Brinword on again in Kelowna, BC: CanPrivComm's replacement drops police surveillence camera lawsuit
Too bad George Radwanski didn't just bring his lunch to work more often. This was one of his more prominent causes, an important one, which his successor is just rolling over on. --- http://tinyurl.com/g30t The Toronto Star Jul. 5, 2003. 01:00 AM Radwanski stand-in cleans house Sidelines aides, ends pricey B.C. court challenge Staff co-operating with auditors: Robert Marleau TONDA MACCHARLES OTTAWA BUREAU OTTAWARobert Marleau, the man replacing former privacy commissioner George Radwanski, has moved quickly to overhaul the beleaguered office, halting a $250,000 court challenge to RCMP surveillance cameras yesterday and sidelining two of Radwanski's most controversial senior aides. Marleau, a former clerk of the Commons who is filling the job on an interim basis, said in an interview he dropped the high-profile court action in Kelowna, B.C., that Radwanski had undertaken as a crusade because it was not a useful way of spending public funds. Marleau also accepted on Wednesday the resignation and early retirement of Art Lamarche, Radwanski's chief of corporate services. Marleau said there was no special incentive package offered to Lamarche to retire July 31; it was Lamarche's own decision. The interim privacy commissioner also ordered Dona Vallieres, Radwanski's director of communications and frequent travel companion, to take special leave with full pay pending the outcome of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's financial probe. When I came in, I took stock of the situation and thought it was in her best interests and our best interests while the audit was ongoing, and pending its results, that she go on special leave, Marleau said. He would not speculate on the likelihood of Vallieres returning to her job. The audit will dictate the outcome, he said. Vallieres travelled extensively with her former boss to Paris, Madrid, London, Rome, New York and New Zealand among other destinations. Her expense claims show she often dined at the same Ottawa restaurants preferred by the ex-commissioner. A self-described sufferer of chronic fatigue syndrome, Vallieres had refused to appear before the Commons committee investigating Radwanski's expenses, saying she was ill. She did, however, appear at Radwanski's news conference the following day. Vallieres has declined interviews, but indignantly denied to a CTV reporter she had any improper relationship with Radwanski. In 2001-2002, documents show Radwanski claimed $182,777 in domestic and foreign travel expenses. Vallieres claimed a total of $129,542 for the same period. Marleau declined to reveal the salaries of Vallieres and Lamarche, who is on special leave with full pay until his July 31 retirement, but both are considered senior executives in the public service. Under recently announced pay increases, an executive's salary ranges from $102,200 to $165,000. The NDP's Pat Martin said he was pleased with the moves by Marleau, and said the results of the auditor general's investigation may mean future sanction for Radwanski's former aides. (Canadians) should be comforted by the fact that any maladministration of public funds may be considered a criminal matter, he said. Neither Lamarche nor Vallieres returned the Star's calls yesterday. Marleau, and all senior officials in the privacy office, have already met with and provided documents to federal auditors from Fraser's office, and more interviews are set for Monday, he said. As well, a broad audit of staffing practices by the Public Service Commission is underway. As far as I'm concerned, they have complete access, Marleau said. I look forward to their findings. As for the Kelowna surveillance camera court challenge Radwanski had launched, Marleau said he made a risk assessment of the likelihood of success and the future legal costs, and believed it was not reasonable to proceed. Up to now, the merits of the case hadn't been argued, yet the challenge had already cost $250,000 to litigate, mostly in fees to Toronto lawyer Morris Manning. The challenge, Marleau said, was not the best use of funds of this small office. The federal justice department opposed Radwanski's efforts to bring the matter to court, and Radwanski had lost his first bid for standing to intervene. Marleau said the office still has concerns about the privacy implications of surveillance cameras, and if it received a complaint from an individual Kelowna resident, which it has not, it would pursue the matter, and apply a test of reasonableness to the use of surveillance equipment. -- Tim Meehan, Communications Director Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.ocsarc.org * 416-854-6343
Re: A firewall problem?
At 01:55 AM 7/4/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote: Wont the following cause a firewall breach- First we capture inbound packets to a firewall assuming we have a man in the middle(M). If (M) use block replay on packets he can inject bits and pieces of his own information to an inbound firewall and can go undetected? M doesn't alter the source and destination ip's and is perfectly acceptable to the firewall.Even a timestamp won't work since a packet is expected at any time. We can still re-calculate the CRC of Checksum field by the same attack and replace the old crc/checksum after changing various required bit positions. Do firewall programs use initialisation vectors and a chaning mode to prevent this attack? You are confusing a firewall with a protocol like IPsec that provides authentication and replay resistance (using crypto). A firewall is just a packet filter --if this field is that, do this. (Steve Bellovin has an online book about them you might enjoy.) Sometimes they're clever and look inside the streams, but this won't resist the attacks you're talking about. Various components of IPsec will. Read up on how it does that. - http://www.geocities.com/the_irvine_observer/
Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD protection methods is based on various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware. However, we can sidestep the firmware. The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the disk and amplified. We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. And sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for normal players) the contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system (maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary. We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, with everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the signal. Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD representation to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for someone skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file that we can handle later by normal means. We can push the idea a step further, making a stripped-down CD/DVD drive that would be able basically just to follow the spiral track with its head in constant linear velocity (easier to analyze than CAV) mode, with the ability to control the speed in accordance with how fast (and expensive) ADC, bus, and disks we have, and the possibility to interrupt/resume scanning anytimes in accordance with how much disk space we have (or to scan just a small area of the disc). As a welcomed side effect, not only we'd get a device for circumvention of just about any contemporary (and possibly a good deal of the future ones) optical media protections, but we would also get a powerful tool for retrieving data from even very grossly damaged discs, for audit of behavior of CD/DVD writers and CD vendors (eg, if they don't attempt to sneak in something like a hidden serial number of the writer), and for access to all areas of the discs - including the eventual ones unreachable through the drive's own firmware. If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why?
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 07:13 PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD protection methods is based on various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware. However, we can sidestep the firmware. The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the disk and amplified. We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. And sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for normal players) the contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system (maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary. No RTOS/Linux is needed for fast sampling, which has been happening for several decades now. Nor is a digital oscilloscope needed. (FWIW, I used a Nicolet digital oscilloscope, and also a LeCroy CAMAC digitizer, for some high-speed single-shot event capture--the strike of an alpha particle--nearly 25 years ago. The OS for our data collection computers were, variously, RSX-11M and VMS.) Video ADC cards are already vastly capable at sampling video streams. We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, with everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the signal. Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD representation to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for someone skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file that we can handle later by normal means. So? Yes, this is all possible. Any moderately well-equipped lab can do this. So? If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why? I have no idea what you mean by fill this idea with water, but by all means go ahead and rig up such a machine. Personally, I already make about 1-2 recordable DVDs per day, on average, without any hint of copy protection or Macrovision. I usually use the 3-hour speed on my DVD recorder, and can put one high-quality movie on the first part and then, by using a slightly slower speed, another movie on the remaining part. If DVD quality is needed, I record at the 2-hour setting. If better than DVD quality is needed, as from a DV camcorder source, I record at the 1-hour speed. If you build a machine which has even higher digitization rates, taken ahead of any DVD spec circuitry, you will get about what I am getting at the 1-hour setting. A very limited market for consumers to buy such machines. Video pirate labs very probably already have such rigs set up. --Tim May Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.--Barry Goldwater
