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Comment Opposite spin (Score 5, Informative) 257

Well, in our solar system at least one planet is spinning the other way around: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_does_venus_spin_the_other_way It's not quite the same like orbiting into the opposite direction, but the Venus apparently received a nudge or two as well in order to spin the other way around. Such accidents appear to happen.
The Internet

Submission + - Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System

Greg Huang writes: "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."

Comment Re:Full Disclosure (Score 1) 171

Correct, specific plans exist for various scenarios. Concerning the web-of-trust, there are some inherent problems without a unifying institutional body. See, security has some clear rules which are easier to enforce in a corporate environment. Specially if you work at StartCom ;-)

And yes, I heard about "Perspectives", so it might have currently a single-point-of-failure problem. Personally I don't believe that it should provide a means for self-signed certificates. It might however provide a good additional layer to existing efforts.

Comment Re:Full Disclosure (Score 1) 171

I'm quite pleased to receive a A- :-)

The reason for not disclosing anything before is perhaps quite easy to understand. Minor events are logged in the ongoing events logs and no further actions are required. Events in the magnitude of issuing a certificate wrongfully due to a bug and which requires modifications to the systems, require detailed reporting (as seen in the "critical event report"). Those reports were reviewed in time by relevant parties and will be presented to the auditors during auditing. A major event like a CA key compromise (we don't sign directly from the root) would have to be made public and handled according to the "disaster recovery guidelines". In such an event, all software vendors, subscribers and the general public must be informed immediately.

The event which happened recently wasn't a major event, but obviously important enough to act accordingly and issue the critical event report. Important to note that no third party could have relied on and have taken damage. Therefore the resolution was appropriate. The disclosure was done in order to prevent any rumors and false accusations about what did and what not happened (once it was published by Mike).

Comment Re:Lemons. (Score 1) 4

According to the work done over at Mozilla, this shouldn't happen. The Mozilla CA Policy clearly requires domain control validation. Being myself part of the team which reviews CAs, I must say that there is a failure. It's unfortunate, because domain validated certificates do have a value and are excellent for protecting low-value sites like blogs, portals, webmail etc. But the practice disclosed in the article is certainly not going to work!
Security

Submission + - Disclosure: No-check SSL Certificates... (startcom.org) 4

StartCom writes: "In a previous article I reported about Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks and if they really happen. Unfortunately it does happen as some testimonials confirm. Now it's even easier because in the attack described previously, untrusted certificates from an unknown issuer were used. Want to make the attack perfect with no error and fully trusted certificate? No problem, just head over to one of Comodo's resellers.

And here the disclosure: In order to confirm for yourself, edit the hosts file at your computer and add the following entry:"

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