ID Cards

The minions of the rancorous thug seem to have got wise to the fact that people will be trying to renew their passports before ID Cards come into force so that they can avoid being forced onto the Stasi database. The Passport office has remove the note that you can renew your passport early for any reason from their website, leaving only a note that implies that you can only renew it if it has only 9 months left.

It is not all doom however. Phil Zimmerman, of PGP fame, has release a new peice of software for encrypted voice over IP. It uses AES 256 and 3000 bit public key encryption for key exchange. You can even, like PGP, examine the source code to make sure the it does not contain any nasties yourself. One particually elegant part of this system is the way that it avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.

Once that happens, and the caller on the other end also has Zfone installed, the interface cleanly indicates that the call is secure. It also displays two different three-character codes. One party reads his code, e.g. "CF8," while the other says hers, "TKP."

This bit of cloak-and-dagger isn't just fun, it helps prevents what is known as a man-in-the-middle attack, in which an eavesdropper sits between two callers, intercepting their cryptographic keys and then relaying the communications between them. If someone tries that with Zfone, the spoken codes won't match what the callers see on their screens.

New Labour might have outlawed encryption with RIPA but this little tool should certianly help against the prying eyes of the UK Secret Police.

There has also been another release of Freenet, a peer to peer system for entrinsically anonymous file sharing.