Posts by Gary Calder

antenna design?

>At the heart of the complaints are 18 patents covering, in Motorola's words, "wireless >communication technologies, such as WCDMA (3G), GPRS, 802.11 and antenna design,

Ah yes, Motorola's famous patented antenna design for mobile phones. You know, the one that doesn't work when you hold the phone. Duh!

Expensive, proprietary

Let me see, AlertMe want 70 quid, plus 3 quid a month for the priviledge to send my consumption data to Google, with no way of viewing the data on an LCD locally.

Why would I ever do this, when for 40 quid (ok plus 8 quid for the USB data cable) I get a local display and a documented XML data feed plus some free apps for the history data using the Envi from CurrentCost.

At this rate, they'll be calling Bill Gates a philanthropist. Oh, hang on...

100 zipped files on 2 CDs, password protected

Speculate no more:

the BBC have published some of the correspondence and emails:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/Informationrelatingtochildbenefitdata.pdf

It refers to a previous request which was sent in 100 zipped files on 2 CDs, and to send the password(s) in a separate email.

At this point you hope they used winzip v9 or later (with AES, or 7zip) and non-short password(s). Winzip v9 gives a max effective key length of 160 bits whether 128,192 or 256 bit AES key length is used (uses HMAC-SHA1, 1000 iterations, in a key derivation function -see RFC2898). Crack programs available will struggle with anything more than short password when faced with a zip encrypted using AES.

Unfortunately, it's more likely that Windows XP own built in zip was used which I think just uses the old (non AES, more easily cracked) Zip 2.0 compatible password protection.