Google developed android to protect against apple taking over the smartphone market and, while it seemed like a long shot, you see how successful that project has been.

This sounds like a defensive play against oculus. Facebook/oculus should be intimidated; google executes much better than crapware companies like fb and ms.

That first link is to a rootkit proof-of-concept, not Linux malware in the wild.

Also, not like the malware you find in the wild that speaks DNS itself, bypassing the hosts file.

The flag is dear to some people's hearts because it is a battle flag of their ancestors... I do not share the sentiment for this particular flag, but I understand it. And you better understand it too -- for the healing to begin.

You clearly do not understand why some people in the south love the confederate flag.

It has nothing to do with history. It is a statement of identity - the identity of a "country boy." It's borne of a very deep inferiority complex. Rural folks see all kinds of great things on television that they will never have, because television is set in New York, L.A., and other cities. Rural economies cannot support the nice houses, cars, jobs, shopping malls, and priviledge they see, and they feel left behind.

These same people also feel very intimidated by things they don't understand, and they don't understand much.

So, the people who have confederate flag bumper stickers are not all racist. But, there is a strong feeling of resentment behind that flag, and some of that resentment does get directed through racist channels (just as Roof did).

This divide between rural folk and city folk is not unique to Southern United States. You see this conflict all over the world, frequently as rural inland dwellers v/s coastal city dwellers. It's universal.

So, no, the confederate flag has nothing to do with healing after the civil war or anything like that. It's a symbol of the red state/blue state divide. That's why you're sticking up for it, after all.

The security industry is full of "thought leaders" who spout off opinions and forecasts.

There are no real credentials necessary to earn respect, because the infosec industry has historically mistrusted formal education.

So, we get people with little or no computer science education who just make stuff up. The people who know less talk louder and tweet a lot. The infosec press loves it. It's all really just marketing for infosec vendors.

when caustic humour is aimed at them... Please, don't hate.

He uses what he calls "caustic humor" to bash his political opponents, then tries to take the high road by reminding us not to hate.

Next, he'll claim that pointing this out is an ad hominem attack.

No, this is simply a freedom-loving position. I don't want to have to submit my employment choices to your approval so I am resisting your attempts to similarly violate the freedom of others.

One critical flaw with your worldview is that you only recognize government as a power structure. You do not recognize wealth and ownership as providing a parallel power structure.

Therefore, less government always equals more freedom in your simplistic, contrived universe.

Here in the real world, a total lack of government would mean the power of wealth is unchecked. That is not freedom, it's slavery. By the way, "collectivists" didn't enslave blacks in the American South. Wealthy landowners did.

The digital information used for attribution is so easily manipulated that it's nearly impossible to be 100% sure you have the right person... without a police style sting where you record the attacker in action.

For malware, attribution can be inferred by looking at code similarities among the malware.

Everybody on this thread seems to have forgotten the DEA was collecting Americam phone metadata in bulk since 1992, well before the Patriot Act. They did it under USC 21 section 876 (administrative subpoenas).

From what I've read, they were probably exceeding their authority, but carriers like Sprint gave them the data anyway.

What a profoundly naive and ignorant idea.

Expire all laws? Like all federal criminal law against fraud, racketeering, drug trafficking, computer misuse, theft, and murder?

All the laws enabling agencies like the FDA, which keeps the food supply safe? Laws that regulate and maintain the highway system and regulate interstate commerce? Laws that establish the FDIC and keep confidence in banks?

Not to mention the huuuuge body of procedural law, which defines how the courts work, how the military is governed, etc?

The US Congress would not have time to reauthorize the entirety of federal law, much less write new law. The states wouldnt have the time to do this either.

Businesses would hate this because there would be so much uncertainty.

Probably the "bright line" copyright distinction between APIs and actual works of art should come from the legislature, but our Congress is just as technologically illiterate as the judicial and executive branches.

Maybe in another 20 years we can have laws that actually bring us in to the 21st century.

Generally, if a carefully-crafted input can cause your application to crash, a similarly-crafted data may be able to exploit the same bug and cause an execution of malicious code. If â" as is usually the case â" the crash is due to buffer overflow and I can stomp over your app's memory, I may be able to place my code in the right place and it will be executed as part of the app...

This is only true for certain classes of memory management defects. There are many different kinds of defects, and many different ways to crash software that bring no possibility of remote code execution.

This isn't as difficult to find as you might think. You do not have to test millions or billions of random text strings.

Software security testing works by breaking inputs into categories, and assuming that if you test one or two items in the category, then the category is covered. Categories are derived from the software specifications.

Example categories:
1. 0-byte message
2. max-length message
3. max-length +1 message
4. message consisting of all NULL bytes
5. message with unicode characters ...

If ellipses are treated specially, then they are part of the specifications, and should factor in to the choice of categories. There is software to automate building of test cases based on the categories, and the testing could be automated as well.

If we only test likely cases, we are not doing security testing. Given that this is an unauthenticated network vector, it should be subject to security testing. Apple has the resources to do this.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you observed "they never bothered testing."

As long as software vendors have zero liability for defects, we'll probably continue to see easy-to-catch and easy-to-exploit bugs in software. Even software out of large, mature dev groups that should really know better.