Year: 2004
-
Diebold Looking for Help
A reliable source tells me that a headhunter, working for e-voting vendor Diebold, is calling security experts, trying to find somebody to help Diebold improve the security of their systems.
-
Monoculture
Lately, computer security researchers have been pointing out the risks of software monoculture. The idea is that if everybody uses the same software product, then a single virtual pathogen can wipe out the entire population, like Dutch Elm Disease mowing down a row of identical trees. A more diverse population would better resist infection. While…
-
California Lawsuit Against Diebold
A group of Californians has filed a lawsuit in state court against voting machine vendor Diebold, in advance of the March 2 primary election. The complaint asks the court to order Diebold to do three main things: (1) to refrain from further violations of state election laws and regulations, such as installing uncertified software for…
-
Comment Spam
I enabled user comments on this site several months ago, and on the whole I’ve been quite happy with the results. But I’ve had an increasing problem with comment spam, comments submitted to advertise products unrelated to my original postings. Many of these spam comments seem to be trying to leech off of my good…
-
U.S. Exports DMCA to Australia
Kim Weatherall notes that in the recent “Free Trade” Agreement between the U.S. and Australia, the Aussies agreed to implement a DMCA-like law, and to extend their term of copyright. Needless to say, these are both bad ideas. Kim offers a long post recounting the history of this issue in Australia. I only wonder what…
-
More Journal Editors Have Declared Independence
In response to my previous post about the revolt by the editors of the Journal of Algorithms, Peter Suber points out that journal editors have “declared independence” before, at least twelve times. Peter’s blog, Open Access News is a great source for news about the trend toward open access to scholarly publications.
-
NYT On "Hacking" Car Engines
In today’s New York Times, Jim Motavalli writes about people who tinker with, or replace, the software controlling their car engines. Some people do this to improve engine power or fuel efficiency, and some do it out of curiosity. In a now-standard abuse of terminology, the article labels this as “hacking”. Worse yet is this…
-
Windows Source Code Leaked?
Neowin is reporting that the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 has been leaked to the Internet. I haven’t looked at the code, and I won’t, so I can’t tell you whether the report is accurate. But based on the fragmentary information available, it appears more likely than not that the leak is…
-
Is BayTSP a Cyber-Trespasser?
Next week in my “IT and the Law” course, we’re discussing cyber-trespass. Reading the course materials got me to wondering whether BayTSP might be a cyber-trespasser. BayTSP is a small company that works for copyright holders, monitoring the contents of P2P networks. Among other things, they query individual computers on the P2P networks, to see…
-
"Hacking" Revisited
I wrote yesterday about the degradation of the term “hacking”. Today, the perfect illustration of my point turned up: a Hacker’s Hall of Fame published by The Learning Channel. It includes legitimate uber-programmers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with computer criminals like Kevin Mitnick and Vladimir Levin. Putting those guys on the same…