Flaws in Tor anonymity net­work spot­lighted. At the Chaos Com­puter Club Con­gress in Berlin, Ger­many on Mon­day, researchers from the Uni­ver­sity of Regens­burg deliv­ered a new warn­ing about the Tor anonymizer net­work, a sys­tem aimed at hid­ing details of a com­puter user’s online activ­ity from spy­ing eyes.

The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activ­ity an open book, but offers the abil­ity for some­one on the same local network—a Wi-Fi net­work provider, or an ISP work­ing at law enforce­ment (or a régime’s) request, for example—to gain a poten­tially good idea of sites an anony­mous surfer is view­ing. [Ars Tech­nica]

There are things users can do to pro­tect them­selves. From the article:

Users them­selves can guard against this type of fingerprint-based eaves­drop­ping rel­a­tively eas­ily, Her­rmann noted. Down­load­ing or request­ing more than one site at a time through the net­work will muddy the pat­tern enough that cer­tainty will be very dif­fi­cult for the eaves­drop­per to establish.

And from one of the comments:

This attack should be sig­nif­i­cantly less effec­tive as well if the tar­get in ques­tion is a fully func­tional and qual­ity relay­ing node. In that case other peo­ple access­ing through the node would ran­dom­ize things sig­nif­i­cantly, and their access would be impos­si­ble to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from a local user with­out the kind of phys­i­cal access that makes the entire thing moot.

You know you’re watch­ing a stu­pid Hol­ly­wood movie when a guy wakes up to find a baby polar bear lick­ing his face, and the guy doesn’t die a really grue­some death the next minute when the baby’s giant angry car­niv­o­rous mother doesn’t show up to tear him to shreds. I real­ize they’re cute when seen from a dis­tance (prefer­ably a very large dis­tance), but the real­ity is that polar bears are incred­i­bly dangerous.

For­eign Exchange Stu­dent Dies After Fight With Class­mate. A Korean for­eign exchange stu­dent has died fol­low­ing a fight with a class­mate at Sylmar’s First Lutheran High School. The Los Ange­les Police Depart­ment explain that the squab­ble began on Tues­day after­noon as a ver­bal dis­pute regard­ing cul­tural dif­fer­ences that turned into a phys­i­cal fight that proved fatal.

19-year-old Jin Su Lee sus­tained severe brain dam­age dur­ing the fight with his 17-year-old class­mate, also a Korean for­eign exchange stu­dent. [LAist]

I real­ize that jour­nal­ism is all about the mind­less regur­gi­ta­tion of press releases, and any­one who devi­ates from the pro­gram by ask­ing awk­ward ques­tions risks los­ing access to future press releases, but that leads to pretty ridicu­lous news sto­ries. For exam­ple, the obvi­ous (and appar­ently imper­mis­si­ble) ques­tion here is: what “dis­pute regard­ing cul­tural dif­fer­ences” arose between these two peo­ple from the same culture?