Its rare that a hacker convention makes national news, but three MIT students caused a whole lot of controversy when they planned a presentation about security holes in Boston's subway system for DefCon in Las Vegas earlier this month. They were forced to cancel the talk at the last minute by a 10-day federal restraining order, requested by Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA). On Tuesday, a judge denied motions by the MBTA to issue a preliminary injunction aimed at keeping the students quiet for a further five months. Now, in his most extensive interview to date, MIT subway hacker Zack Anderson talks with PM about what's wrong with the Charlie Card, what happened at DefCon, and what it's like to tango with the FBI and the MBTA.

Perspectives is a new approach to help clients securely identify Internet servers in order to avoid "man-in-the-middle" attacks. Perspectives is simple and cheap compared to existing approaches because it automatically builds a robust database of network identities using lightweight network probing by "network notaries" located in multiple vantage points across the Internet.
The extension provides two primary benefits:
   1. If you connect to a website with an untrusted (e.g.,self-signed certificate)*, Firefox will give you a very nasty security error and force you to manually install an exception. Perspectives can detect whether a self-signed certificate is valid, and automatically overrides the annoying security error page if it is safe to do so.
   2. It is possible that an attacker may trick one of the many Certificate Authorities trusted by Firefox into incorrectly issuing a certificate for a trusted website. Perspectives can also detect this attack and will warn you if things look suspicious.

Twenty-four contestants compete in an endurance/sleep deprivation contest in order to win a brand new Nissan Hardbody truck. The last person to remain standing with his or her hand on the truck wins. An absurd marketing gimmick at first glance, the contest proves to be much more...