I guess most people have been led to believe this new generation of ePassports or biometric passports are more secure, will help us keep our privacy intact and help us mitigate against identity theft.
Well how wrong the propaganda is! THC (famous for their tools and research in security) has just released some technical information, tools [...]

thc-Amap (Application MAPper) is another excellent tool more towards banner grabbing and protocol detection than OS-fingerprinting. But from the services running on a machine you can get a good idea of the OS and the purpose of the server.
Amap is a next-generation scanning tool for pentesters. It attempts to identify applications even if they are [...]

THC-Hydra rocks, it’s pretty much the most up to date and currently developed password brute forcing tool around at the moment.
It supports a LOT of services and protocols too.
Number one of the biggest security holes are passwords, as every password security study shows. Hydra is a parallelized login cracker which supports numerous protocols to attack. [...]

I have to agree with their sentiment, I’m all for open hardware standards.
Even if you don’t open it, people will copy it anyway (See the mass of Cisco knock-offs in China for a fraction of the price with almost exactly the same functions and IOS).

So why not open it, let us play with it.
At least [...]