April 26, 2002, 4:18 pm
Can you really click ‘No’?
Mr. Fine contacted Symantec and was told that as of Nov. 1, 2001, Symantec had changed its policies and that his users could no longer use NAV updates on their home systems. (Because Symantec’s licenses are perpetual, in theory the home users could keep the original software on their systems, but without new virus definitions the software would soon be of little use.) “I was pretty disgusted,” says Mr. Fine. “Since we were on maintenance at the time of this change in policy, the right thing for them to do would have been to notify customers at that point. To ‘notify’ me by allowing me to renew, so I can read it in the fine print, is not the best way to find out that a feature that was a big plus for us in choosing NAV is now gone.”
April 25, 2002, 8:59 am
LA Times:
CIA Warns of Chinese Plans for Cyber-Attacks on U.S.
Moreover, U.S. authorities are bracing for a possible wave of hacking attacks by Chinese students against the United States in coming weeks, according to the analysis. The confidential alert, which was reviewed by The Times, was sent to intelligence officials a week ago.
No kidding. We’ve had the interest of a Chinese hacker trying to disrupt our operations for at least a couple of months.
April 25, 2002, 8:57 am
Hackers turn tables on file-swapping firms. ZDNet Apr 25 2002 6:07AM ET
For the past several weeks, the pseudonymous programmer, a college student who declines to give his real name, has been releasing versions of popular file-swapping programs online with the advertising and user-tracking features stripped out.
[Moreover – Computer security news]
April 24, 2002, 5:37 am
IE-6 privacy solution backfires. “The privacy features added in IE6 to help protect a user’s privacy by giving them direct control over cookie management allows any site to read any other site’s cookies, in effect removing all privacy. Further, this hole extends to other protocols, allowing you to execute arbitrary commands on the user’s machine as well as take over MSN Messenger,” Larholm told us. [The Register]
See also
April 21, 2002, 7:51 pm
Adam Bosworth (BEA): “Loose coupling is central to the nature of Web services-based application integration. That’s why it seems to me that the right model for XML in Web services is a message-oriented, document-based one rather than one based on remote procedure calls.”
[Scripting News]
April 21, 2002, 7:46 pm
Security Review of 802.11b: an excellent rundown by the author of a recent O’Reilly & Associates book on 802.11b.
[80211b News]
April 19, 2002, 2:22 pm
Sean McGrath speaks to the dark side of XML tagging in this cogent article. He’s right. When the people who are making the dogfood don’t have to eat it, there’s bound to be trouble.
For example:
“In XML land, not only are the equivalent of “global variables” created with wild abandon, but their creators often see fit to invoice based on the number they create for you. An unfortunate schism exists in XML software development between the team that develops the schema and the team processing the XML that conforms to the schema. Too often, these are not the same teams.”
