Knowing that the government can keep us safe against evil dildos and penis pumpers, I don't really give much importance to the fact that a guy got into the U.S. Homeland Security Department phone system to make more than 400 calls to his buddies in friendly countries like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to security consultant John Jackson, the hacking was very low-tech and old school, which probably would make Steve "Blue Box" Wozniak proud, but it was an embarrassment for the agency:

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Hackaday has a piece about an upcoming Discovery Channel show called "Prototype this!" It's due in October, and since it's about making and modding robots and other gizmos, it sounds like a Mythbusters-meets-Makerfaire geeky heaven. [Hackaday]

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Network access at conferences sucks, pretty much without exception. That is, unless it's built by the badge-wearing network ops volunteers of the Defcon hacker convention, who are affectionately referred to as the "Goons" (read: IT badasses). Wired's Threat Level got a chance to look behind the scenes and snap some great photos of the network gear (and chain link fences, and padlocks, and German Shepherds) that make the Defcon network the fortress that it needs to be to keep a network full of hackers from tearing each other apart.

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"Want free subway rides for life?" teased the description of the talk "Anatomy of a Subway Hack" by three MIT students at DefCon this past weekend, where they planned to explain security flaws in the payment system for Boston's T subway. Live! They were going to demo how they cracked the system's CharlieCard smartcards and the mag-stripe on its paper CharlieTickets and offer up open source tools they made while conducting their research, among other gaping holes. Apparently, however, that "constitutes a threat to public health or safety," and "affects a computer system used by a government agency for national security purposes."

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Coinciding with the conflict in South Ossetia, the Georgian government is claiming they have lost control of many, if not all, of their governmental web sites and are incapable of using them to update its citizens or the international community. The blog RBNexploit is claiming to be an unofficial spokesman for the Georgian web, and they're alleging that an infamous mafia of hackers for hire, the Russian Business Network, is involved.

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There has been a lot of news lately about piracy and hacking--including the ongoing saga of Terry Childs, the nutcase who hijacked San Francisco's computer network, the trouble with e-passports, California's vulnerable Fastrack toll system, and Brazilian software pirates. But this is nothing new. We are always hearing about the next "unhackable" system only to point and laugh when some 13 year old takes it out 24 hours after launch. It's not like companies will stop trying to keep hackers out, but are their efforts futile? In other words, is a truly unhackable system nothing more than a pipe dream?

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Tests conducted for the UK's Times Online have concluded that the new high-tech e-passports being distributed around the world can be hacked and cloned within minutes. A computer researcher proved it by cloning the chips in two British passports and then implanting digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. Both passports passed as genuine by UN approved passport reader software. The entire process took less than an hour.

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Wired got a sneak peek at one of the more fun aspects of this coming weekend's Defcon, the hackable badge. Last year's badge was hacked in just ten minutes, but it didn't have an SD card slot at USB support. The new card has fewer features than last year's but is more powerful. And it comes with a longer battery life, good news. But not everything is known, and that's kind of the point to these fun trinkets. [Wired]

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Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into military computers looking for evidence of UFOs in the "biggest military hack of all time," did so using his home computer and a 56k modem. I think we just lost our rights to complain about not having Japan-fast broadband.

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Initially, Terry Child's hijacking of the San Francisco computer network had a rebellious vibe about it that was, well...sort of admirable. However, much has happened in the last couple of weeks that has painted him as more than a simple disgruntled employee. Now it seems that Childs is actually a brilliant but deeply disturbed individual that sought to take down the network that he constructed based on paranoia and insatiable need for power and revenge.

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