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Submission + - Australian law enforcement pushes against encryption, advocates data retention (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Australia is in the middle of a parliamentary inquiry examining telecommunications interception laws. Law enforcement organisations using this to resurrect the idea of a scheme for mandatory data retention by telcos and ISPs. In addition, an Australian peak law enforcement body is pushing for rules that would force telcos help with decryption of communications.

Submission + - OpenSSL: The New Face Of Technology Monoculture (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: In a now-famous 2003 essay, “Cyberinsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly” (http://cryptome.org/cyberinsecurity.htm) Dr. Dan Geer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Geer) argued, persuasively, that Microsoft’s operating system monopoly constituted a grave risk to the security of the United States and international security, as well. It was in the interest of the U.S. government and others to break Redmond’s monopoly, or at least to lessen Microsoft’s ability to ‘lock in’ customers and limit choice. “The prevalence of security flaw (sp) in Microsoft’s products is an effect of monopoly power; it must not be allowed to become a reinforcer,” Geer wrote.

The essay cost Geer his job at the security consulting firm AtStake, which then counted Microsoft as a major customer.(http://cryptome.org/cyberinsecurity.htm#Fired) (AtStake was later acquired by Symantec.)

These days Geer is the Chief Security Officer at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. But he’s no less vigilant of the dangers of software monocultures. Security Ledger notes that, in a post today for the blog Lawfare (http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/04/heartbleed-as-metaphor/), Geer is again warning about the dangers that come from an over-reliance on common platforms and code. His concern this time isn’t proprietary software managed by Redmond, however, it’s common, oft-reused hardware and software packages like the OpenSSL software at the heart (pun intended) of Heartbleed.(https://securityledger.com/2014/04/the-heartbleed-openssl-flaw-what-you-need-to-know/)

“The critical infrastructure’s monoculture question was once centered on Microsoft Windows,” he writes. “No more. The critical infrastructure’s monoculture problem, and hence its exposure to common mode risk, is now small devices and the chips which run them," Geer writes.

What happens when a critical and vulnerable component becomes ubiquitous — far more ubiquitous than OpenSSL? Geer wonders if the stability of the Internet itself is at stake.

“The Internet, per se, was designed for resistance to random faults; it was not designed for resistance to targeted faults,” Geer warns. “As the monocultures build, they do so in ever more pervasive, ever smaller packages, in ever less noticeable roles. The avenues to common mode failure proliferate.”

Comment Re:oh (Score 4, Interesting) 306

by Billly Gates (#46812459) Attached to: Our Education System Is Failing IT

You can. In India.

The fact that MBAs and CIOs are the ones whining make me always suspicious who of course get quoted in all these articles and probably contribute to them. How convenient this propaganda can now be used and passed around to politicians to increase H1B1 visas as a response.

Sadly many with years of experience now can be as good if not better than the native ones anyway so go cheap.

Comment It is just so horrible (Score 4, Funny) 306

by Billly Gates (#46812439) Attached to: Our Education System Is Failing IT

So horrible that hardly any of the European or American young IT workers are qualified.

Too bad there was not some way we could get around this problem. You know perhaps get around this and maybe save some money too hmm.

Just think about how horrible it would be if CIO's and MBAs wrote such an article and published in a well known magazine that they could give to EU politicians and senators on something that needs to be done RIGHT AWAY!

 

Submission + - Google breaks its own reCAPTCHA (arxiv.org)

Submitted by ras
ras writes: Google researchers working on recognising street numbers for Street View pointed their creation at images generated by reCAPTCHA:

To further explore the applicability of the proposed system to broader text recognition tasks, we apply it to synthetic distorted text from reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is one of the most secure reverse turing tests that uses distorted text to distinguish humans from bots. We report a 99.8% accuracy on the hardest category of reCAPTCHA.

Comment Re:Yeah, sure. (Score 1) 253

Wait. Did you just admit that he's being targeted improperly because he is the union rep . . . and then say that if we got rid of tenure and let them fire whoever they want for whatever reason it wouldn't be a problem anymore?

I sure did.

This guy prevented bad teachers from being fired. I know call the lawyers bla bla. But if he is the problem why LA school districts are failing he needs to have some leighway and let the administrators do the write ups and terminations. Yes some is political. Welcome to work. Most though needs to be documented and finished.

Walmart does this all the time to keep prices low.

The American Teachers Association needs to go back to it's roots to advance the career just like the state bar does with lawyers. Does the bar protect bad unethical lawyers? No they take away their bar license. The American Teachers Association needs to be de-certifying the bad apples and helping them succeed. Helping as in getting training needed and setting up licenses for professional teachers. Not protecting them.

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