Slashback: Compromise, Bugs, Slag

Slashback with more on Bill Gates' comments on bugs in Microsoft's code, the recent compromising of millions of credit card numbers, more .uk domain waffling, and more, including a foolproof way to stop anyone from reading data off of your discarded hard drive's platters.

Let me just slide your card a few dozen more times ... Any Web Loco writes "Following on from this piece on /., this story in the Sydney Morning Herald tells us that the company that got hacked (exposing up to 8 million credit card numbers) was Data Processors International. Not much to the story, but we now know who it was."

Another reason to be cautious about domains with "uk" in them. An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that Nominet has looked at opening .net.uk up or killing it off and then decided it can't decide. The chair of sub-committee responsible, Clive Feather, is currently standing for re-election to Nominets Policy Advisory Board. The sub-committee he chaired had suggested shutting down net.uk entirely, which the main board rejected. His position must surely be under scrutiny by the internet community."

Interesting bugs are in the teeth of the beholder. dvdweyer writes "I myself do remember having read the whole interview with Bill Gates in Focus, a German weekly news magazine (their online service now seems to be part of MSN *yuck*). There are however resources online which provide full sources, in English, most notably RISKS in issue 17.43 (not 17.42) with a follow-up in issue 17.44."

When fan-subs just aren't what you want. May Kasahara writes "Studio Ghibli fansite Nausicaa.net now has official release dates for Region 1 DVDs of Kiki's Delivery Service , Laputa: Castle in the Sky , and Spirited Away , as well as official preview artwork of the disks and packaging. As a side note, the site now has a page up for Miyazaki's upcoming Howl's Magic Castle . See you at the video store on April 15!"

Fonts make your terminal much more useful. Russ Nelson writes "The Bitstream Vera fonts are available for trial use. Bitstream is still tweaking them, so they're under the provisional "no redistribution" license. You can download them yourself, though, and in about a month, put them in your software distribution. Kudos to X co-creator Jim Gettys for finally getting X some professional-quality fonts."

Dear Mr. Ashcroft: I hope you find this slag useful. eecue writes "Due to the recent MIT study concerning data recovery from old hard drives, we decided that the only foolproof means of data removal was complete destruction."

Comments

Standard US DoD SOP

[George Walker Bush]

for destruction of magnetic data is to use thermite in situations where time is of the essence and less important than safety (eg, your base is being overrun), and acid in other cases. Both are quite effective, needless to say.

Re:.uk

[rgmoore]

Why should it be .gb instead of .uk? The full and proper name of the country is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland. People are more likely to call it The United Kingdom (which fully includes the whole country) rather than Great Britain (which excludes the people in North Ireland, many of whom most certainly want to assert that they are part of the UK rather than their neighbor to the south). I've certainly heard lots of people talk about "The UK", but I've never heard them talk about "GB". There's certainly no reason not to use .uk rather than .gb.

Re:.net.uk

[ajvtoo]

Nominet membership is a 400ukp one-off joining fee, and 100ukp annual subscription.

http://www.nic.uk/Members/HowToJoin/

Re:.uk

[$$$$$exyGal]

It looks to me like .gb and .uk are both TLD's for the United Kingdom. A website in Norway tells me so.

--sex

Re:Vera, what do you look like?

[Hal Roberts]

http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts /vera/index.html

Securely deleting encrypted data

[phr2]

First of all you should never write sufficiently sensitive data to a hard drive in cleartext form. But if you have 10,000 encrypted files and you want to delete one securely, the question then becomes, how do you get rid of the decryption key for that file?

It turns out you can do that if you have some securely deletable way to store just one key (e.g. 16 bytes for an AES key). See here for further description and a link to sample code.

Absolutely Beautiful!

[nathanh]

The Vera Sans Mono Roman is gorgeous. I'm making it my default terminal window font. Thank you, Jim and Jim!