talkinsecurity writes "Earlier this week Peter Tippett, chief scientist at the ICSA and the inventor of the progam that became Norton Antivirus, had some interesting things to say about the state of the security industry. In a nutshell, Tippett warned that about a third of the work that security departments do today is a waste of time. Tippett goes on to systematically blow holes in a lot of security's current best practices, including vulnerability research/patching, strong passwords, and the product evaluation process. 'If a hacker breaks into the password files of a corporation with 10,000 machines, he only needs to guess one password to penetrate the network, Tippett notes. "In that case, the long passwords might mean that he can only crack 2,000 of the passwords instead of 5,000," he said. "But what did you really gain by implementing them? He only needed one."' Some of his arguments are definitely debatable, but there is a lot of truth to what he's saying as well."

thinkzinc notes a story indicating that, according to a new study, men have a harder time putting down a controller than women do. Researchers at Stanford did brain imaging work on a group of young test subjects while they played a simple PC game. Besides the 'obvious' conclusion that men were more 'aggressive at gaining territory on the screen', the tests also indicated that male brains showed more activity in the reward and addiction components of the brain. "The lead author, Dr. Allan Reiss, noted that most of the video games that are popular with men are territory and aggression-type games. 'These gender differences in the brain may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become hooked on video games than females,' he said. Other recent surveys indicate that about 40 percent of Americans regularly play games on a computer or console, but young males are two or three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, Reiss said. "

DaMassive writes "Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld's SAVE XP petition Web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" — a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! The Save XP movement has attracted the attention of the software giant, despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies and its adoption rate is in line with the company's expectations. "We're seeing positive indicators that we're already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista," the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro."

narramissic writes "Remember the controversial Mac hacking contest from last year's CanSecWest conference? No? Here's a refresher: Conference organizers challenged attendees to hack into a Macintosh laptop, with the successful hacker winning the computer and a cash prize. Winner Dino Dai Zovi found a QuickTime bug that allowed him to run unauthorized software on the Mac once the computer's browser was directed to a specially crafted Web page. Well, the contest is back again this year, but with a twist, says Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of CanSecWest: 'We're thinking of having a contest where we have Vista and OS X and Linux ... and see which one goes first.""