent Stuart Van Buren said at the RSA computer security conference last week.[cnet.com]

They basically ask their users to use True Crypt on conventional hard drives only and not on Solid State Drives and other Flash storage devices.[ghacks.com]

You may notice that the game is very slow paced, but believe me, the game takes skill, and is very intense. The slow pace is necessary, as each action you take can make you the hero of the ocean, or the next find on a James Cameron underwater documentary.[nerdreactor.com]

Red's Trading Post is busy.[kmvt.com]

Nothing like a few armed robberies to remind the good folks in Southern Idaho of why every pickup used to have a rifle rack and you didn't have to lock your doors at night ...

In Detroit, Michigan, three men tried to ambush and rob a pizza deliveryman, who managed to fight back by shooting at the alleged robbers, striking and slaying one of them, while the remaining three missed and tried to get away before getting caught.[examiner.com]

Research In Motion has accused unnamed competitors of trying to compound and profit from its problems in India by "suggesting or implying" that RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) will be singled out by Indian regulators, even as their own products that use encryption will escape scrutiny.[pcworld.com]

This would certainly be a dangerous game to play ...

"Data is encrypted in a file system where it's stored," said Skoudis, who joined with Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at SANS Technology Institute, to speak at the RSA Conference last week on dangerous attack techniques that appear to be on the rise. Though stored encrypted, the data has to be processed by some application and "if you're processing that data it will be processed in that system unencrypted," Skoudis pointed out.[networkworld.com]

Prosecutors said the two agents often targeted foreigners and subjected them to additional screening, during which time they would pocket cash found in their carry-on bags.[nydailynews.com]

Humans have a natural propensity to trust non-kin, even strangers. We do it so often, so naturally, that we don't even realize how remarkable it is. But except for a few simplistic counterexamples, it's unique among life on this planet.[schneier.com]

Bruce is always thought-provoking ...

Through sleight-of-hand techniques that security cameras and pit bosses failed to notice, the false shuffle created a “slug” – a group of played cards whose order would not change when the rest of the cards were shuffled. When the slug next came to the top of the deck, members of the ring recognised the card pattern and knew how to bet.[reviewed-casinos.com]

The top security official in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon was found shot dead and burned inside a truck in the city of Monterrey, the state-run Notimex news agency reported, citing state officials.[cnn.con]

SRA International (NYSE: SRX) rolled out One Vault Messenger, an encryption solution for text messages for BlackBerries.[executivebiz.com]

Seagate Monday announced that it has shipped more than 1 million self-encrypting hard drives (SEDs), and that it has received a key government security rating for its top four lines of laptop and enterprise-class products.[computerworld.com]

Some defense lawyers now swear by an increasingly popular method of getting their clients off free: Making them wear glasses in order to come off "less menacing" to a jury.[nymag.com]

We tend to trust are vision quite a bit more than is actually warranted ...

Armed men opened fire and hurled a grenade into a crowded nightclub early Saturday, killing six people and wounding at least 37 in a western city whose former tranquility has been shattered by escalating battles among drug cartels.[ctv.ca]

Public wireless networks – those Wi-Fi hotspots in coffee shops, libraries, airports, hotels, universities, and other public places – allow people to access the internet through a shared network. While convenient, they’re often not secure. You’re sharing the network with strangers, and some of them may be interested in your personal information.[timesnews.com]

“If you have a device where no encryption is advertised, you know what to expect. But with the iPhone, the user expects all data to be secure – and we want to show that in certain circumstances, this is not the case.”[thelocal.de]

Harbor commissioners approved his application Wednesday night, which clears one hurdle in Welsh's audacious plan to dive to the deepest points of the world's five oceans.[dailypilot.com]

Coool ...

The Israeli police were in the midst of a nationwide rapid-response drill simulating terror attacks and "public disorder" in both urban and rural areas, the police told Xinhua Thursday.[peopledaily.com]

One of these vendors, CipherCloud, a Cupertino, Calif.-based start-up, on Thursday launched a virtual appliance technology that companies can use from within their premises to encrypt or to mask sensitive data before it hits the cloud platform.[computerworld.com]

Free phone and text-message encryption software that has until now been available mostly to U.S. users can now be used in Egypt, according to the security researcher who developed it.[wired.com]

Several gunmen on Tuesday killed a man who last month shot three men dead in self defense in the border town of Palomas, Chihuahua state police said.[elpasotimes.com]

Hmmm ... probably should have taken a nice, anonymous vacation ...

Video included

Well, it's hard to be prepared for this ...

Guadalajara is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, home to Mexico's mariachi music and tequila, and was for long spared the beheadings and drive-by shootings tainting other areas of the country.[reuters.com]

Backscatter safety testing reports

Despite the reassurance, however, the TSA has yet to release radiation inspection reports for its X-ray equipment — two months after lawmakers called for them to be made public following USA TODAY's requests to review the reports.[usatoday.com]

I don't think the problem is that the tests show that the equipment is dangerous. I think the problem is that the tests were done on high-energy equipment and when they release the reports, peer review will bring it to everyone's attention that there hasn't actually been any testing done on low-energy (backscatter) equipment.

A U.S. security firm that claimed to have uncovered the real identity of Anonymous members responsible for a recent spate of web site attacks became a victim of Anonymous itself, when members of the online vigilante group breached the company’s network and stole more than 60,000 internal e-mails.[wired.com]

Don't fvck with the Wongs Anons ...

But the Air Force doesn’t stop there. Your mom, your kids, your cousins — they can’t access WikiLeaks either. If you don’t stop them from reading those documents, they’re looking at a potential Espionage Act prosecution, too.[wired.com]

The only narco submarine ever captured — a 73-foot-long camouflaged vessel capable of carrying at least 7 tons of cocaine while cruising stealthily beneath the ocean's surface — sits raised on concrete blocks in a South American seaport.[chron.com]

Interesting ...

Video included

Gastonia police have a man in custody who they said attempted to rob a convenience store clerk but ended up being attacked by the clerk.[wsoctv.com]

The clerk is an admirable fellow. He had the courage to fight back but couldn't quite bring himself to disintegrate the baddie's brain-housing group ...

At least 17 people were killed in drug-related violence in northern Mexico this weekend, nine of them in restive Ciudad Juarez, the state attorney general's office said Sunday.[afp.com]

AUSTRALIA could buy 10 of the latest nuclear attack submarines from the US for much less than it would cost to build 12 conventional replacements for the Collins-class boats, says the Kokoda Foundation think tank.[theaustralian.com.au]

Somehow, Bajwa's two-year stint behind bars went unnoticed by security officials in Punjab province. In 2009, they made him computer section chief for the Punjab police's intelligence wing, a post that gave him access to investigations and special reports on militant groups, surveillance directives, even security arrangements for VIPs.[latimes.com]

Oops ...

Looking to reduce sky-high security costs, Mineta San Jose International Airport is launching an idea that few other major cities have tried -- jettisoning the city's police officers from the airport and replacing them with a private security force.[mercurynews.com]

The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.[telegraph.co.uk]

I wish this would turn out to not be true ...

He is identified by police as Anthony M. Carleo, and it is reported he is the son of a Las Vegas judge. The December heist involved a motorcycle-riding bandit who waved a handgun at gamblers and stole high-value chips.[latimes.com]

Those chips really aren't the same as cash, are they ...?

It does away with minimum staffing levels set by the state for casino security officers, surveillance personnel and supervisors like pit bosses.[cbslocal.com]

This may go a long way toward saving AC ...

In the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, the chief of police, Manuel Farfan has been killed, along with at least two of his bodyguards, as the result of an ambush, according to officials.[worldnewsinsight.com]

BlackBerry owners in India could now face a ban on using their handsets after Research in Motion (RIM) failed to meet a government deadline and hand over access to its services.[hexus.net]

Authorities say Roger Stockham, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran from California, drove from the west coast to Dearborn last week and parked a car full of class-C fireworks in front of the Islamic Center of America, one of the nation's largest mosques, with intent to cause damage.[mlive.com]

Sounds like he needs help rather than prosecution ...

Egyptians have adopted, with few exceptions, medieval tactics to defend and attack one another. Here are their most popular means of violence.[deathandtaxes.com]

It would be damn unpleasant to be whacked in the shins with a length of rebar ...

A Florida police officer has been shot dead in a gunbattle with an ex-convict who set up an ambush in the woods.[dailymail.co.uk]

Lawyers have come a long way since the days when their secretaries printed their e-mails and despairing IT directors begged to place PCs on mahogany desk tops.[law.com]

The Transportation Security Administration began testing on Tuesday new software that will transmit more modest images of travelers' bodies on some of its controversial airport screening machines.[usatoday.com]

Google and Twitter have come up with a workaround to the Internet clampdown in Egypt that allows Egyptians to send tweets over landline phones. This is a nice gesture, but it seems that the revolution could move ahead without the ability to tweet.[cnettv.cnet.com]

I think we may need to work on improving the 'Ad Hoc Wifi Network' capability ...

On Tuesday, secret documents leaked via WikiLeaks revealed the FBI is on the hunt for four additional suspected terrorists in connection with the 9/11 attacks.[nymag.com]

Interesting ...