Hack The Planet

Not even a week after scientists discover how to fabricate DNA our next favorite criminal catcher, Stylometry, goes down for the count. How are all my favorite crime dramas going to catch their bad guys?

In every crime drama on TV (and there are a lot of them) one of the constants is that DNA evidence is king. Once the prosecution has the DNA of a person the show takes the dramatic twist and the person confesses to whatever crime is hot that week. Recently Ponzi schemes seem to be the big hit. The criminal justice system may need to reconsider what they consider their “gold standard of proof” because DNA evidence isn’t quite as strong as it used to be.

The really scary thing is that most of individuals that will make up the “jury of our peers” probably won’t have read this or understand that DNA can be fabricated. ‘You can just engineer a crime scene,’ said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper. ‘Any biology undergraduate could perform this.’

If you still felt safe John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.” So don’t worry about some average criminal planting your DNA at a crime scene. It would take someone like, maybe the government, to plant your DNA. As the Joker said, “Who do ya trust?”

This just in, you get what you pay for. I was just reading up on the latest case of free not being free with Digsby IM installing software that uses your system resources when idle. Digsby defended this by saying the software was free but just because something doesn’t cost any money up front doesn’t mean it is free. The disk space that the extra software is taking up costs money. The electricity and network connection costs money and the time it will take your brother, cousin or other random familial IT person to clean off your computer so that it doesn’t run slow after all of the free software you have installed isn’t free. Just remember, nothing is free.

The last week or so has been pretty rough for Twitter. Not only has Twitter been DOS’d a number of times and kicked offline but it also came out that hackers were using Twitter to control a botnet. It seems that Twitter isn’t just dangerous because of the amount of time you can waste but also because it can be used for data and identity theft. Of course with all of the fake Twitter accounts and the previous issue of Twitter accounts being hijacked because of a Twitter employee with a weak password it makes me wonder what type of future Twitter has. My guess is a good one because the normal citizen doesn’t care about security breaches, only about what the new hot hairstyle their favorite celebrity is wearing.