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I originally switched to Suntrust primarily because I was fed up with First Tennessee’s online banking system and Suntrust’s was much better.

They have made a lot of changes recently, and I am considering switching again, namely because Suntrust’s site has gone from bad to worse over the last year, both in matters of web-design and in security (or lack thereof). Among my problems:

I am not much of a developer, but here are some interesting posts on programming that ought to get some people riled up:

• Why PHP Sucks
• and Why Web Programming Matters Most (with respect to Python)

Duane weighs in on Mozilla’s recent decision (detailed here) over at the CACert blog.

F-Secure has a story about a new virus:

Fantibag.B is a trojan that installs a packet filter for preventing of downloading AV companies database updates and security patches. It is related to recent Bagle/Mitglieder trojans.

Pretty evil.

Better get your ssh tunnels and GPG keys in order, because big brother is watching:

The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities.

Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs–that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.

Ian Grigg has some harsh words for Mozilla’s security processes:

JEP-00072 SOAP Over SMPP has been released. Looks pretty cool. SOAP is, as the JEP says, “agnostic” about its transport protocol, although it’s typically used over HTTP. Using it over XMPP might have some interesting possibilities.

Microsoft has released this Package Installer thing that supposedly significantly reduces the size of updates. I continue to find myself wondering why something like bittorrent isn’t used for this.

On the heels of the lawsuits filed by AMD vs. Intel, analysts are starting to wonder about how this might affect Apple’s decision to go with Intel:

Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner Inc., headquartered in Stamford, Conn, agreed, saying, “The lawsuit should have no effect on Apple.”

“However,” he said, “it does raise the question of why Apple selected Intel over AMD. There was no existing business, so there can be no possibility of coercion based on rebates. It isn’t too presumptuous to assume that Apple made the decision based on the facts that AMD and Intel offered.”

Scoble and others are starting to talk about the security ramifications of RSS in Longhorn:

Developers should expect to discuss RSS security at Microsoft’s upcoming Professional Developers Conference, to be held in Los Angeles this September, said Robert Scoble, a Microsoft technical evangelist writing in a recent Web log posting. “This is something we all need to do a lot of thinking and work on,” he said.