Category: Internet

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Is London 2012 skewing their blog commentary?

Yesterday I posted a comment about the dodgy logo at the London 2012 blog, but it wasn’t published. So this morning I’ve posted the following comment which may or may not appear.

I don’t understand why the balance of commentary on this blog is so out of kilter with the balance of commentary elsewhere. It’s clear that most media outlets are reflecting an overwhelmingly negative response to the new branding — yet that’s not reflected here.

I posted a comment on this issue on Monday’s posting but it wasn’t published — yet I don’t see how it broke the commenting guidelines.

Are comments being selectively published as a PR “spin”?

I wonder if they’ll even respond… there’s so much at stake with the Olympics, and so many reputations to protect.

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“First Virtual Land Lawsuit” not so new

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 But it turns out the lawsuit was filed back in May 2005, has since been withdrawn, and a second suit filed in October 2006 which is more about fraud than property law.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.

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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…

Continue reading “Who do you trust? Everyone!”