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Comment Re:Their country, their standards. Reciprocity suc (Score 1) 5

It's not that the Brazil government can't afford a Thawte or Verisign certificate - the actual reasoning is that as a sovereign nation they don't trust (and can't depend on) these foreign corporations. The website is (IMHO, correctly and appropriately) certified by the chief Brazilian trusted authority.

Hmm. When I go to The Consulate General of India in San Francisco, I am assured that

Effective October 1st, 2007 Travisa Outsourcing will handle all requests for Indian visas.

Strangely enough, that site [registered by Verizon Wireless] is authenticated by Verisign Inc., but that does not seem to bother your governments sensibilities. BTW, I myself am a UK Citizen and a Permanent Resident of the United States, so I don't think your xenophobic rant really applies to me.

But yes, it's your country so your rules apply. I understand that a visa is a privilege, not a right.

I applied for my visa/"Green Card" in the same way that a non-citizen from anywhere must, and although the process involves vetting as might be expected, I am never "excruciatingly humiliated" [to paraphrase your comment] when re-entering the US.

The point of my post was to highlight the fact that there exists a web of trust on the internet which seems to be ignored in this particular case; is that my browser's problem? I think not. They all quite rightly caution that there can be no trust applied to this particular site and to try to turn this into a specious allegation on what happens to a non-citizen entering the US is garbage.

Privacy

Submission + - Olympics In Brazil? Beware The Visa Application! 5

BuhDuh writes: Not that I intend to go, but we planned to take a cruise later this year, as part of a European vacation, from Portugal to Brazil. That's when the fun started. You need a visa. No problem, fill in a form online starting at the official government site. Wait a minute! A government in a sovereign country can't afford a valid security certificate from a trusted authority?

It gets worse. Among other choice pieces of information you will be required to supply on this untrusted site are:
full biographical info, including mother and father's full names!?
complete details of your passport — number, date of issue/expiry/where issued etc
schooling details!?
current employment!?
full address/zip/phone/email

Is this a perfect recipe for identity theft, or am I just a paranoid who misplaced his tinfoil hat?

Submission + - Pay up, says Comcast (koat.com)

BuhDuh writes: The tragic death [KOAT.com] of a NM State trooper, helicopter pilot, and the student they tried to rescue lead the honorary Japanese Consular General, Davis Begay, to be personally held responsible for her unpaid Comcast internet bill. Despite Comcast's assertion that the matter had been dealt with, they continued to harass Mr. Begay and even put the account into collection. Only [after the TV channel's assertion that they had intervened] did Comcast cancel the action, credit the account, and apologize. One can only imagine the extra grief Ms. Yamamoto's parents must have experienced.

Comment Re:let's wait and see (Score 1) 286

There are good and bad points to be made on both sides of this contentious subject. Eliminating spurious traffic/spam etc could never be bad, but given the .au government's draconian position, I wouldn't trust them to monitor the corridors in a kindergarten school. As for "How?" - tail -f /var/log/messages works for me. Pipe it to some simple filters and you have it. Want to know who's reaching out on port 445? Or spamming on port 25? There's a filter for that.
The Internet

Submission + - New Apache DOS Tool

BuhDuh writes: "The good folks at SANS Internet Storm Center advise us of a new DoS tool just released which targets Apache (ironically IIS 6.0 and 7.0 are not affected). They give details of a crafted HTTP request which it is alleged will keep a connection open indefinitely, and by 'lather/rinse/repeat' will eventually lead to the DoS. No details are given of where the tool was released, and it does not seem to be Goliath, but given the solid reputation of the ISC, it should probably be taken seriously."

Comment Following to the MSDN (Score 1) 206

article pointed me to [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ColumnHandlers\{F9DB5320-233E-11D1-9F84-707F02C10627}] @="PDF Column Info"
Hoping to mitigate the vulnerability, I deleted the key after exporting it. However it does not cure the idiocy of Adobe allowing executables in something supposed to simply describe a document.

Comment Re:Apple Damage Control (Score 1) 327

TFA says:

The perception of iPhone being a failure was created by a newspaper in Japan, Sankei Shimbun, Hayashi noted in his original reply to Wired. Last fall, it wrote although Softbank tried to sell one million units by the end of 2008, they only sold about 200,000. This article was wrong in two fronts. One is that Softbank nor Apple never publicly claimed they would sell 1 million units. Second, their estimate of 200,000 units were also wrong. Although Apple nor Softbank releases the real number of shipment, today, it is strongly believed that they have shipped more than 300,000 and possibly near 400,000 units in Japan.

(My emphasis)
shipped!=sold

Comment Not quite all.... (Score 4, Informative) 259

the goodies OP would have us believe are actually included. From this story

In another move to counter VMware's lead, Citrix will offer its XenServer software free starting in April. One or two high-end features from that product, including the high-availability features, will be moved to Citrix Essentials for XenServer, but many of the existing capabilities will be available for no charge, said Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer each will be priced at US$1,500 to $5,000 per server, depending on the features selected, Crosby said.

Security

Submission + - An Internet Experience - Santa Fe Via Korea

BuhDuh writes: "Coming down from Los Alamos to Santa Fe yesterday in beautiful sunshine we reached our hotel (an ABC-badged XYZ Inn on C.......s Road) right around 3PM. As we had stuff to do, I didn't unpack the laptop until late that evening after my sister in law had retired for the night. I hooked it up (RJ45, not wifi) and did my usual thing — caught up on the latest news, blogs, mail etc. Performance seemed sluggish, but I didn't think much of it and I logged out and handed control over to my wife. In a little while she yelped! and called me over — she had logged in to her MY Yahoo! account to be greeted by this page. This of course gave me a WTF!? moment. I opened a shell and ifconfig showed 192.168.0.10 for an IP but the DNS for my lease was 168.126.63.1 — which whois told me was in Korea! I then pointed my browser at 192.168.0.1, to be greeted with a screen captioned 'PS730' and an offer to supply username and password. I failed with the usual defaults, so I turned my attention to the enigmatic PS730 and google quickly pointed me at the unit Further digging on their site uncovered the manual, and sure enough, this is not only the default dns, it is also used to determine if the fall-back path should be switched to:

As shown in the figure below, if there is no continuous PING reply sent three times in 3 second intervals with 168.126.63.1, the relevant circuit is dead and can be backed up to WAN2.

So there we go — a custom router seemingly designed for the hotel environment, made in Korea, with a default configuration which relies on a server in Korea to operate effectively. Bizarre or what? The web site of the company providing user support proudly proclaims they have a presence in dozens of large chains around the country — I wonder how many other routers are configured in the same way?"

Censorship

Submission + - Net Neutrality Still Alive?

BuhDuh writes: Despite previous reports, and as subsequently discussed here on /., it appears that Sen. Feinstein's ammendment[pdf] did not make it into the approved "HR1 version of the bill[pdf]
Of course, I cannot aver to having read all 680 pages, but searching for the terms Ms. Feinstein used came up blank, so can we breathe a collective sigh of relief until someone tries to bury similar proposals in the next wide-ranging legislation?

Comment Maybe I'm off base here but (Score 3, Insightful) 175

FTFA:

.....instructs its drone machines to report to 250 different internet addresses each day. Without the service, admins would have to manually block 1,750 domains each week, or 91,250 each year.

Wouldn't blocking "this weeks" known IP addresses stop the addition of new ones, rendering the infection impotent?

Censorship

Submission + - Wiretapping Program Legal

BuhDuh writes: "The New York Time is carrying a story concerning that well known bastion of legal authority the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance" court, which has ruled that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program was perfectly legal.

A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

Given that the largely derided administration of the last 8 years is expiring, should we be surprised? Should we even care?"

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