Hasta La Gadget!

Not sure how you feel about those airport scanners that reveal your bits and pieces to under-paid guards? We think they make air travel rather titillating, but perhaps you’ll be more comfortable with a conceptual scanner that skips your fleshy bits entirely and looks only at your bones. Being developed by a team of researchers at Wright State University, such a scanner could use existing technology to detect the skeletal structure of a person. The idea is that a person’s bony bits are unique and, unlike one’s face, impossible to disguise (short of some serious surgery). If a database of registered criminals and suspects could be created they could be identified with such a scanner, in theory even at a distance, far more reliably than via facial scan. Right now it’s just a concept, but the idea is to have a working prototype by next year. After that, nobody’s clavicles will be safe.

Conceptual airport identifier skips your naughty bits, scans straight to the bone originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Intel acquires McAfee for $7.68 billion

Intel acquires McAfee for $7.68 billion originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GPUs democratize brute force password hacking originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fast food connoisseurs should pay special attention here — according to a recent paper by the University of Pennsylvania, Android users are inadvertently leaving their nine-dot lock patterns in the open, courtesy of their fingers’ oily smear on the screen. Specifically, the study on potential “smudge attacks” found that partial or complete patterns could be easily retrieved — even with added noise on the display or after incidental clothing contact — by using various lighting and camera orientation settings for the smear analysis. Should we be surprised? No. But should our phones be getting Froyo sooner for the extra PIN and QWERTY password options? Hell yeah.

Shocker: Touchscreen smudge may give away your Android password pattern originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As both enterprises and everyday users invest in whole-drive encryption software and struggle to make sure that the hard drives in their laptops and desktops are properly wiped clean of all data before they’re disposed of, Toshiba has unveiled new disk features that may make the process of upgrading to a new computer easier for home and business users alike.

Toshiba announced Wipe Technology, a new feature that their line of Self-Encrypting Drives would now come with, which allows users and IT administrators to safely and securely erase user data, or simply erase the drive’s encryption key (thus rendering the data unusable) before disposing of a system or re-using it.

The technology is aimed at businesses that want the ability to quickly clean hard drives before re-deploying them, selling them, or destroying them. Wipe can also wind up being very useful for consumers who want to keep their data safe and encrypted while they travel, but then make sure their drive is clean before they give their old laptop to a friend or family member.

[via SlashGear]