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Posts tagged as “security”

Chrome Clamps Down, Bitcoin Vulnerability & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Swiss cloud with, presumably, no holes

Back when the Edward Snowden brouhaha first began, we said that this was going to have serious repercussions on the tech sector here in the United States, especially after it became evident that Microsoft was actively working with the spooks by allegedly designing back doors into their operating system and keeping federal intelligence agents informed about unpatched security holes that could be used against foreign governments and “terrorist,” which now days seems to be everyone who doesn’t work for the NSA, FBI or CIA.

Swisscom logoBrazil is already spending big bucks in an effort to make sure that no Internet cable entering their country goes anywhere near the US of A and is working to pass laws to make sure all Brazilian businesses use only servers located in-country. Similar efforts are underway in Europe, most notably in France and Germany.

Now the frugal Swiss are jumping on board, and they rightfully intend to profit from our stupidity by taking advantage of their strong privacy laws.

WordPress Becomes Big Brother & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Is Netflix coming soon to a Linux near you?

Saurav Modak at Muktware was observant enough to note last week that Netflix is now offering-up programming with a choice heretofore unavailable. For the time being they’re still pretty much married to Microsoft’s dead or dying Silverlight, but they’ve taken HTML5 on as a lover. This gives users of the popular movie outlet a choice that, at the very least, should make things easier for Linux users who insist on using the Netflix service:

“Although hackers have already made a workaround to stream Netflix videos in Linux machines, performance is generally low and video playback is not hassle free. Some workarounds include running the entire browser in Wine, or running a Silverlight plugin in Wine and make it compatible with the browser. But all of them come at a cost of performance. Switching to HTML5 from Silverlight will greatly reduce all these hassles, as all you will need is a latest standard compatible browser to stream movies and TV shows. This will also allow support for mobile devices and tablets which are adopting more HTML5 standards day by day.”

PHP Attacked, the Shuttleworth Tea Party & More…

FOSS Week in Review

NSA: Locking the barn door after the horse is stolen

On Monday, Reuters reported in an exclusive story that the NSA had failed to install some super duper software meant specifically to protect the agency from inside threats at the site in Hawaii where Eric Snowden downloaded thousands of classified documents. In other words, after spending who knows how much taxpayer money developing internal security software, made by Raytheon by the way, and getting it installed and tweaked at NSA installations everywhere, little Eric Snowden was shuffled off to one of the only, if not the only, locations where internal security wasn’t in place. In hindsight, this made the NSA akin to two lengths of case hardened steel chain being bound together by a link made from a paper clip.

Windows Becomes Freeware, Adobe Cracked & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Adobe hacked

We’ve known for years that Adobe doesn’t seem to have a knack for keeping their products secure. New vulnerabilities are found almost daily in Reader and Flash, so much so that Windows users grow used to the constant updates required of them by the fine folks at Adobe. Now it appears as if the San Jose based company can’t keep their servers secure either.

Last Friday, The Australian reported that black hats had managed to steal source code and sensitive customer information:

Phishing Scam Masquerades As LinkedIn Connection Request

We’ve noticed in the last week there’s a new email phishing campaign that uses emails masquerading as LinkedIn connection requests.

Although most tech savvy users long ago learned email best security practices (don’t click on links in emails unless you’re absolutely sure you know the source of the email), sometimes we get lulled into complacency and automatically click on links from trusted sources.

TOR Case Appears to Be Infringement of Rights

I shouldn’t have to say this, but child pornographers and users of child porn are scum and deserve just about any sentence meted out to them. This absolutely doesn’t mean, however, that we willy-nilly throw their rights out the window in order to catch them. Remember, in the United States we still claim to believe in the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” If they forgot to teach you that in school, Google it. Try “Bill of Rights” as your search term.

With that out of the way, let’s get into our story…

Tor LogoIt appears more and more that the malware caper discovered this weekend on the TOR network was all about harvesting MAC (media access control) addresses. We’ll probably never know the whole story of who’s behind this, but we’re getting enough pieces so that we can hobble together a broad picture of what happened.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Is the NSA Targeting TOR?

I like the expression, “Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.” I almost used it to open this article, but I didn’t. It would be inaccurate. Nobody in his right mind would consider the Internet waters safe at this junction in time.

Today while surfing tech sites looking for items for our news feed, I ran across an item on the Beeb titled Users of hidden net advised to ditch Windows, with the “hidden net” being TOR. Since it always brightens my day to discover some security geek has found yet more vulnerabilities in Redmond’s finest, I checked out the news item.

It wasn’t what I thought. TOR was singling-out Windows not because of any newfound security issues with Redmond’s operating system, but because TOR had been compromised with malware that was specifically designed to infect Windows machines.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

NSA/PRISM Mess–Yahoo Wins & Microsoft Loses

I’m beginning to rethink Yahoo, just as I reappraised my feelings on the old Novel after they went to bat against SCO for the benefit of IBM and Linux.

On Monday, the Sunnyvale, California company pulled a honest-to-goodness rabbit out of the hat when they managed to persuade a FISA court to order the Obama administration to declassify as much as possible of a 2008 court decision justifying Prism before releasing it to the public.

Yahoo’s victory came one day before Microsoft went into damage control mode by denying allegations revealed by the publication last Thursday of documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper and website.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Welcome to Microsoft Trustworthy Computing

It used to be you only had to worry about the accidental insecurities in Windows. Now Redmond’s giving away the keys to everything they sell. Microsoft is beginning to surprise even me and I thought I was beyond surprise.

I get it. I understand patriotism. I also understand legal obligation. The guys and gals in Redmond would want you to believe that their cooperation with the feds is based mostly on the later. Their story is they were forced to give access to their customer’s data by a loaded court order being held to their collective head.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

WWPL: The World Wide Party Line

I don’t think there are very many people my age who’ve ever expected much in the way of privacy online.

Oh, maybe in the very early days some might’ve naively figured that if they didn’t actually interact with a site, like if they just went to the New York Times to read an article or something, they were pretty private, but they soon learned about tracking cookies and hackers with keystroke logging tools and right away understood that everything done online might possibly be being observed.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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