Valid or not, if the patenter can threaten you with it until you have to spend millions or billions in patent lawyer fees to get it _declared_ invalid by a court then that's pretty good protection in its own right.

The original iPhone wasn't exactly running "real apps" - it ran a fixed set of software that Apple shipped with it. There was no iTunes store, no third party software. Official support for third party software only came around after people started rooting the devices in order to write software for them. Conversely, the likes of Symbian, PalmOS, etc. were doing third party apps *years* before the iPhone appeared - I certainly wouldn't have called the original iPhone a "smartphone" since it lacked most of the features that made Smartphones Smartphones. Also, at the time the iPhone was being developed, a number of other vendors were developing similar devices - Apple just happened to get to market slightly before everyone else and did their usual job at marketing (Apple are *really* good at marketing).

So really, the current line of phones is pretty much a natural progression. Patenting a natural progression of technology just because you happened to sell first what everyone else already had in the works seems pretty bogus.

If you participate in a BYOD scheme then you can expect the network owner to take steps to keep their network secure (whether you're at a school or an employer). This may well include installing certificates so that they can filter web content for malware, etc. If you don't like it, then don't agree to the BYOD scheme and use your own internet connection.

I also struggle to believe that the school didn't have an internet usage policy that would have been signed by either the student or their parents (if they were a minor), which would have said that the school reserves the right to monitor the internet traffic.

You won't get a simple ssh session out through an intercepting proxy. However, you're missing the point here - this isn't about implementing a system that can't be circumvented (this is impossible) - it is about implementing a system that automatically filters _normal_ traffic without breaking too much stuff (whether that filtering be for malware or porn or whatever). Circumventing these systems is always possible, and when staff find a student has gone to lengths to circumvent these systems then they will discipline the student for breaking the internet usage policy.

Also, when Little Johnny came into school with a Playboy, that was clearly not the school's fault. If the school is providing internet access without any kind of filtering then that is seen as the school's fault when the kids start downloading porn over it. (Kids downloading porn over their personal 3G connections in school time is another matter).

In the submitter's case, he's talking about BYOD where the kids are going to be using their own devices (phones, tablets, etc) rather than classroom computers and are therefore going to be doing it in situations where there is no teacher supervision, so the whole "pay attention to what the kids are doing when they're using the Internet" thing isn't going to work unless you employ a *lot* of teachers and ensure they keep all the kids in sight at all times, or you cut off Internet access for the kids most of the day (which I would argue is counterproductive).

And that's ignoring stuff like virus scanning, work to prevent e-bullying, etc.

It used to be that *most* web sites were unencrypted and you could get away with just blocking all but a few encrypted websites. The tide has turned and now there are a huge number of encrypted sites that need to be allowed. It's unfeasible to whitelist all those sites and provide no further filtering on them, so intercepting SSL streams is the future, I'm afraid.

Sounds counterproductive to me. The world we live in today requires people to know how to use the internet in their day to day lives, both for work and pleasure. If you refuse to let people use this valuable resource except for the 1-2 hours a week where they have an IT lesson then you're really screwing with their education. Its pretty much the equivalent of banning people from reading books outside of English lessons for fear that they might read something a bit too "explicit" - the answer, of course, is to ensure there are no explicit books in the school library, not ban reading altogether.

(Disclaimer: I run a business that provides web filtering systems for schools)

In fact, SSL is becoming quite common place on a lot of sites where you'd traditionally not consider security to be a big deal. For example, Google does searches over https(*). For a long time we resisted intercepting HTTPS streams, instead choosing to only whitelist certain sites. However, over the last few years, the number of sites using HTTPS has massively increased, and it's simply not feasible to allow them all through without any kind of automated content inspection. So these days, our filtering systems do perform a MITM attack on all HTTPS sites that aren't whitelisted - as far as we're concerned, there's no other way to reliably filter web traffic now.

I should take this opportunity to point out that I'm specifically talking about schools, where there is a need for some amount of filtering. I'm of the opinion that performing any kind of web filtering in a normal workplace is counter productive: you'll end up blocking stuff your employees need to access in order to do their jobs, you'll end up pissing your employees off and at the end of the day, if your employees aren't responsible adults, why the hell are you employing them?

(* Google HTTPS searches can be disabled on a network-wide basis; although it could be argued that MITMing these connections at the proxy is better than disabling encryption entirely since the MITM method only introduces one weak point instead of weakening the entire path).

Who you gonna sue if the company has been wound up? Hell, even if they had said "we insure these funds", you still can't do much if the company has gone. The only sensible thing to trust is if they said "we have a *third party* insure these funds for you", so their bankruptcey doesn't absolve the third party of paying out your insurance money.

1. Steal currency
2. Convert into another currency
3. Time passes
4. People realise that a theft has occurred
5. Currency devalues
6. Theives don't care because they already cashed out in (2).

Its reasonable to trust a security company to manage security since they theoretically know more about it than you and can therefore do a better job. What is unreasonable is to trust someone with security with no kind of insurance against them screwing up - while a company can massively screw up and then simply say "sorry" and declare bankruptcey, leaving you out of pocket, they aren't really to be trusted.

I'm also not a big believer in accreditations - over the years I've had to deal with a lot of people who were supposidly qualified to do their job, but in the end I have frequently ended up picking up the pieces after it becomes clear that they don't know the first thing about what they're doing.

Or it shows that the applicant is the sort who will blindly accept a friend request from people they don't know. If you've got over 1000 "friends" on facebook, you aren't an extrovert, you're a security risk...

A non-HTTPS login page could be modified to submit the data to a different server instead of the bank's - by the time you realise, its too late. Or some JS could be embedded in the page to send the data to a third party *as well* as the bank, and you'd never spot that unless you had firebug open. The latter attack can also be carried out by embedding HTTP objects in an HTTPS page, which isn't especially visible to the end user.

Meanwhile I was reasonably impressed by HSBC, who fixed their website in about a day when I told them they were including HTTP objects in the HTTPS login page. That said, they still include some objects from third party servers, over HTTPS (notably, Google advertising). IMHO the browser should warn you if thre are any objects on an HTTPS page that aren't covered by the certificate displayed in the address bar.

I believe he was already in the (repressurising) airlock by that point, so whilst taking the helmet off would have been bad, it's not quite the same as doing it in space.

On the other hand, the helmets do have a depressurisation valve which can be opened while in space (Chris Hadfield had to use it to remove contamination from inside his suit while on EVA). ISTR that NASA had considered using that, but had concluded that the surface tension would prevent the water from migrating towards the valve so it wouldn't have worked.

Times have changed - when I did my computer science degree, most of the students were at the geeky end of the spectrum and were there because that's what they were really into. Compare to the present-day cross section of computer science students: most of them are there because computers are seen as a good career. The extra-curricular interest is giving way to people who just want a job.

Empathy on both my workstations has suddenly refused to log into facebook with auth failures over the past few weeks (no, I haven't changed my password). I must get around to looking into it, but it would imply that facebook have changed _something_ WRT XMPP...

Doesn't need to do that: crack the wifi key and you now have access to the whole network. From there you can install on *any* insecure device on the network - be it the AP itself, a Windows workstation, a NAS, smart TV, printer, whatever. If the device in question has its own wireless NIC (which is frequently the case if you've infected something like a laptop or smartphone) then you can find another wifi network, crack that, install on any device you find therein, rinse and repeat. Especially good for devices like laptops and phones which physically move around so can probably infect geographically separated networks (think: home user bringing their infected phone into work - the phone doesn't need to already be authorised to log into the office wifi network for it to sit there all day, every day, cracking the damned thing!).