Category Archives: Security
So why is it difficult to properly legislate for Cyberspace?
Ryan Blitstein asks this question in a great article at the Mercury News, here is the link. To summarize, the difficulties include legislators who don’t understand the technology, as well as companies that fight good laws because the proposed law hurts their bottom line. Special interests, as usual, appear to have more sway than implementing [...]
Also posted in Internet Governance, Phishing Leave a comment
Detecting government spyware
Here’s an interesting article, written by Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache, entitled “Will security firms detect policy spyware?” There are currently no rules that specifically require companies to comply with requests for government spyware to be installed on users’ machines. There similarly is no current requirement for anti-spyware vendors to write software that doesn’t detect [...]
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Be Proactive: Know Your Systems and People Before Facing a Lawsuit
The following is an article I wrote about the recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and its impact on record keeping responsibilities and issues. —- As of December 1, 2006, the Federal Courts have adopted new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that explicitly acknowledge the fact that information that may be relevant [...]
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Arrogant hacker tracked down through Metadata
Here’s a funny development I’ll be watching closely. This week, a hacker who claimed to operate a remote ‘bot network of thousands of computers was interviewed in the Washington Post. That in itself wasn’t newsworthy enough for me to blog about it, as sadly there are many users who allow this to happen to their [...]
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Reviewing the FBI Computer Crime Survey 2005
The FBI’s Computer Crime Survey 2005 has been released. Thanks to BeSpacific for the link. At the time of this writing the survey itself is not accessible, but the summary of the findings can be found from the above link. In relevant part, the important findings are as follows: Frequency of attacks. Nearly nine out [...]
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Truly Anonymous Web Surfing: Realized on a CD?
In Wired News, Quinn Norton has an interesting article on an open source CD that contains a self-contained operating system. The purpose is to never actually use the hard drive of the machine while still allowing internet access, thereby leaving no fingerprints that the machine was used. The CD runs OpenBSD, but it disguises the [...]
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Out of the Box with Wireless
I’m writing this now on OpenOffice 2.01 with my new Acer Travelmate C200. Opening the box was cool, I was up and running within minutes. The only big hiccup came with the built-in power management software misinterpreting tablet mode as being the standard βLid’s closed, let’s power downβ mode. Luckily I was able to diagnose [...]
Victory declared: But is it really?
Mark Russinovich, over at Sysinternals, has declared victory over the rootkit embedded in the CD’s Sony has distributed. And, as Bruce Schneier points out in his excellent analysis, Mark has reason to be happy. It’s David v. Goliath. However, it’s not a total victory. There are untold numbers of machines still infected with the Sony [...]
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Firestorm over Sony DRM continues
So, just what was Sony thinking? Now that the first class-action lawsuit has been filed in California, I’m sure more details on that topic will eventually emerge. Since Sony licenses the software from First 4, it may not have known all of the niceties of just how the software worked. I would not be surprised [...]
Also posted in Audio, Cases Leave a comment
What does “search incident to arrest” mean today?