(Update: By total coincidental timing, the VA executive featured in this episode, Charles Ogilvie, announced today he's moving on from VA to do something that sounds equally cool with tech and entertainment. Details at the bottom of the post.)

[Xeni Jardin]: Last week, the Boing Boing tv crew was in San Francisco shooting a few upcoming episodes, and our friends at Virgin America (BBtv is shown on the in-flight entertainment system) invited us to come wander around behind security, and peek at the nuts and bolts that are the tech underpinnings of this airline.

They're about to launch in-flight wireless internet soon, and they're holding a competition for open source games, the winners of which will be available for people to play in-flight (entries are still being accepted).

Virgin America's head of in-flight entertainment, Charles Ogilvie, brought us on board a plane that was empty and at rest between flights. We poked around with the computers and displays (all Linux!) and we tried to IM our friends using the pilot's controls in the cockpit. This did not work so well.

My favorite part of this shoot: driving a VA pickup truck around between the resting airplanes, and peeking into the giant abyss where your bags are shuffled around on giant conveyor belt systems, hopefully towards your plane and final destination.

(Disclaimers: BBtv is an in-flight entertainment partner with Virgin, but BBtv doesn't receive compensation for this. VA once asked Boing Boing to name a plane, and we did, but we weren't paid for this, either. VA has previously been a paid sponsor on Boing Boing the blog. This episode isn't an ad, and we weren't paid to produce it. All of us at BBtv sincerely thought this stuff was cool, and that Charles Ogilvie is a cool guy with interesting ideas, and we had a blast goofing around where the TSA folks generally do not permit one to goof. )

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Update, 07-03-08: BBtv learned today that Charles Ogilvie is moving on from Virgin America. We're bummed we won't be working with him there anymore! The timing of this episode and his move are totally coincidental, we weren't aware. Here's the note from VA CEO David Cush, after the jump, and congrats on your next adventures, Charles!

The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. Boing Boing tv's hidden cameras captured everything.

And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.

The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote.

Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom.

Xeni visits the offices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and speaks with Jake Appelbaum and Bill Paul, two of the authors of a security research paper that shows how your computer's memory can be tricked into revealing data you thought was safely encrypted, and out of the reach of others.

One method involves using a can of compressed air to quickly cool the memory chip, but freezing the target isn't the only way to lull it into submission -- Paul shows us how to use an iPod or a USB thumb drive to do the same thing. These methods have been shown to defeat three popular disk encryption products commonly used to protect data on laptops: BitLocker (Windows Vista), FileVault (MacOS X), and dm-crypt (Linux).

Here's the entire text of the report draft, released earlier this year: Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys . Authors: J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten.

The team plan to research additional software tools and a final version of their report at Usenix Security Symposium in July/August.

Special thanks to Seth Schoen and Peter Eckersley of the EFF.