You know, I made a joke about streamlining Windows vulnerabilities with its new support of RSS, but maybe I wasn’t as far off the mark as I thought: “What inevitably happens with any new protocol, especially the ones with the word “simple” in them, is that developers try to come up with a way to…
Jim Baller of The Baller Herbst Law Group is the attorney representing both the municipalities that were targeted by a study by the Heartland Institute that aimed to show that municipal wireless/ISPs were a losing proposition. They have fought back against the studies claims, citing “mistakes, misinterpretations, unsupported and insupportable claims, irrelevancies, innuendos, key omissions…
Bruce Schneier notes that Seagate is now offering a hard drive that offers transparent encryption on the fly. It’s low on details, but it looks like it stores a key on the hard-drive itself (bad), but that it’s protected by a passphrase (good). This means that the passphrase is ultimately the weakness, obviously. All things…
Well, it’s official: Grokster and Streamcast lost the SCOTUS case: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that developers of software violate federal copyright law when they provide computer users with the means to share music and movie files downloaded from the Internet, at least when the software companies take “affirmative steps to foster infringement.” It seems…
An interesting partnership has developed between KDE and Wikipedia, in order to develop somewhat of an API for applications to snag content directly from Wikipedia: We want to provide our desktop users with a way to easily access Wikipedia content. At the same time we want to create a technology that developers of other projects…
Despite the fact that talks to agree on a standard more or less fizzled, evidently Microsoft has decided to implement sender-ID checking for Hotmail/MSN mail, effectively junking any message from a domain not implementing sender-ID. Seeing as how sender-ID has very little adoption so far, this bodes poorly for the number of false positives they…
An interesting article on eweek discusses a new strategy in fighting botnets: hunting for their ‘Command and Control’ servers — that is, the networks and computers that are sending them instructions. A wise target, to be sure. Botnets are becoming a huge problem. More and more viruses are being designed not to run rampant on…
Mytob is fast becoming a much-reviled wonderboy of the virus world, increasingly used in many variants: The Mytob worm, which first appeared in late February, is a mass-mailed worm that hijacks addresses from compromised PCs to spread using its own SMTP engine, drops a backdoor Trojan so more malicious code can be added to the…
Will the fun ever end? I continue to marvel at the extent to which security (or lack thereof) affects our lives. Now our mobile phones are not safe… eWeek’s writeup states: The latest mutant, identified as Skulls.L, pretends to be a pirated copy of the F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus application, a sign that virus writers targeting…
Tester’s get ready! An interview with Bog Muglia reveals some interesting facts about the upcoming Windows release, dubbed Longhorn. [Bob] Muglia reconfirmed that Longhorn Server Beta 1 will ship this summer, around the same time as Longhorn client Beta 1. And based on a comment from one of the Microsoft chat moderators, it sounds as…
