Category: Liberties

Ten questions with Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Dr. Philip Zimbardo was the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), where in 1971 in a fake environment students experiemented with the influence of the environment on the apparition of behaviours that are considered as highly anti-social (quite normal graduate students played the roles of guards and prisoner, and quickly -in 6 days- derailed…

Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?

Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure…

E-passports already failing at security tests

It did not take long: The electronic passport, that several countries actively defend (particularly the United States of America that tell us it will be the ultimate weapon against terrorists and frauders) and are preparing for full distribution, met a string of very significant problems last week in the Black Hat convention of Las Vegas.…