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Comment Sometimes yes, within enterprises (Score 1) 684

I don't like DRM in the consumer world, DRM'd media files, games, etc. I agree with all the arguments against using DRM there. Criminalizing decryption is a travesty of justice.

However, there are entirely different contexts where DRM can be a useful tool. For example, in a past job, my company was receiving a sensitive data feed from another company where we had to promise to revoke our internal access to certain parts of the data feed upon demand. We were not worried about internal hackery, but we were worried about inadvertent copies being made within our enterprise for reasonable reasons. (Backups, caches for speed, etc.) We self-imposed DRM, and it was a great solution.

Comment Actively harmful... (Score 1) 379

Having such an easily game-able criteria (boisterous people get more investigation) yields more success rate for those who don't want to get investigate. The al-Qaeda training manual suggesting blending in is an obvious reaction - while the security spends more time on some class, they have less time to spend on the class the terrorist can put themselves into. (Quiet and blending in.) Thus, this actively (slightly) increases the chance the terrorist can achieve their goals.

Security

Researchers Hack Biometric Faces 244

yahoi sends in news from a week or so back: "Vietnamese researchers have cracked the facial recognition technology used for authentication in Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba laptops in lieu of the standard logon/password. The researchers were able to easily bypass the biometric authentication system built into the laptops by using photos of an authorized user, as well as by presenting multiple phony facial images in brute-force attacks. One of the researchers will demonstrate the hack at Black Hat DC this week. He says the laptop makers should remove the facial biometrics feature from their products because the vulnerability of this technology can't be fixed."
The Almighty Buck

How To Make Money With Free Software 81

bmsleight writes "The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition to design not a building, but rather the new 5-Euro commemorative coin. The theme was 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winning design was made 100% with free software, mainly Python, but also including The Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch, and Ubuntu. The design is amazing — the head of Queen Beatrix is made up of the names of architects based on their popularity in Yahoo searches (rendered in a font of the artist's own devising). In the end the artist, Stani Michiels, had to collaborate closely on location with technicians of the Royal Dutch Mint, so all the last bits were done on his Asus Eee PC. Soon, 350,000 Dutch people will use and enjoy the fruits of free software."

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