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Encryption

Safari Will Stop Trusting Certs Older Than 13 Months (theregister.co.uk) 115

Posted by EditorDavid from the suspicious-certs dept.
"Safari will, later this year, no longer accept new HTTPS certificates that expire more than 13 months from their creation date..." writes the Register.

Long-time Slashdot reader nimbius shares their report: The policy was unveiled by the iGiant at a Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser) meeting on Wednesday. Specifically, according to those present at the confab, from September 1, any new website cert valid for more than 398 days will not be trusted by the Safari browser and instead rejected.

Older certs, issued prior to the deadline, are unaffected by this rule.

By implementing the policy in Safari, Apple will, by extension, enforce it on all iOS and macOS devices. This will put pressure on website admins and developers to make sure their certs meet Apple's requirements — or risk breaking pages on a billion-plus devices and computers... The aim of the move is to improve website security by making sure devs use certs with the latest cryptographic standards, and to reduce the number of old, neglected certificates that could potentially be stolen and re-used for phishing and drive-by malware attacks... We note Let's Encrypt issues free HTTPS certificates that expire after 90 days, and provides tools to automate renewals.
Transportation

California's Hydrogen Highway Adds Another Station 87

Posted by timothy from the chicken-meet-egg dept.
plover writes Scientific American notes that a new hydrogen refueling station has been added in Sacramento, bringing the state's total to ten. This was timed to coincide with Toyota's Japan release of their first commercially available fuel cell vehicle, the Mirai. Toyota is scheduled to start selling cars in Northern California next year.

Comment Re:~/.cshrc (Score 1) 208

by hcbecker (#48010129) Attached to: Apple Yet To Push Patch For "Shellshock" Bug

Scripts that start with #!/bin/sh but are written dependant on bash features will fail. .

And that is just brain-dead from the beginning. If you ask for /bin/sh, you should get /bin/sh (which in my world should be statically linked, and I am looking at you, Linux distros) and not some almost-but-quite-not sh.

Submission + - Krugman: Say no to Comcast acquisition of Time Warner (nytimes.com)

Submitted by nbauman
nbauman writes: In his column, "Barons of Broadband" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02... (easily circumventable paywall) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says:

Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons, so-called by analogy with medieval warlords who perched in their castles overlooking the Rhine, extracting tolls from all who passed. The Time Warner deal would in effect let Comcast strengthen its fortifications, which has to be a bad idea.

Comcast’s chief executive says not to worry: “It will not reduce competition in any relevant market because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other. In fact, we do not operate in any of the same ZIP codes.” This is, however, transparently disingenuous. The big concern about making Comcast even bigger isn’t reduced competition for customers in local markets — for one thing, there’s hardly any effective competition at that level anyway. It is that Comcast would have even more power than it already does to dictate terms to the providers of content for its digital pipes — and that its ability to drive tough deals upstream would make it even harder for potential downstream rivals to challenge its local monopolies.

Submission + - Why Improbable Things Really Aren't (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by sixoh1
sixoh1 writes: Scientific American has an excellent summary of a new book "The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day" by David J. Hand. The summary offers a quick way to relate statistical math (something that's really hard to intuit) to our daily experiences with unlikely events. The simple equations here make it easier to understand that improbable things really are not so improbable, which Hand call the "Improbability Principle":

How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.

Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!

Submission + - Reporting from the Web's Underbelly (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: The NY Times has an interesting article about Brian Krebs (Krebs on Security):
"In the last year, Eastern European cybercriminals have stolen Brian Krebs’s identity a half dozen times, brought down his website, included his name and some unpleasant epithets in their malware code, sent fecal matter and heroin to his doorstep, and called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner."
His reporting is definitely on the edge. "Mr. Krebs, 41, tries to write pieces that cannot be found elsewhere. His widely read cybersecurity blog, Krebs on Security, covers a particularly dark corner of the Internet: profit-seeking cybercriminals, many based in Eastern Europe, who make billions off pharmaceutical sales, malware, spam, frauds and heists like the recent ones that Mr. Krebs was first to uncover at Adobe, Target and Neiman Marcus."
The article concludes with this: "Mr. Joffe worries Mr. Krebs’s enemies could do far worse. “I don’t understand why he hasn’t moved to a new, undisclosed address,” he said. “But Brian needs a bodyguard.” (He does have a shotgun.)
Python

Submission + - Python trademark at risk in Europe

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes: It seems that a company in the UK is trying to trademark the "Python" term for all-things-computing and the PSF (Python Software Foundation) is asking for help. According to the PSF, they contacted the company in order to settle the matter but "They blew us off and responded by filing the community trademark application claiming the exclusive right to use "Python" for software, servers, and web services — everywhere in Europe. ". They now seek help from the community in several ways: By sending a letter to the EU council if you happen to work on a company that uses the Python programming language, by providing EU-published material regarding the Python language (articles etc) and/or financially supporting the PSF in the upcoming legal battle.
NASA

Submission + - NASA considering moving GALEX astrophysics satellite to private ownership (spaceflightnow.com)

Submitted by
hogghogg
hogghogg writes: "The GALEX spacecraft (surveying the Universe in ultraviolet wavelengths at which the atmosphere is close to opaque) is coming to the end of its budget life, but it hasn't finished imaging the entire sky and is still (fairly) functional. A group at Caltech wants to keep it running, so NASA is considering transfer of ownership under the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act which "allows the transfer of government-owned excess research equipment to educational institutions and non-profit organizations". Many NASA missions are terminated for budget reasons at the end of a prescribed period, even while the hardware is still highly functional. Although this is the first-ever transfer from NASA of a functioning satellite, maybe this is just the start for a class of privately run astronomical and Earth-observing facilities in space?"

Comment Re:Don't bother (Score 1) 270

by hcbecker (#29213889) Attached to: Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps?
Everything from Adobe newer than Acrobat 6 (including Acrobat 6 if you count the update feature) is utterly broken on case-sensitive HFS+ file systems. Adobe's solution? "Reformat with a case-insensitive file system." Needless to say, they don't get any more money from me ...

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