Hacker Mitnick sells laptops

Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick says he is coming clean and plans to auction off the laptops he used during his fugitive years in the 1990s, reports Reuters. Mitnick also says he intends to write a book. The hacker, who was on the run from the FBI for three years, hacked into networks along the way including those of Motorola, Sun Microsystems and Nokia, as well as the computer scientist who helped in his capture. He was eventually nabbed in February 1995 and subsequently held for four-and-a-half years without bail. Now Mitnick is flogging his Toshiba 1960CS, his laptop of the time, on eBay. The other laptop is also for sale and is described as having a "fine layer of fingerprint dust", red X marks where fingerprints were lifted and a mouse still housed in an FBI evidence bag. The computers are signed on the bottom by Mitnick and Steve Wozniak, who wrote: "You`ve got the whole world in your hands. - Woz (Free Kevin!)" Mitnick previously auctioned off his prison ID cards on Dutchbid.com after eBay, Amazon and Yahoo refused to let him sell on their Web sites.

A team of scientists have made a major leap forward in secure global communications by sending a key for deciphering coded information over a record 14.5 miles, reports Reuters. Keys are random strings of numbers needed to encode and decode sensitive data. The team, from QinetiQ, the commercial arm of Britain`s defence research agency, together with researchers from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, sent the key between two mountains in Germany as photons of light using optical fibres. If a key has been intercepted and read, it changes the state of the photon so the recipient knows it has been intercepted. If keys are sent electronically, they could be intercepted and no one would know. "It is quite a technical challenge to point a beam of this sort of low-intensity light over long distances. The great technical challenge is to try to do it between moving things like a satellite," says John Rarity, a researcher at QinetiQ.