10837360
submission
FutureDomain writes:
Is SSL becoming pointless? Researchers are poking holes in the chain of trust for SSL certificates which protect sensitive data.
According to these hypothesized attacks, governments could compel certificate authorities to give them phony certificates that are signed by the CA, which are then used to perform man in the middle attacks.
They point out that Verisign already makes large sums of money by facilitating the disclosure of US consumers' private data to US government law enforcement.
The researchers are developing a Firefox plugin that checks past certificates and warns of anomalies in the issuing country, but not much can help if government starts spying on the secure connections of its own citizens.
7112432
submission
FutureDomain writes:
In an uncommon display of common sense, a federal judge in Atlanta has declined a retraining order from AT&T that would have prevented Verizon from running ads that compared their 3G coverage to AT&T's. AT&T felt that Verizon's ads "mislead consumers into thinking that AT&T doesn't offer wireless service in large portions of the country, which is clearly not the case." Verizon argued that the ads clearly indicated that the maps were only of 3G coverage, and that AT&T is only suing because it doesn't want to face the truth about its network.
6817176
submission
FutureDomain writes:
A bill which just passed the House Financial Services Committee would require Internet Service Providers to block access to sites hosting financial scams that pose as members of the government-backed Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). The bill is broad enough to block not only websites, but email and any other "electronic material". The bill is the Investor Protection Act sponsored by Paul Kanjorski. How long until the US starts censoring the Internet?
4154765
submission
FutureDomain writes:
The Boston College Campus Police have seized the electronics of a computer science student for allegedly sending an email outing another student. The probable cause? The search warrant application states that he is "a computer science major" and he uses "two different operating systems for hiding his illegal activity. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on." The EFF is currently representing him.
138549
submission
FutureDomain writes:
With the US patent system in a mess, PC World writes about senators who have introduced a bill to reform the patent system.
The provisions of the Patent Reform Act would change the patent process from the current "first to invent" system to a "first to file" system like the rest of the world, restrict damages that patent holders can receive for infringement lawsuits, create a new procedure to challenge the validity of a patent after it has been granted, and boost resources for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
106830
submission
FutureDomain writes:
A
Blog in PCWorld is reporting about another problem with Windows Live OneCare. Apparently, it sometimes deletes the entire Outlook or Outlook Express
.PST mailbox when it finds a virus in one of the messages. The only solution is to tell OneCare to exclude the entire Outlook mailbox.
From the article:
"If you get a virus in an email message received by Outlook, OneCare's next virus sweep may quarantine or delete your entire email store. If you receive a virus via Outlook Express OneCare may quarantine or delete the entire folder containing the virus."
With
OneCare coming in last in antivirus tests, how will OneCare stand up in the market?
