At the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) last week, Karsten Nohl offered new insights and methods for cracking GSM encryption.

Curtin University of Technology researcher, Don Griffiths, has been awarded a government grant to develop a system that enables a secure computing environment to be loaded onto a USB memory stick and then used to provide secure access to corporate applications from any PC.

There is a project underway to employ distributed computers to compute rainbow tables for GSM decryption.  Download the code and join in, if you're interested!

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies claims the new Travelstar 7K500 hard drive is the fastest in its class. The device also implements on-disk encryption for security without adding to the processing load.

Refuse to give Police your password?  In the UK, you'll go directly to gaol.

Almost 70 percent of Australian businesses and organisations were hit by one or more data breach incidents in the past year, a major increase on the situation in the previous 12 months.

One deterrent to switching operating systems is the inability to perform tasks with a minimum of fuss. Unfortunately, for Linux, doing something as natural as playing a movie on DVD doesn’t just work out-of-the-box. The reason why not is the same reason the Nintendo Wii doesn’t play DVDs either.

(changes are shown in italics) According to Gartner, the new iPhone 3G S and version 3.0 of the iPhone software go a long away towards addressing the concerns IT managers have about allowing iPhones into the corporate IT environment, but shortcomings remain. Gartner however stresses that these apply only to enterprises wanting to integrate mobile devices into their IT infrastructure, and that it considers the iPhone perfectly acceptable for applications such as email, calendar and web browsing.

Security controls on removable drives forms an integral part of Windows 7, squeezing third-party developers from yet another niche.

Network traffic compression is becoming increasingly an issue for corporations looking to squeeze as much bang-for-buck from their IT departments as possible.  With WAN acceleration as an offshoot, this real life example shows ways in which bandwidth can be better utilised to deliver high rates of data at good speeds.  Effective WAN capacity can be multiplied with a relatively cheap solution, such as the Juniper WX range of devices, but there are pitfalls.