Industry News

I could list a number of Security and Hacking articles, which have exploded with the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, instead I just refer you to CNet's fairly extensive coverage of the event.

The Fifth Amendment continues to shrivel under capricious legislation, cavalier enforcement, and questionably educated judicial review

SMTP was made for a trusting environment that no longer exists. Therefore, its obsolete and dangerous

I will, however, refer you to an unusually heated discussion over an apparent flaw in the Mac OsX screensaver. I say apparent, because its questionable about whether the behavior is unreasonable or not. My take: In an OS environment, especially a *nix, when I set my OS to require a password to get access to my screen/keyboard/mouse I expect the OS to be designed such that the password prompt cannot, under any circumstances, be circumvented. Of course, once a user has local access, the validity of having a secure system is somewhat nullified, as the drive can easily be removed and thrown into another box for cracking. The flaw has also probably gained attention because of another buffer-overflow type flaw from a few weeks ago in the same program. (I know the latter link doesn't link to ALL the messages about the flaw, but it catches the majority of them).

A program for finding security flaws in binaries

Thermalpaste is making major advances

NVidia's performance market share shrinks

Confusing Linux Corporate politics continues to be, well, confusing

CloneDVD is out and, apparently, is worth its weight in gold. (so, how much does a few megabyte download weigh??)

AMD has cleared up the whole extra Athlon64 pin confusion

Hope that was enought to satiate your thirst for news!