Mager Twitter Tour

A friend of mine, Andrew Mager, recently got the chance to go through the new Twitter offices in San Francisco. He took the opportunity to snag a few photos, which you can see here. If you haven’t investigated Twitter, you should take a look. There’s a great security community on Twitter herded by Quine of n0where.org. It’s a great way to keep up to the minute with what’s happening in the world of infosec.

Defcon MBTA Madness!

Wow, the MBTA is in deep shit. If you haven’t heard about this, 3 kids from MIT did some analysis on the MBTA fare system and found out how bad it actually is. We’ve (jabra + quine + myself) debated whether the card is actually storing $$ value, and it turns out it is. Check out this VA report published by Wired and the corresponding article. So now they’ve been issued a restraining order, and weren’t allowed to talk at Defcon. Here’s hoping they get off of this, as it has ramifications for security research:

Marcia Hoffman of the EFF (Stolen from Wired):

“Basically, what the court is suggesting here is that giving a presentation involving security to other security researchers is a violation of federal law,” she said. “As far as I know, this is completely unprecedented, and it has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research. . . . And we intend to fight it with everything we’ve got.”

I’ll post more info on the highlights from BlackHat / Defcon soon.

/me heads off to buy an RFID cloner + pay EFF dues.