Reblogged from Naked Security:

Symantec, the makers of Norton AntiVirus, has confirmed that a hacking group has gained access to some of the security product’s source code. An Indian hacking group, calling itself the Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code on the internet. So far, there have been two claims related to Symantec’s source code. First, a document claiming to be confidential information related to Norton AntiVirus’s source code was posted on Pastebin. Symantec says it has investigated the …

If your security product’s effectiveness is undermined by the exposure of its source code, you’re relying security through obscurity, which is no security at all.

Reblogged from Corey Robin:

Ron Paul has two problems.  One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part.  The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism. Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support.  His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which …

Excellent as usual.

Reblogged from Naked Security:

This Christmas, banks were visited by the ghost of malware past: an ever nastier version of SpyEye that manages to hide fraudulent transactions from unsuspecting victims. Security vendor Trusteer last year found SpyEye targeting transactions at major UK banks. SpyEye is a tweak of the Zeus crimeware kit that grabs web form data within browsers. This year, right before the recent holiday season, Trusteer found a hopped-up version of SpyEye attacking banks in the U.S. and U.K. The new Trojan, instead of …

Pretty scary. But also probably a bit alarmist.

This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they’re protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it’s not going to harm the computer. I wouldn’t mind what Apple was doing if that’s all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that’s not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn’t see anything there that you wouldn’t see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie.

Source: Scripting News

Source: ACLU (via Glenn Greenwald)

One of the things I find most fascinating about the idea of the spacesuit is that space is actually a very complex and subtle idea. On the one hand, there is space as an environment outside of the earthly realm, which is inherently hostile to human occupation—and it was actually John Milton who first coined the term space in that context.

On the other hand, you have the space of the architect—and the space of outer space is actually the opposite of the space of the architect, because it is a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on technological mediation.

via BLDGBLOG: Spacesuit: An Interview with Nicholas de Monchaux.