Fear cuts deeper than knives

This weekend, controversy surrounds the black hat/defcon security conferences once again. Students at MIT were slated to present on research on hacking the MTA farecard system (both magnetic stripe and RFID technologies), but a temporary restraining order granted this morning by a Boston judge has caused the cancellation of the talk. There have been several different cases of legal threats shutting down talks in the past few years — in fact, it almost seems a mandatory event every year now. However, RFID seems to have attracted it disproportionately now, with IOActive having been forced to pull a talk in a …