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University of Washington physicist John Cramer is planning to send a photon 50 milliseconds into the past.

“Roughly put, Cramer is talking about the subatomic equivalent of arriving at the train station before you’ve left home, of winning the lottery before you’ve bought the ticket, of graduating from high school before you’ve been born — or something like that.”

UK Biometric passports cracked

Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert easily broke the security codes on the new UK biometric passports in 48 hours, using just £174 worth of RFID sniffer hardware and software.

“The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES – that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a ‘secret key’. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.”

Jack Palance dead

Veteran Hollywood actor Jack Palance has died, aged 87.

Following a distinguished career on stage and in movies, mostly in westerns playing villains, Palance picked his only Academy Award for a comedy, City Slickers, in 1991.

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