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Comment Re:Funny how all software has turned into spyware (Score 1) 308

He already commented on that 10 years ago (see the start of https://www.networkworld.com/a... about Canonical ).

It is interesting how FSF and RMS have pioneered the idea of shunning in the free software community, but how suddenly this is a problem when they are the target.

Comment Re:Split already (Score 1) 308

FSF also need to pay for lawyers. They usually do not work for free either, and finding a competent one is already hard, so finding one able to work with RMS (who is notoriously hard to work with, I think no one deny that ) and pay them less than private sector while being in Boston is going to be quite impossible with less money.

Comment Re:how possible is a perversion of the GPL? (Score 1) 308

Given some of RMS suggestions (like https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... ), and some of the FSF self consistent and highly problematic takes (like https://lists.gnu.org/archive/... , I can see why they do that, but I can also see how problematic it is to disable errors message and so push people to get new hardware to correct firmware issues), the question also apply on what can happen with a GPL v4 where the FSF apply this line of reasoning.

Submission + - 20 Million People Exposed in Massive South Korea Data Leak (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: While the recent data breach that hit Target has dominated headlines lately, another massive data breach was disclosed this week that affected at least 20 million people in South Korea. According to regulators, the personal data including names, social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers and expiration dates of at least 20 million bank and credit card users was taken by a temporary consultant working at the Korea Credit Bureau (KCB). The consultant later sold the data to phone marketing companies, but has since been arrested along with mangers at the companies he sold the stolen data to. A similar insider-attack occurred at Vodafone late last year when a contractor made off with the personal data of two million customers from a server located in Germany. According to a study from PwC, organizations have made little progress developing defenses against both internal and external attackers, and insiders pose just as great a security risk to organizations as outside attackers.

Submission + - Adware Vendors Buying Chrome Extensions, Injecting Ads (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ars reports that the developers of moderately popular Chrome extensions are being contacted and offered thousands of dollars to sell ownership. The buyers are then adding adware and malware to the extensions and letting the auto-update roll it out to end users. The article says, 'When Tweet This Page started spewing ads and malware into my browser, the only initial sign was that ads on the Internet had suddenly become much more intrusive, and many auto-played sound. The extension only started injecting ads a few days after it was installed in an attempt to make it more difficult to detect. After a while, Google search became useless, because every link would redirect to some other webpage. My initial thought was to take an inventory of every program I had installed recently—I never suspected an update would bring in malware. I ran a ton of malware/virus scanners, and they all found nothing. I was only clued into the fact that Chrome was the culprit because the same thing started happening on my Chromebook—if I didn't notice that, the next step would have probably been a full wipe of my computer.'

Submission + - Mozilla is mapping cell towers and WiFi access points (mozilla.com)

Submitted by neiras
neiras writes: Mozilla is building a map of publicly-observable cell tower and WiFi access points to compete with proprietary geolocation services like Google's. Coverage is a bit thin so far but is improving rapidly.

Anyone with an Android phone can help by downloading the MozStumbler app and letting it run while walking or driving around. The application is also available on the F-Droid market.

Submission + - SCOTUS to weigh smartphone searches by police (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether police can search an arrested criminal suspect's cell phone without a warrant in two cases that showcase how the courts are wrestling to keep up with rapid technological advances.

Taking up cases from California and Massachusetts arising from criminal prosecutions that used evidence obtained without a warrant, the high court will wade into how to apply older court precedent, which allows police to search items carried by a defendant at the time of arrest, to cell phones.

Submission + - Actually, It's Google That's Eating the World (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: An Xconomy column today suggests that Google is getting too big. When the company was younger, most of its acquisitions related to its core businesses of search, advertising, network infrastructure, and communications. More recently, it’s been colonizing areas with a less obvious connection to search, such as travel, social networking, productivity, logistics, energy, robotics, and — with the acquisition this week of Nest Labs — home sensor networks and automation. A Google acquisition can obviously mean a big payoff for startup founders and their investors, but as the company grows by accretion it may actually be slowing innovation in Silicon Valley (since teams inside the Googleplex, with its endless fountain of AdWords revenue, can stop worrying about making money or meeting market needs). And by infiltrating so many corners of consumers’ lives — and collecting personal and behavioral data as it goes — it’s becoming an all-encompassing presence, and making itself ever more attractive as a target for marketers, data thieves, and government snoops. ‘Any sufficiently advanced search, communications, and sensing infrastructure is indistinguishable from Big Brother,’ the column argues.

Submission + - Adblock's days are numbered (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PageFair offers a free JavaScript program that, when inserted into a Web page, monitors ad blocking activity. CEO Sean Blanchfield says he developed the monitoring tool after he noticed a problem on his own multiplayer gaming site. PageFair collects statistics on ad blocking activity, identifies which users are blocking ads and can display an appeal to users to add the publisher's website to their ad-blocking tool's personal whitelist. But Blanchfield acknowledges that the user appeal approach hasn't been very effective.

ClarityRay takes a more active role. Like PageFair, it provides a tool that lets publishers monitor blocking activity to show them that they have a problem — and then sells them a remedy. ClarityRay offers a service that CEO Ido Yablonka says fools ad blockers into allowing ads through. "Ad blockers try to make a distinction between content elements and advertorial elements. We make that distinction impossible," he says.

From ComputerWorld http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245190/Ad_blockers_A_solution_or_a_problem_?taxonomyId=71&pageNumber=4

Comment Re:Fire them (Score 3, Informative) 276

by eric_herm (#45370305) Attached to: Snowden Used Social Engineering To Get Classified Documents

You can fully divide the admin task with selinux like having 1 admin who can disable selinux ( or rather "update the policy" ), and having another doing operational stuff ( like logging as root ). So technically, the first one can disable protection for the 2nd one, but cannot do much by itself. And with protected physical access, you can pretty much have a rather locked down system. Not protected against 2 rogue admins, of course, but being protected against 1 is already better than most systems.

And regarding environment where SELinux is used ( besides targeted ), you can take a look at the openshift service from RH, they do use it a lot to separate users. But you are right that for most people, using more than targeted policy is a bit overkill, since people do not care that much about security ( and when they do care enough to not disable selinux, firewall and everything that make stuff so hard ).

Comment Re:B-O-O H-O-O. (Score 1) 419

by eric_herm (#45179411) Attached to: Mark Shuttleworth Complains About the 'Open Source Tea Party'

Bash is slow.
Also, bash is not a real language. You will start talking about programming in bash when it will have a proper namespacing system, because even php got namespace support.

Not to mention the need for forking a gigantic amount of software as soon as you want to make anything relevant such as parsing output of any others process, because bash is also unable to understand any complex data structure.

That's a fine language for those whose programming is not a job, and for small software, but as soon as you talk something more critical like the boot of a modern system, bash is holding change, due to various problem ( like a total lack of testing framework, and a given the fact that no one wrote one, lack of will to write one from the whole community of bash aficionados ). Any kind of network operations is just a hack, trying to put everything under the unix pipeline model ( like the whole /dev/tcp/ stuff that Debian disabled ).

Systemd unit file are vastly more easier to edit and go straight to the point, you declare the binary and it fucking take care of the rest. That's why we invented computers, to do stuff, not to force us to do their work.

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