Video included

A convicted felon is accused of punching an 80-year-old man in the face, knocking off his glasses, as the elderly man waited outside a restroom in a grocery store on the Northwest Side, police say.[chicagotribune.com]

With the vic's face blocked you can't really tell whether he's just standing there or yelling some kind of smack at the locked restroom door leading up to the punching. Yelling at the door, or doing something else that is provocative rather than patiently waiting for his turn at the restroom, certainly wouldn't be justification for the other guy to punch him, but it would indicate that he had significantly reduced his 'resistance to selection for interference' leading up to getting punched, and may actually paint him in the light of interferior if he thought someone vulnerable was in there at the time.

Video included

Well ... this was fairly intense ...

The mayor, police chief and a village trustee in the New Mexico border town of Columbus have been charged along with eight other defendants with buying firearms for illegal export to Mexico, federal authorities said Thursday.[cnn.com]

Welcome to the economics of prohibition ...

Further, BestCrypt allows you to mount a container (on NTFS drives) as a folder, not as a new drive. This means you're not limited to drive letters, and while a new virtual drive might draw attention, a folder buried many levels deep will not be casually noticed.[pcworld.com]

The reactors that power Britain's naval submarines are "potentially vulnerable" to fatal nuclear accidents because they fail to meet modern safety standards, according to a heavily censored report declassified by the Ministry of Defence.[guardian.co.uk]

Sen. Jack Reed expressed guarded optimism Wednesday that the eventual spending compromise to finance the government for the rest of this fiscal year would include the full allocation for purchase of two Virginia-class submarines in 2011.[projo.com]

Following huge amount of criticism for trying to block freedom of information and freedom of speech by restricting people’s ability to donate to Wikileaks, Paypal has done a U-turn. Now all accounts associated with donations have been freed up and returned to regular standing.[topsecretwriters.com]

Interesting ... if true ...

Rule No. 1: Never bring a beanbag to a gunfight.[washingtontimes.com]

After inducting advance fighter jets from China, Pakistan plans to buy six state-of-the-art submarines from the neighbouring country in a bid to boost its under-sea warfare capabilities.[thehindu.com]

Android has also never before represented such a significant target for hackers and other baddies looking to profit off of the platform's popularity. In other words, now is the time to get smart about Google Android security. The following six tips and tricks will help do just that.[computerworld.com]

At least 18 people were killed in a shootout in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, state media reported.[cnn.com]

The drug-related violence in parts of Mexico is making for some great travel deals south of the border — if you’re willing to take the risk.[khou.com]

Most users know better than to click a message from "Bank of Amerika" that tells them "Your account is much suspect of risk, please input number for verify."[pcworld.com]

FreeOTFE has a "no install" mode, though it does require Administrator privileges to load the drivers. Using this mode is a good way to put both FreeOTFE and an encrypted volume on a portable drive, either a flash drive or a small USB drive. If the drive is stolen or lost, its contents will be inaccessible, and you can use it on any computer where you have appropriate privileges--for example, this is ideal for transporting sensitive data between office and home environments, or between multiple work computers.[pcworld.com]

Israa Abdel Fattah, 32, a labor organizer and blogger, shared her file with McClatchy and marveled at the thoroughness of the surveillance. The file included detailed transcripts of e-mails sent from her Gmail account and phone conversations with her ex-husband. The feeling of violation was indescribable, she said.[miamiherald.com]

The home ministry has directed the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to ask service providers for a solution for security agencies to access the services, by the end of this month, according to people privy to the development. Research in Motion (RIM) has maintained that the company cannot provide access to its enterprise services, since it does not hold any key to these.[business-standard.com]

Some cool pics ...

Android handsets infected with malware are getting a cleaning job from Google. On March 2nd, Google removed 21 apps from the Android Marketplace that contained malicious code (the number of infected apps is now 58). Now Google is "remotely removing the malicious applications from affected devices" and "pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undoes the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices," according to a blog post by Rich Cannings, Android security lead.[betanews.com]

Under the new agreement, the two governments will implement long-delayed cross-border trucking provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement enacted in 1994.[swtimes.com]

It will be interesting to see the effect this has on border security ...

Whoever is sending out the mysterious tweets calling for regular Sunday afternoon "strolls" around China has come up with a highly effective psychological operation against the government, sending a paranoid security apparatus chasing at shadows.[latimes.com]

"As [Wednesday's] attack in Frankfurt revealed, the open area of the airports, whether parking areas, loading/unloading zones, and the terminals themselves, have historically been prime targets [for terrorists],"[foxnews.com]

There will always be places where crowds gather ... maybe you should concentrate on keeping the stuff that leaves the ground from blowing up ...

If you don't want spam-bots or bad guys breaking into your site, make them do calculus.[latimes.com]

It'll probably work for awhile ...

Public-key cryptography allows people across the world to share valuable personal data without a second thought. When you shop online, when you check your bank statement, when you file your taxes online, public-key cryptography is protecting your information. One industry insider estimates that 10 billion devices are using public-key cryptography.[standford.edu]

Some interesting back-story ...

In a surprising blog post that generated a ton of commentary when he wrote it in 2008, Schneier called his policy one of “basic politeness,” providing Internet access for his guests and anyone else that might happen to wander by.[esecurityplanet.com]

Beijng said on Friday that it would boost defence spending by 12.7 percent in 2011, for a total of 601.1 billion yuan ($91.48 billion), marking a return to double-digit growth. China says it needs to upgrade its outmoded forces and that its plans are not a threat to any country, pointing out its defence budget is far lower than the United States.[indiatimes.com]

TrueCrypt is a powerful, free, open source program that allows you to create encrypted volumes on your computer, or to encrypt entire disks, including your system disk. Furthermore, it allows you to create hidden volumes, or even an entire hidden operating system.[pcworld.com]

The show, entitled How To Command A Nuclear Submarine, fits six months of training into eight episodes.[metro.co.uk]

Peraltalajara told authorities that he used the box cutters for work at a Secaucus manufacturing plant and simply forgot that they were in his luggage. He was not charged with any crime.[news.com.au]

To get a sense of how hard it would be to stay focused on screening for 8 minutes, much less 8 hours, try thinking about nothing but driving the next time you get in a car to drive. Before you turn the key your mind will have drifted to some other subject. That said, I bet if the same guy was trying to sneak the box-cutters through, the screener would have noticed them. This is because the passenger's vibe would have focused the screener's attention.

Chipset manufacturer Intel has finally overcome all anti-competition concerns, obtaining the green light for their acquisition of antivirus developer McAfee. They will now be able to start looking at deploying their hardware security policy in processors.[us.generation-nt.com]

A districtwide policy prohibiting students and staff from opening doors to the outside was recently adopted after a $10,800 security system was installed at the middle school, Southampton High School, Southampton Technical Career Center and Nottoway, Meherrin and Capron elementary schools. Riverdale Elementary had a similar system installed when it was built three years ago.[tidewaternews.com]

I really hate the Z-tol approach to problem solving, but having multiple standards for a single secure access is always a recipe for disaster. As long as the everyone from the District Superintendent to the students have to use the same recognition-for-access routine, penalizing the student, even for a chivalry-based violation, is entirely appropriate.

(H/T boing boing)

Attorneys for Walmart and Wackenhut argued Garrett, 44, never did anything to arouse suspicion or otherwise cause them to compel him to leave before he punched Born and robbed him. Garrett, who is 6-feet 3 inches tall and weighed 250 pounds at the time of the incident, was on store property for about 12 minutes before he attacked Born. Attorneys said he was not loitering or acting erratic.[lasvegasinfonewspaper.com]

It's hard to tell with out studying the transcripts, but based on the story, it's hard to imagine any way they could have forseen or prevented the attack ...

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Quick, efficient criminality ...

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Vietnamese make good Americans ...

A Halifax man is suing the company that runs Casino Nova Scotia and three of its employees for allegedly allowing him to walk into the high-rollers room repeatedly even though he was on a list of people who had asked to be banned from the casino.[thechronicleherald.ca]

The Texas Department of Public Safety warned Tuesday against spring break travel to Mexico because of the region's persistent drug violence.[statesman.com]

The chief of security at the Massey Energy Co. mine where an explosion killed 29 miners last April was charged Monday with lying to investigators and ordering the destruction of thousands of security-related documents.[wsj.com]

Note: once the docs are destroyed, the biggies are free to hypo-vehiculate you (I'm not suggesting it happened here ... just sayin'.)

Video included

Neis reportedly had his son, 15, in the car with him when he sped through the crowd of cyclists. Moments after their car ran through the pack of riders, the pair abandoned the vehicle. On Monday, Neis, who works at a bank, and his son said that cyclists had begun hitting their car, a VW Golf, according to Zero Hora.[npr.org]

I imagine the self-defense defense will be a hard sell but, on the other hand, it's hard to imagine a banker with his son in the car just up and deciding  to toothpaste a bunch of bicyclists. The video doesn't show the lead up, but the event itself is fairly intense.

The fact is that college gun-free zones have failed. Signs warning shooters that their murder weapons weren't welcome didn't stop perpetrators at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University or the University of Alabama. Since colleges have no mechanism to enforce gun-free zones, these killers had a government guarantee that their victims would be unarmed and defenseless.[usatoday.com]

The first question that needs to be answered before firing up the wristwatch camcorder is, “why am I shooting this video?” The reason that needs to be answered is because there are different rules governing covert video, depending on whether you are shooting it as a private individual/business, or on behalf of a government agency.[governmentvideo.com]

It’s a scenario that every small online business fears: site security is compromised, hackers steal customer data including credit-card details, and your brand and your reputation are left in ruins. No wonder then, that many small online businesses are looking to insure against hackers and the resulting financial impact of a security breach. But is insurance really the answer and could it even be part of the problem?[pcpro.co.uk]

Undeterred by their inebriation, the men went ahead with the test, and one man donned the body armor while his friend delivered a blow armed with the knife.[myfoxdc.com]

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 ...