This British wonder-mobile will not only traverse any terrain, it can actually take to the sky using a rear propeller and a flexible ram-air wing.

The designers of the Skycar, who plan to take it on a 3,700-mile land-air expedition from London to Timbuktu in January, 2009, say that it only needs 200 meters to take off and can achieve the airspeed of 100 mph. And if building the first legitimate flying car weren't enough, Skycar creators decided to power it with cleaner-burning ethanol which feeds the 140-hp road-certified engine.

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Researchers at a security conference this week announced a new form of attack against WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), a popular form of security for wireless networks. The attack is not a complete compromise and not reason to panic, but it does bode ill for wireless hardware that's not particularly recent. The attacks may get more sophisticated over time.

It's well-known that the original security mechanism for Wi-Fi, known as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), is trivially breakable. When this became known the industry hobbled together WPA as a stopgap standard while work proceeded on the 802.11i standard, in which everyone had a lot more confidence.

WPA employed a modified version of WEP called TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), which defeated all the known attacks against WEP, but which was designed to work on hardware that supported WEP. Later on, when 802.11i was in final form it was released as WPA2, employing the much more secure AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and other improvements, and requires new hardware support, as opposed to just a firmware upgrade.

The new attack is against WPA, also known as WPA1, and specifically against TKIP. It does not allow an attacker to read encrypted data on the network, but it does allow him, after 12 to 15 minutes of access and analysis, to decrypt certain network control messages (ARP requests and responses), and to send 7 packets with custom content to the network. This could, in theory, allow him to compromise the network.

WPA2 with AES is not vulnerable to this attack. Wireless hardware with WPA2 and AES has been available for some time now and has been considered best practice, at least in business environments, but not urgently so. Probably the large majority of wireless routers and adapters in consumer and small business installations today do not support WPA2. Even for those that do, many, if not most, default to TKIP instead of AES because the more widespread support of it makes it more likely that the configuration will work. A few, such as the Apple Airport, default to using AES, and Windows Vista will attempt to use it too, but most wireless hardware will attempt to use TKIP first.

This attack is not an easy one to commit. It requires some analysis time, so you can't do it in a drive-by. Someone physically nearby, a neighbor perhaps, could commit it, but at this point it has to be considered one of those things where they have easier ways to compromise your network if they want to. In the future you should make sure to buy only wireless hardware that supports WPA2/AES and look into moving your network to it, but there's no particular reason to panic.

A business is different, especially if sensitive data traverses the network. For you, the migration to WPA/AES just became a more urgent matter, even if you have other security issues which are more pressing. Make a note that this needs to be dealt with.

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Microsoft’s Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It’s now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. They’re also launching Windows Live Photos and Windows Live People, and other services. Check it out at Home.Live.com.

Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on Windows Live Messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (Comscore: Microsoft Messenger has 268 million worldwide users, compared to 116 million for Yahoo and 6 million for Google Talk).

Users are asked to build out their profile, and can also bring in content they create on blogs (or any RSS feeds, Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, iLike, Twitter, Wordpress and Yelp. When you do something new on those sites, the information flows into Live.com for your friends to see (in a very similar way as FriendFeed, Plaxo and others do today). Eventually, says Microsoft, more than 50 partners will be supported. When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into the activity stream as well.

The hope, of course, is to get people to hang out a lot more at Live.com. At least those people who use Messenger, since they already have their contacts established. Like Yahoo, Microsoft is going with its strengths, which in their case is instant messaging.

Live.com users can now access a variety of online services like mail, calendar, photos, online storage, etc., as well as Download Services that include a mail client, instant messaging, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, the Toolbar and other services. And now it’s also one big social network.

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