Hurd seems to be an ongoing project to demonstrate that, while interesting in theory, producing a microkernel OS isn't really practical-- it is a software fix to hardware problems that have gone away, and basically no one really needs it. It seems to be "biding its time," waiting for a killer app. Maybe in some new Oracle product? Bwahaha.

I, for one, plan to purchase every anti-virus product I can possibly put on my credit card, and then I'll send a letter to StratFor, to find out what they recommend for additional security hardening for the upcoming conflict. I expect they'll recommend I switch to Linux immediately, and to help me protect myself as well as my neighbors, I shall be following that advice.

How did we start from someone hacking the network of the distributor of a 3rd rate Xmas-release comedy to apocalyptic throw-downs from a child dictator? This sounds like a South Park episode.

This will surely nudge some patriots to update their Symantec license, amirite?

The parallels to this country are simply amazing!

1. The North Koreans have absolutely nothing to gain from the Sony hack.
2. No one who knows actual facts about this case has any interest in letting the truth be known.
3. We will never, ever know who hacked Sony, or why, until it IS in someone's interest for the truth to be known.
4. That won't happen.

Also, there have been no reviews of the film, either positive or negative. For a movie that looked as bad as the one shown in the previews I saw, this could what saves the box office. I can see no possible advantage for NK to invest the resources into hacking Sony over a second-rate comic movie. Who would get an advantage from the Sony hack? I'll bet a lot of Symantec licenses will be renewed before the end of the year. Sorry, just free-associating here. If I had mod points you'd get an insightful.

Are you implying that DPNK will cause "a million [deaths] over 20 years" with the Sony hack? Most of the estimates I've seen are much lower than that. I do believe the animosity most Americans harbor against North Korea is based on PR and not on facts. The largest threat the Un-regime poses is to their own people, for whom I feel nothing but pity.

It seems like a lot of the high bandwidth claims related to the NSA and other spooks indicate they want an iSCSI connection or other high speed, low-latency access to their sources to make for more efficient and cheaper connections. Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos? My inner spook just wants a fast connection to data that is already on disk.

According to the description I read on a link above, the unescaped sql (and hence the injection vector) was a one-off administration page the intruder found by poking around on the disk. A mistake, but not quite as bad as leaving the error on a published page.

That also may be wasted effort (which means money). Prevention is much cheaper than mitigation.

Probably OT, but I just upgraded my ~8 y/o XP laptop with Mint Linux, and I am quite happy with it. The trackpad support is much better, and the SSD driver is much better. That said, it's not my only PC, and I did have to give up some "good-enough" windows software in the process. I gave away my old Canon camera whose software only ran on XP, I've not yet found how to make Mint talk to my very old parallel port scanner, and I still haven't gotten it to work well in the docking station (which is hooked to a KVM switch to the monitor, keyboard, mouse on my desk). I am comforted by knowing if I had $10 million, I could get Microsoft to support my XP laptop for a few more years so I could continue to use my obsolete camera, scanner, and dock.

Your argument breaks down as soon as the boss buys the new, improved Hamm-R-Matic with improved Head-hitter aim control, and the exclusive Whack-Tracker (using a standard ultra-speed parallel interface), that is both manageable and scalable, and sports the new laser guided "Nail Head Finder" front-end with indestructible low-power LED success indicators. Updates are continually provided directly from the manufacturer on convenient High Density diskettes.

Within two years, no one is left on the staff who can still operate the "big iron" interface of the old "nail smashing devices" and now there's system-wide version lock-in. The boss bought in because of the blinky lights, reduced training time, highly-granular tracking, and the cost was only $15.00 more per unit than the manual version. He has already been promoted for his perspicacity. Capital equipment purchases nowadays tend to be for processes rather than actual equipment. I don't believe this is a great state of affairs, but I believe it's the true state of affairs, and people ignore it at the risk of their own irrelevance.

This is the type of government organization that hires groups like RATFOR as security consultants. Who knows what they used for security procedures? Password list in /?

I agree 100%. The security companies who advise the likes of Target aren't talking about the whole exploit-- indeed, are pro-actively hiding the details-- because they don't want to explain how their hideously expensive security best practices were utterly pwned by some foreigners who weren't interested in any of their acronyms. These security guys are like Stratfor-- pugnacious, pistol-packing, ex-military folk who think computer security is just a variation on any other kind of security detail, and are prepared to sell the hell out of their ideas, even when they can't secure their own passwords.