Throwing another lock on seems like the most logical way to secure an apartment—or a website. But a new attack called "Man in the Browser" allows attackers who have infected a computer with malicious software to get around the bank website security systems that demand, for example, a pin in addition to a password.

A BBC investigation uncovered the vulnerability. Once an attacker has access to the browser, they can ask a user to enter their authentication code or password into an inappropriate field as part of an effort to "train a new security system." If the user falls for it, the attacker gets full access to the bank's website, and can even obscure withdrawals of funds.

This points to a larger issue, says security technology OG Bruce Schneier: All security solutions that consist of adding another password or pin to the process are attempts to authenticate that a person is who they say they are, when the only real solution is to authenticate the transaction itself.

That means what all bank and other secured websites need are elaborate fraud-detection algorithms akin to those used by the financial industry to secure credit cards. Credit cards are easily forged, but it doesn't matter, in part because banks prevent fraud by examining activity rather than trying to directly verify that a credit card is being used by its rightful owner.

New Hanover County, North Carolina, just rolled out Super Wi-Fi, which is its actual name, not just a patronizing euphemism I'm deploying because I think you can't handle "a new Wi-Fi standard operating in the 'white spaces' between 50-700Mhz, where previously only television stations were allowed to transmit."

Aside: here's a very accessible primer on what Super Wi-Fi is and why you should care about it.

This could mean super fast wireless connections for the county's residents, and also the potential to connect to Wi-Fi towers that are miles distant—something that is impossible with conventional Wi-Fi, mostly because the power of normal Wi-Fi transmitters are limited by the FCC.

From the press release:

Wilmington was the first city in 2008 to make the successful transition from Analog to Digital Television. As a result of this transition, the city had early access to the broadcast spectrum “white spaces” that emerged from the shift. These white spaces are ideal for Super Wi-Fi deployment since their physical properties allow for stronger signals that provide better penetration and allow Wi-Fi to travel further distances than more common, traditional Wi-Fi networks. A subsequent trial of the Super Wi-Fi network took place in 2011.

There's a bunch more in the release about how Super Wi-Fi is the greatest thing since penicillin, but I have to temper the hype a bit by referring to an earlier piece in Tech Review by Scott Woolley that notes that Super Wi-Fi can't really live up to its full potential, at least as a medium for long distance connectivity.

Under government rules designed to protect local TV stations from harmful interference, high-power Super Wi-Fi signals (up to four watts), which can travel for miles, must give TV channels a wide berth. Low-power Super Wi-Fi signals (less than 40 milliwatts) face fewer restrictions.

The result is that while there are 48 channels potentially available for long-range Super Wi-Fi, zero or one channel will be available for long-range use in the places most Americans live—so Super Wi-Fi networks significantly bigger than today's home Wi-Fi networks won't be practical.

So it turns out that most of the spectrum that the FCC was trying to free up for Super Wi-Fi remains unavailable. That hasn't stopped companies like Microsoft from creating WiFi hardware that could take advantage of a theoretically more-liberal policy on the part of the FCC, so hopefully this is one case in which the technology will push lawmakers to act.

For more on this rollout, check out New Hanover County, N.C., First in Nation to Deploy ‘Super Wi-Fi’ Network.

CNC toaster / 2D thermal printer cc Windell Oskay

Update: Tim Maly has published an excellent counterpoint to this post over at the Tech Review Guest blog.

There is a species of magical thinking practiced by geeks whose experience is computers and electronics—realms of infinite possibility that are purposely constrained from the messiness of the physical world—that is typical of Singularitarianism, mid-90s missives about the promise of virtual reality, and now, 3-D printing.

As 3-D printers come within reach of the hobbyist—$1,100 for MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic—and The Pirate Bay declares "physibles" the next frontier of piracy, I'm seeing usually level-headed thinkers like Clive Thompson and Tim Maly declare that the end of shipping is here and we should all start boning up on Cory Doctorow's science fiction fantasies of a world in which any object can be rapidly synthesized with a little bit of energy and raw materials.

This isn't just premature, it's absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what's going on at present is pretty cool—whether it's in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces.

But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a "mature" technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter.

Let's start with the mechanism. Most 3-D printers lay down thin layers of extruded plastic. That's great for creating cheap plastic toys with a limited spatial resolution. But printing your Mii or customizing an iPhone case isn't the same thing as firing ceramics in a kiln or smelting metal or mixing lime with sand at high temperatures to produce glass—unless you'd like everything that's currently made from those substances to be replaced with plastic, and there are countless environmental, health, and durability reasons you don't.

Advocates of 3-D printing also neglect entirely the fact that so much of what we use continues to be made out of natural substances, and for good reason. By any number of measures, wood is pound-for-pound stronger than steel, and the move toward natural products for packaging suggests that the strength and affordability of paper, bamboo and even mushrooms mean that in the future there will be more and not less of all of these.

The desire for 3-D printing to take over from traditional manufacturing needs to be recognized for what it is: an ideology. Getting all of our goods from a box in the corner of our home has attractive implications, from mass customization to "the end of consumerism." With stakes like those, who wouldn't want to be a true believer?

Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I'll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact.

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