When I first saw this month’s post on Futures Blog about a Second Life property lawsuit, I thought I’d be seeing news of cutting-edge jurisprudence. But it turns out the lawsuit was filed back in May 2005, has since been withdrawn, and a second suit filed in October 2006 which is more about fraud than property law. Second Life Insider has the story so far. Futures Blog might best re-name itself Past Blog — or at least link to their sources.
Not all groups are gangs
In the same way that British public servants will stop using the phrase “War on Terror” because it makes terrorists feel part of something bigger, the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales says groups of youths involved anti-social behaviour and petty crime shouldn’t be called gangs.
Who do you trust? Everyone!
When it comes to security, every desktop computer operating system is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because any software you run has the same permissions that you do. Anything you can do, they can do too — whether you want that or not.
Speaking at the AusCERT conference on Monday, Ivan Krstic, director of security architecture for the One Laptop per Child project, says the computing industry relies on “utterly obsolete concepts and assumptions” and has “massively failed when it comes to desktop security”.
The way modern desktop security works is by relying on the user to make informed and sensible choices on things they don’t understand.
The early personal firewall software was a classic example:
A dialogue would pop up and say ‘Hi, we’ve intercepted this packet with this TCP sequence number and these flags set, and SYN and FIN are both on, and here are the destination ports and the source ports and here is a hex dump of the packet. Allow or deny? What do you think?’. Who is that protecting? It’s protecting me, but I don’t need that kind of protection in the first place.
The Apple Blog was sarcastic when they reported Krstic’s speech — I suspect because arrogant OS X users think security issues don’t apply to them — so I posted a response…
Maintaining the right tone
My last post, sitting there at the top of the home page for three days or more, really doesn’t give people “the right impression”, does it? Or does it?
Quote of the Day, 17 May 2007
From my friend Richard: “Bukkake: It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”
Fogbound Sydney
This morning Sydney was fog-bound, and The Other Andrew captured a great moment on pixels. By the time I got to the city, while it was still only about 16C, the sun had burnt off most of the cloud. This is all that remained.