Take a look at Novell's Patent Policy.

They must be feeling guilty for selling off the Santa Cruz Operation, eh?

From Slashdot: Ballmer Says iPod Users are Thieves

Ballmer is high. Microsoft has proven on many occasions that they have absolutely no understanding of the consumer market. Their one consumer success story, Xbox, wouldn't exist without Halo & Bungie, which as we all know was originally a Mac software company. Even then, Xbox is just another console, with no real innovation.

MS just doesn't do innovative consumer products, and never will.

Snapshots are one of the best features of FreeBSD 5.x, something that has only been available previously as part of Network Appliance's proprietary ONTAP OS. However, snapshot management on FreeBSD is still somewhat lacking, as creating & mounting snapshots is an entirely manual process. Fortunately, someone has now written a front-end designed to make working with snapshots easier. I have installed this on my FreeBSD RELENG_5 test system, and I can say that it works very well, and provides most of the functionality you get from a NetApp Filer.

Older news, but I came across this interesting blog entry. (The original article is here)

Am I alone in thinking that a policy that would likely keep illegal immigrants from seeking medical care is a bad idea? This is completely backwards. Public health officials in the county I live in come to your house and watch you take your tuberculosis medication to make sure you're being treated. (and TB is not even that contagious!) You'd think that we would want to make every effort to get everyone with an infectious disease into the system to prevent an outbreak.

Yet another seemingly innocent, yet totally stupid, policy decision.

I recall a question at a talk (by OldSkoolS) on satellite broadcasts at DefCon 2 years ago; the person asked if The Dish Network went after pirates like DirecTV did. (The talk covered free broadcasts on the same signal band as TDN) Although the speaker had repeatedly pointed out that he didn't know DirecTV, he answered the question by saying (paraphrased) "No. If you pirate DirecTV, they will kill you, but TDN is more interested in expanding market share at this point than going after pirates."

Another one for the security soapbox: spyware. The problem is, that some (if not much) adware/spyware has become malicious: impossible to remove without reinstalling the entire system, as this column describes. The time has come to support (already proposed) anti-spyware legislation, that will define limits on what spyware is allowed to do, and demand action from the anti-virus vendors to add, at a minimum, malicious spyware to the list of viruses scanned & cleaned by their software.

IE sucks. So much so that SecurityFocus columnist and regular Microsoft apologist Tim Mullen even admits as much. To me, what's shocking isn't that someone is saying that it's time to abandon IE, but even Tim says so - although he only suggests that MS split IE into a regular and "Enterprise Edition".

I'll go one step further (as many other security professionals have) and endorse the Browse Happy campaign to switch to an alternate browser. I can say from personal experience that even large corporations and government agencies are seriously considering switching away from IE, or in one case, already have. (usually to Firefox)

Here's a good article from SecurityFocus that explains the security philosophy of "Secure by Default." I'd like to add that in addition to OpenBSD and many Linux distributions, Mac OS X has also adopted this philosophy (I believe the other *BSD distros have as well). As the author notes, there are "some interesting changes " with Windows 2003/XP, but, what they essentially amount to is putting up a firewall in front of the services that can't be shut off/closed (due to design flaws relating to RPC).

I just added SPF support for mail here at technomagik.net!

In case you haven't heard of it, SPF, aka Sender Policy Framework is an innovative anti-spam technology that's very easy to implement. All you need to do is add a couple of DNS TXT records to your domain, to "authorize" valid mail senders. (SPF has a wizard that can generate the relevant records that takes at most a minute to fill out)

If you use the -all option, you can eliminate "joe jobs" against servers that use SPF, and widespread adoption will help combat spam by protecting the envelope sender. The SPF FAQ does a better job explaining all this, you can read it here.

To be truthful, there's more to the story (involving IETF standards, patents, and Microsoft), but I won't get into that. If you want, you can read this undeadly.org article.

Sniff, I miss Black Hat... Here's a bit from SANS Newsbites:

RFID Tags are Not Developed with Security in Mind
(28 July 2004)

Speaking at the Black Hat Briefings conference, Lukas Grunwald, CTO of DN-Systems Enterprise Internet Solutions of Germany, demonstrated software that could allow people to read and write to most RFID tags. Presently, RFID tags are not read-protected, and few are write protected. The vulnerability could be exploited by shoplifters.

http://www.gcn.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=gcndaily2&story.id=26759
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105_2-5287912.html?tag=printthis