German hackers have constructed a route around the great firewall of China. The Chaos Computer Club said its technology will help athletes and journalists travelling to Beijing for the Olympic Games to circumvent censorship.

Visitors to China are being offered USB sticks containing a browser that connects via the TOR proxy network.

Chaos Computer Club is offering the technology partly to offer an easy way around Chinese censorship restriction but also to make a political point much closer to home.

Microchipped passports designed to have watertight security can actually be cloned in a matter of minutes.

A computer researcher was able to clone the chips on two British passports. They then implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The tampered chips were then passed as real by passport reader software used by the United Nations agency that sets standards for the e-passports.

These tests flag up several interesting and somewhat alarming points: They undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week are useless as they can't be cloned, they also raise questions on the £4 billion spent by the government on ID cards which use the same technology.

In one of the more colossal security blunders in a long time, an unencrypted laptop containing sensitive information for 33,000 travelers has been reported stolen from San Francisco International Airport.

Officials with Transportation Security Administration say the laptop was discovered missing from a locked room more than a week ago, but unbelievably, they weren't warned until Sunday.

As if the lack of encryption and a tardy warning weren't enough, the company's CEO, Steven Brill, dismissed the incident as a simple burglary of a laptop. "For it to be more than that, the thief would have to hack into two different passwords - and even then would not get what identity thieves want most - a Social Security number and/or credit card information."

The federal judge who presided over the nation's only peer-to-peer copyright-infringement trial announced from the bench here Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial.

At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone.

The judge's decision, which he said would be issued "hopefully before the end of September," is likely to have wide-ranging implications in the RIAA's file-sharing litigation campaign -- 20,000 lawsuits and counting.

For a long time, Hushmail was considered a very secure email provider until an affidavit (PDF) from a DEA agent in 2007 showed that they had handed over 12 CDs of possibly decrypted data to law enforcement. Now, Cryptome has posted that the Hushmail encryption program is no longer the same program for which Hushmail releases their source. Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?