Poor Mojo's Newswire

A German security researcher who demonstrated last year that he could clone the computer chip in an electronic passport has revealed additional vulnerabilities in the design of the new documents and the inspection systems used to read them.

Lukas Grunwald, an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport consultant to the German parliament, says the security flaws allow someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.

Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to approve expired or forged passports.

Sitting next to an office printer could be as bad for your health as passive smoking, according to new research. Researchers at the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, tested the emissions from 62 laser printers and found that 27% of them emitted high levels of particulate pollution when in use. Lidia Morawska and her colleagues focused on particles less than a micrometre in diameter. These are not easily filtered out by the lungs and are suspected of causing long-term health problems.

Counterfeiters be warned: banknotes may soon be harder to fake thanks to a new iridescent film that changes colour when you turn or twist it. The polymer film mimics the structure of naturally occurring opals (pictured) and could be used to make eye-catching paint that shimmers when viewed from any direction, or food packaging that changes colour if its contents spoil. Butterfly wings and opals have already inspired the creation of make-up and paints with the same flickering, iridescent colours. These qualities spring from photonic crystals, whose atoms sit in a three-dimensional repeating pattern, similar to a stack of egg boxes. This structure blocks certain wavelengths of light at some viewing angles, while other wavelengths zip through. As a result, the crystals change colour, or shimmer, as the viewer's perspective changes.

A computer vision system that automatically counts the number of people inside a vehicle could make it easier to charge road tolls based upon the number of occupants, and monitor high-occupancy vehicle lanes, researchers say. The system uses infrared light to detect human skin, and a computerised facial recognition system to double-check. Its inventor, John Tyrer of Loughborough University, UK, claims the system is 95% accurate. "The step-change technology is the ability to look inside a car and count people," Tyrer says. Previous systems have used cameras and computer algorithms to spot the number of faces through the windscreen of a car. But these systems have run into two problems. Firstly, it can be hard to get a good look through glass, especially at night, and secondly, the systems can easily be fooled by a mannequin or a photograph of a face, which unethical drivers might have used to beat the system.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners. "We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would," said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study. "In addition to the rage, bloodlust, and hatred we already know to dominate the Iraqi emotional spectrum, it appears that they may have some capacity, however limited, for sadness." Though Pryztal was quick to add that more detailed analysis is needed, he said the findings cast some doubt on long-held assumptions about human nature in that region.