Technology

MORE bad news for electronic

voting machines. Accused in the

US of flaws that could allow one

voter to cast many votes, the

systems have now been branded a

threat to democracy in the UK.

Trials of e-voting machines

and optical scanners used to

count paper ballots were held

during local elections last month

in England and Scotland. In a

report into the trials released last

week, the London-based Open

Rights Group says it cannot

express confidence in the results

of ballots which use such systems.

Observers spotted a host of

problems with e-voting machines,

including insecure software, error

messages and poorly designed

encoded receipts. Malfunctions

and software errors delayed

counts using optical scanners and,

in some cases, electronic counts

differed widely from manual ones.

WANT to blow up a satellite? It’s

easier than you might think.

China recently boosted fears of

a war zone developing in space by

shooting down one of its own

satellites. In response, Adrian

Gheorghe at Old Dominion

University in Norfolk, Virginia,

led an investigation into whether

any group with access to an

intermediate-range ballistic

844attacks on US Department of Homeland Security computer systems were launched in 2005 and 2006, including virus infections and malware

“Truly a case of the biter bit.” That was

the response of computer security

researcher Ross Anderson at the University

of Cambridge to reports last week that

the French national security agency

(SGND) has banned government

ministers from using their BlackBerry

PDAs. The agency says phone calls and

emails routed through BlackBerry servers

in the US and UK are too easy to intercept.

Leaving aside the fact that

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion

has its servers in the UK and Canada,

not the US, Anderson is bemused by the

SGND’s sudden concern for digital

security. It was French opposition to

strong cryptographic algorithms that

left calls from all GSM cellphones,

including BlackBerries, vulnerable to

eavesdropping. “The delicious irony in

this is that the A5 algorithms used to

encrypt GSM traffic came from France

and are now fairly easy to break. It was

the French authorities who pressed

harder than anyone for the strength of

generally available cryptography to be

limited during the 1990s,” he says.

So if Echelon – the signals

intelligence operation of the US, UK,

Australia, Canada and New

Zealand governments – wanted to hear

what French ministers were saying on

their BlackBerries, they’d have the

French government to thank for making

it easier. A million dollars’ worth of

electronics can break GSM keys “in

under a minute”, Anderson says.

However, RIM security chief Scott

Totzke says BlackBerry email is harder to

crack since it uses AES256, a far stronger

cryptographic algorithm than that used

for GSM voice calls.

FRENCH SAY ‘NON’ TO BLACKBERRY

missile could do the same.

They used the satellite-tracking

program Orbitron, available on the

internet, to select their satellite

and accurately predict its orbit.

This was linked to a flight-control

simulator that allowed them

to launch, track and correct the

trajectory of their virtual missile,

successfully simulating the

Chinese shoot-down (International Journal of Critical Infrastructure,

vol 3, p 457). “It is doable with basic

knowledge and off-the-shelf

information,” Gheorghe concludes.

The next rover to trundle around Mars will be fitted with its own ray gun. NASA’s Mars

Science Laboratory, due to be launched in 2009, will carry a device called ChemCam

that will vaporise rocks up to 9 metres away with a beam of laser light. It will analyse

the light emitted by the resulting plasma to identify what the rock is made of.

Hard-to-recycle polymers like nylon and Kevlar can be broken down into their

chemical building blocks. Unlike many plastics, these materials cannot easily be

heated and remoulded into pellets for reuse. Chemists Akio Kamimura and Shigehiro

Yamamoto at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan, mixed nylon with a quaternary

ammonium salt and a catalyst, and heated the mixture to 300 °C. This converted

86 per cent of the nylon into caprolactam, which can be used to make fresh polymer.

GIZMOSTEREO VISIONThe number of 3D movie screens is expected

to soar worldwide, most of all in the US

Stuart Gitlow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, on a debate at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting on 24 June over whether to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alchoholism. Delegates decided more research is needed (Chicago Tribune, 25 June).

“If it wasn’t an addiction with baseball and cars, it isn’t with games”

–Eavesdropping is a cinch–

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E-vote of no confidence

Skies open to satellite shooters

www.newscientist.com 30 June 2007 | NewScientist | 25

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