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Government

DOJ Fights To Bury Court Ruling On Government Surveillance 100

coolnumbr12 writes with this IBTimes excerpt: "The Justice Department may soon be forced to reveal a classified document that details unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. The Justice Department has fought to keep the document secret for about a year, but a recent court order demands that they respond to a formal request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by next week, June 7, 2013."

Comment Re:I hope they make the right decision.... (Score 1) 154

misinformed much?

You do not need to disable UEFI in order to boot a different OS, but only need to disable Secure Boot.

You can disable Secure Boot and still boot multiple OS's (with UEFI, as almost all the major distros now support). You can then add a second key and re-enable Secure boot, and dual boot any OS you want with Secure Boot enabled.

Comment Re:but... (Score 2) 37

Most likely scenario for Security, Dick:

1) Criminality. Failure to ensure funding from reputable companies forces these folks into blackmail or abuse of disclosure process. Eventually, they end up behind bars.

2) Corrective collective: Companies never give out freebies, but well-behaved security researchers have far more fun not being chased by police and get all the chicks. This creates a role model. You should see Bruce Schneier at rave parties.

Comment Re:Sounds fairly reasonable. (Score 4, Interesting) 37

The guidelines (dutch PDF) have a whole chapter outlining the responsibilities of the organization receiving a disclosure. They include guidelines for solving the issues (60 days for software, 6 months for hardware), reporting back progress to the discloser, allowing a discloser to report the vulnerability to a larger audience as part of the NCSC (government). Combined, these guidelines are an effective tool for security researchers to play by the rules and put pressure on companies together with others.

Researchers are encouraged to disclose to the NCSC as well, which means many security experts will be able to put pressure on companies not fixing vulnerabilities according to these rules.

Comment Re:Been Done (Score 5, Informative) 37

Being a native dutch speaker, I read the entire guidelines in Dutch, and they include disclosure terms to encourage companies to rapidly fix (60 days) issues, and make agreements with the discloser about the disclosure.

This is common practice and rather well accepted practice already. So, in essence, the document encourages the public disclosure. Any company that wishes to ignore the vulnerability will have their asses handed to them anyway, so this guideline actually helps - security researchers can use it to show to companies that they are acting in good faith as long as companies play by the same rules.

So personally, I highly encourage governments to do something like this.

This Dutch variant is interesting in the sense that it creates a possible middle man that can mediate and monitor the disclosure. This protects disclosers, and puts more pressure on companies to abide by these standards. Not the other way around.

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