A non-mouse Coward - Slashdot User

Submission + - Texas Supreme Court Leaves Obama/McCain on Ballot (lp.org)

Submitted by A non-mouse Coward on Thursday September 25, 2008 @10:16AM

A non-mouse Coward writes: We discussed last week that Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate, Bob Barr, filed a lawsuit requesting that Obama and McCain be removed from the Texas Presidential Ballot because they missed the submission deadline. (Not to the surprise of many Slashdotters) The Texas Supreme Court ruled against the suit without explanation, exempting the GOP and Dems from the same rules that attempt to keep independents and third parties off the ticket:

"The Court's one-sentence denial deprived us, and the voters of Texas, of any explanation of the Courts reasons for arbitrarily exempting the Republicans and the Democrats from the clear deadline set forth in the law," Verney [Bob Barr's Campaign Manager] continued. "Third parties and Independent candidates are consistently told that deadlines are deadlines. Texas has somehow determined that deadlines are just suggestions but we are left without the guidance of the Court's reasons."

I guess this proves bipartisan actions are possible.

Submission + - Undocumented Backdoor in PGP Whole Disk Encryption (blogspot.com)

Submitted by A non-mouse Coward on Wednesday October 03, 2007 @09:49AM

A non-mouse Coward writes: PGP Corporation's widely adopted Whole Disk Encryption product apparently has an encryption bypass feature that allows an encrypted drive to be accessed without the boot-up passphrase challenge dialog, leaving data in a vulnerable state if the drive is stolen when the bypass feature is enabled. The feature is also apparently not in the documentation that ships with the PGP product, nor the publicly available documentation on their website, but only mentioned briefly in the customer knowledge base (PGP customer account required). Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded that this feature was required by unnamed customers and that competing products have similar "dangerous" functionality. There is still no official word from PGP as to why the public documentation withheld recognition of this risky option.

Submission + - Backdoor in PGP Whole Disk Encryption (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by A non-mouse Coward on Tuesday October 02, 2007 @11:03AM

A non-mouse Coward writes: PGP Corp's Whole Disk Encryption suite has an intentional backdoor accessible via the command line, whereby administrators or any user who knows the passphrase for a volume key can disable the boot-up passphrase prompt altogether. Apparently this "feature" is not documented in any way beyond the enterprise customer support pages and is kept secret for only those organizations needing an automated reboot process that won't hang on the boot guard screen. Even running the typical " — help" switch to the command line yields no knowledge of its existence. What's worse, that PGP Corp built this intentional backdoor feature, or that they barely documented it, keeping it quiet from their customers who want the highest amount of security for their laptops?

Submission + - Zero Day Quicktime Flaw affects many browsers (gnucitizen.org)

Submitted by A non-mouse Coward on Wednesday September 12, 2007 @02:29PM

A non-mouse Coward writes: GNUCitizen has published details including POC code regarding a zero day exploit for Quicktime and Chrome/Gecko browsers. People running NoScript in Firefox appear to be safe. The bigger question here is: how long will javascript implementations that ship in popular browsers continue to operate on a general execute-anything-with-the-user's-permissions model? And doesn't it make sense to separate executable code from data objects in memory?

Submission + - How would you geek out a backpacking expedition?

Submitted by A non-mouse Coward on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @09:55PM

A non-mouse Coward writes: If you were going to go on a several hundred mile, multi-day backpacking expedition across a continent, what would you take? Remember, weight is crucial and there is no electricity except for the occasional overnight in a metropolitan area. At the same time, you can stay "connected" as you near cities with wireless. Would you seek renewable energy for small compact electronic gear, such as solar, hand-cranks, or other generators? Or would you keep it minimalist, visiting a cyber cafe when the wilderness requires you to escape back into the cities?

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