talkmagic.co.uk

The home office has (quietly) approved a proposal which would allow the police to hack into and search any home PC — reading and taking emails, IM conversations, web history, and personal files using keyloggers, trojans (fake files which fool the user into opening them) and hacking into wireless connections outside your house (which is incredibly easy to do on a number of home wireless networks)

All that is needed is for a senior official (I'll let you read into that what you will) to give the nod if he thinks it is '"proportionate" and necessary to investigate a "serious" crime'. And by serious, it doesn't mean acts of terror or anything like that. It means any crime which carries a possible sentence of 3 years in jail

And you thought storing all your emails in a huge database was bad enough?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/0 ... s-pol.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 439604.ece

I'd love to know how they're going to identify a target on the fly from a DHCP pool without, ironically, serious ISP input.

My guess is that they're more likely to get initial access by logging into wireless connections, installing software that will "phone home" and make a connection. But then, this kind of stuff isn't my strength so it might not be as easy as I think it is

All we need to do is 'spam' each other with ridiculous e-mails and let the nosey bug.gers sort their way through them!

Mandrake wrote:All we need to do is 'spam' each other with ridiculous e-mails and let the nosey bug.gers sort their way through them!

No need Mandrake, about 90% of all email is spam already

Sadly, I route my email through gmail which strips all my spam away

Mandrake wrote:All we need to do is 'spam' each other with ridiculous e-mails and let the nosey bug.gers sort their way through them!

This is, technically, the reason we're not just talking German but why we're here at all. The Nazis encrypted their communications using Enigma and Lorentz, but didn't bother encoding the contained messages. By the battle of El Alamein, Bletchley Park (the most sainted 9 acres on the planet) could read everything and, perhaps even more importantly, the counter intelligence boffins could directly understand it.

the thing is though that sensible practice against intruders as we know them now will prevent the old bill gaining access... Unsecured networks are accessed immediately, WEP secured are the easiest in the world to hack whilst WPA and WPA2 offer better margins of protection.

If you were genuinely concerned about your activity then to hide behind a hardware firewall would make it really really difficult to hack you!!

They may have the powers but they don't have the skills portrayed by film and TV! In the ICT security industry you have at your disposal tools that are equivalent to if not better than the police!!

Jordan C wrote:the thing is though that sensible practice against intruders as we know them now will prevent the old bill gaining access... Unsecured networks are accessed immediately, WEP secured are the easiest in the world to hack whilst WPA and WPA2 offer better margins of protection.

But sadly, nobody seems to care about wireless encryption and few people seem to realise how insecure WEP encryption actually is, and routers are still being used which uses this method. Until I moved in, the router in this place was using WEP (and couldn't be set up to use WPA)

kolm wrote:

Jordan C wrote:the thing is though that sensible practice against intruders as we know them now will prevent the old bill gaining access... Unsecured networks are accessed immediately, WEP secured are the easiest in the world to hack whilst WPA and WPA2 offer better margins of protection.

But sadly, nobody seems to care about wireless encryption and few people seem to realise how insecure WEP encryption actually is, and routers are still being used which uses this method. Until I moved in, the router in this place was using WEP (and couldn't be set up to use WPA)

A sad but true fact, there's no accounting for human interface failure!!

This is a similar piece of legislation that is allowing local authorities to use anti-terror legislation to gather details about resident who commit misdemeanours.

The key is for them to prove that the level of intrusion is proportionate to the offence that they have obtained it for, which is precisely where it comes unstuck.