GroundBot by Swedish robotics firm Rotundus is an all-terrain, amphibious surveillance robot in the shape of a bug-eyed sphere (video). Roughly the size of a car tire, the robot moves silently at up to six mph. GroundBot houses two cameras which provide a stereoscopic view to its remote operator. Rotundus notes that the current version “cannot house robot arms or weapons.” Maybe in the next release.

The spherical design is simplicity itself. With its large circumference, GroundBot takes all kinds of terrain in its stride. And yet its appearance is friendly and unthreatening.

Inside, all cameras and sensors are sealed off from the outside world. This means that they are protected from bangs and knocks. In addition, the outside world is protected from potential electrical sparks when GroundBot is investigating gas leaks.

via BLDGBLOG & Technabob

Google has launched Good To Know, a comprehensive overview of their privacy and security features and policies.

via Pulp Tech by Violet Blue

Legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick shows Anthony De Rosa of Reuters how he can access a person’s voicemail without using a password by spoofing Caller ID. He demonstrates it live with Anthony’s voicemail, playing back a message.

Kevin Mitnick’s new book Ghost in the Wires just came out, about his days as the world’s most wanted hacker.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is heading to Las Vegas this week for DEF CON 19, the elite conference that gathers hackers, crackers, journalists and FBI agents together under one roof to discuss all things cyber.

To commemorate, EFF has produced a special shirt by Robots & Monsters charity demigod Joe Alterio. The shirt looks cool enough under ordinary light conditions, but walk under a black light and super-secret computer codes are revealed. And if you walk into a completely darkened room (where most hackers spend their time), the shirt glows in the dark to reveal a very important message: STRONG ENCRYPTION SAVES LIVES!

The shirt is only available at DEF CON, but EFF has other great swag available when you join or renew online, including their new Bit-Blaster Mecha shirt, designed by yours truly.

For more information on encryption and how it does, in fact, save lives, check out the handy encryption advice to be found on EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense site.

xkcd takes a look a how different people interpert an attack on the CIA website.

The 19th annual DEF CON, one of the largest and oldest continuous hacking conferences, takes place August 4th though 7th at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. DEF CON Kids, a hacking conference for kids age 8-16, premieres at this year’s event.

Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen designed a DIY text message-operated door lock for his company’s headquarters.

via Leftover Takeout

Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a tip sheet for talking to the police when they are searching your computer or phone as part of their Know Your Rights guide for protecting your computer or phone from illegal police searches.

The 1st annual DefCon Kids, a hacker conference for kids aged 8-16, takes place August 6-7 at Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The event is part of DefCon 19, the largest hacker gathering in the world.

DEFCON Kids will have two rooms focused on content for beginner hackers age 8-16. There will be a classroom for kids to participate in demos and workshops, such as learning how to open Master locks, Google Hacking, making Electronics, Social Engineering, coding in Scratch and Communicating in Code. There will be a workroom for kids to participate in hacking activities anytime throughout the two days, including a Codebreaking Museum, a Makerbot and the Hardware Hacking Station. The rooms are on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will also be contests just for kids, including social engineering and lockpicking. DEFCON Kids is not daycare; kids are their parents’ responsibility. DEFCON Kids premiere partners include AllClear ID and HacKids.

via Reuters

ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com has a lookup form where you can enter your email address to see if it was in one of the databases with login info that has been compromised and released to the public.

LulzSec and other groups have been hacking an assortment of prominent organisations. Forgood or for bad, they have also been publishing their databases, which typically include emails and passwords. Given that most people re-use their passwords, this site allows the average person to check if their password(s) may have been compromised and need to be changed.

via New York Times

Jörg Piringer created a video of the 25727 passwords collected from the LulzSec porn hack, displayed one per frame.

via Waxy

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus by Patrick Clair

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1.

via Gizmodo

NMA takes a look at the LulSec and their Hacking Rampages for the Lolz.

Out of the swamp that is 4 chan, two groups of hackers emerged. The first, anonymous, practised hacktivism, using DDoS attacks against numerous targets such as Iran, the Church of Scientology and Amazon.com.

Lulzsec, on the other hand, are pranksters happy just to take down random sites for lulz. Lulzsec has been on the rampage, taking down the CIA website to win a twitter flame war while picking another fight with 4chan despite past associations.

4chan users are out to take down Lulzsec any way they can. Will the hackers of Lulzsec be applying their computer skills elsewhere soon?

The Lockitron system is an app paired with an electronic door lock that allows the user to lock and unlock a door with their smartphone (see the video demo.) Using the text message feature, it’s even possible to use Lockitron with an unsmart mobile phone.

Let guests into your beach house while you’re traveling abroad, provision temporary access for contractors at the office, or let friends buzz themselves up to your party without the hassle of physical keys.

Any internet-enabled smartphone can use Lockitron. Activate our text message feature to allow any mobile phone to use Lockitron through text messaging.

The Vehicle Arrestor by Barrier1 Systems is a fairly innocuous-looking net that can stop a 15,000 pound truck traveling at 50 mph. The word “stop” in this instance can also be understood as “completely demolish.” Barrier1 Systems builds a variety of vehicle stopping products, most of which are even less gentle to speeding vehicles than the Vehicle Arrestor (a number of unhappy cars and trucks meet spectacular ends in the Barrier1 demonstration video.)

via Geekosystem

still images via Barrier1 Systems

At Where 2.0 today in Santa Clara researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced today that Apple’s iOS 4, which runs on the iPhone and iPad, has been secretly saving the device user’s location data since the software’s release a year ago. The researchers discuss their findings in this video discussion via O’Reilly Media.

All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called “consolidated.db.” This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. The coordinates aren’t always exact, but they are pretty detailed. There can be tens of thousands of data points in this file, and it appears the collection started with iOS 4, so there’s typically around a year’s worth of information at this point.

The location data is saved on the device and is synched to the user’s computer as well. No word yet from Apple on why this data is being collected.

Allan and Warden have released iPhoneTracker, an application that will generate a map of an iOS 4 device user’s movements by accessing the location data on the user’s computer. The researchers recommend iOS 4 device users check the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” box under “Options” in iTunes to provide at least some measure of protection for this data.

via O’Reilly Radar

Ars Technica takes a look at how security expert Aaron Barr and his company HBGary tried to track down Anonymous, handing over information to the FBI, only to incur the wrath of Anonymous, who broke into his server and ended up posting 60K of their emails on BitTorrent for people to download and distribute.

“How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price” (Ars Technica)

image via Ars Technica

Worried about your iPhone or iPod Touch being lost or stolen and your information being out in the open? Have no fear! You can keep you passwords, photos, and contacts protected with the Ben the Bodyguard app coming January 2011.

Follow Ben on Facebook and Twitter to keep informed on any updates.

Ben the Bodyguard created by Nerd Communications

4th Amendment Wear is a series of underclothes that have the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution printed on them with metallic ink that so that it will show up when worn through a TSA X-Ray machine.

The clothes are designed as a silent protest against the new reality of being searched to the point where we’re basically naked. We don’t intend for this to be anything more than a thought-provoking way to fuel the debate about safety vs. civil liberties. If we sell a few items, great. But the main intention is to open more dialogue. It’s more of a conceptual piece than anything else.

[via Jason Bodnar]

Hack Bloc presents Digital Security and Tactics For (and By) Anti Authoritarians at Noisebridge in San Francisco on March 12th, part of the 8 days of Anarchy.

Digital Security and Tactics For (and By) Anti Authoritarians is an one night attempt to share information and skills on digital security, tools, and news between an anti authoritarian tech and activist community.

photo by Scott Beale

There is a particularly nasty WordPress attack making the rounds right now which Lorelle talks about on her blog. If you are not running the latest version of WordPress (2.8.4), you should upgrade immediately. If you’re not sure if your installation of WordPress is running the latest version, you can check by logging into your Dashboard.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg talks about how to keep WordPress secure.

Popular blogger Robert Scoble didn’t upgrade his WordPress blog and as a result, two month of his blog posts were deleted. There’s are active discussion about what happened with Robert on FriendFeed and Hacker News.

Running a web hosting company we see first hand what happens when people don’t upgrade WordPress and their is blog compromised. It’s is not pretty. It can take quite a while fix the damage and often people find out that Google considered their blog a security risk, blocking it from search.

If you’ve ignored the warnings and it’s too late, here’s information on how to recover from a compromised WordPress install.

The good news is that once you are running the latest version of WordPress you’ll be able to do one click automatic upgrades, making the process super easy.

While you are at it, check out these suggestions on how to harden WordPress to make it more secure.

NOTE: This attack only affects self-hosted installations of WordPress. Blogs on WordPress.com are automatically updated.

More Coverage: Slashdot, Mashable and TechCrunch.

photo by mattdork

ToorCon is organzing ToorCamp 2009, first ever full-scale hacker camp in the United States, which takes place July 2nd-5th inside an abandoned Titan-1 Missile silo in Moses Lake, WA. mattdork shot a bunch of great photos of the missile silo.

Modeled after the camps in Holland and Germany, ToorCamp will focus on all of the technology topics that ToorCon has become famous for but will expand out into other areas of society. ToorCamp will offer 2 days of talks on many different topics — Security, Internet, Emerging Technologies, Hardware Hacking, and Privacy are just some of the areas we will be covering. ToorCamp will also feature 2 days of hands-on workshops on a multitude of different skills that you may have never found yourself interested in learning about before. Blacksmithing, Lock Picking, Orienteering, Logic Design, Archery — these are just a few of the topics you can expect.

Dan Tentler, one of our sys admins at Laughing Squid Web Hosting, is giving a talk at ToorCamp about “Peoplehacking 2.0 – Human information leakage, and buffer overflowing the brain”.

You can buffer overflow the human brain just as you would a rinky dink FTP program. You can identify if people are being evasive in responses and you can identify what emotions people are exhibiting based on their facial expressions and mannerisms.