Sexy Jihad

Within a mere 24 hours of its release Google Video Viewer has been hacked by non other than Jon Johansen, of deCSS fame.
The crack itself is actually quite simple and was just a question of reading the diff Google added to VLC (VLC being of course the player that Google based its video viewer on). […]

Wired has a piece on the recent appalling state of Blogger:
What’s up with Blogger, the institution that is eponymous with the media phenomenon it helped spawn?
Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the […]

Securityfocus has an interesting interview with Marcus Ranum (he’s done many things, including inventing the proxy server). An excerpt:
It’s not a technology problem, it’s a management problem. There are plenty of tools that can be used to control inter-host trust, but they are generally not used because they’re “too hard” or “inconvenient” or whatever. For […]

Linuxdevices has written a piece on Capricorn Technologies sale of over 1 Petrabyte of storage to The Internet Archive:
Capricorn Technologies says it has completed delivery of more than a petabyte of storage to the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that creates periodic snapshots of the Internet. Capricorn’s PetaBox products are based […]

PHP Developer reports that today PHP is officialy 10 years old:
I suppose, like everyone, I should chime in with how things started out for me with PHP: I was a Perl kind of guy until a friend/coworker of mine (who now works with me again) introduced me to PHP back in college. At the time, […]

Mr. Schneier has written a piece on his blog about the kind of attacks his company has monitored this past year:
Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., monitors more than 450 networks in 35 countries, in every time zone. In 2004 we saw 523 billion network events, and our analysts investigated 648,000 security “tickets.” What follows is an […]

It’s official. You can now earn a living by being a blogger! Excerpt:
In its short lifespan, blogging has largely been a freewheeling exercise in online self-expression. Now it is also becoming a corporate job.
A small but growing number of businesses are hiring people to write blogs, otherwise known as Web logs, or frequently updated online […]

In what’s a great victory for privacy, Lycos Germany had decided to stop logging IP data:
Lycos DSL in Germany says it will no longer store dynamic IP addresses of its customers, now that a specialist on data privacy laws from Frankfurt University has threatened to sue the company.
Jonas Breyer had asked Lycos what data was […]

Bruce Schneier once again makes a valid point:
SSH, or secure shell, is the standard protocol for remotely accessing UNIX systems. It’s used everywhere: universities, laboratories, and corporations (particularly in data-intensive back office services). Thanks to SSH, administrators can stack hundreds of computers close together into air-conditioned rooms and administer them from the comfort of their […]

It seems that my hitherto published worries about Google Web Accelerator are being given some grounds by a recent article published in Eweek:
Google’s effort to speed the pace of Web browsing quickly aggravated some early users, who say that the software is delivering them Web pages under other users’ logins and breaking Web applications.
Google Inc.’s […]