Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Quinn, InfoCards, McKinnon
Globe's Ombudsman silent no longer. Andy Updegrove writes "For two months, the ombudsman of the Boston Globe has been silent on the reporting that helped bring about Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn's resignation. Last night, in response to an entry pointing out that silence at the Standards Blog, ombudsman Richard Chacon at last responded, admitting to "lingering questions over why the [Quinn travel investigation] story was allowed to run without comment from Eric Kriss," but standing by "the initial reasons for looking into the story." Chacon also promises to report back with further observations after contacting Peter Quinn."
Microsoft continues push for 'InfoCards'. FrankieBoy writes "Bill Gate kicked off the RSA computer conference in San Jose, CA by unveiling a few more details about their new 'InfoCard' system in the upcoming IE7. With InfoCards people could save personal information on virtual cards on their computers which websites would recognize removing the need for many different internet passwords."
Gary McKinnon extradition hearing reopened. earthlingpink writes "BBC News is reporting that the extradition hearing has reopened for Briton Gary McKinnon who is accused by the US of hacking into military computers. The damages he has caused is estimated at £370,000 (about $640,000 today) and he is said to face more than 45 years in prison. The original story and audio interview were both covered by Slashdot in June of last year."
Bugs to help kick oil addiction. Mr. Ghost writes "Bugs such as certain species of termites and fungi such as Trichoderma reesei may be the key to effectively and cheaply generate ethanol from cellulose. Small companies like Iogen and large international energy companies like Royal Dutch Shell are putting more and more money into this research. This type of technology may even be a way for the American automobile industry to gain back market share from its competitors."
So stealing my laptop will allow anyone to go to websites and impersonate me?
I see how Microsoft would like to position their system (passes, OS, Mail Client, etc.) as the "standard". Even previous versions of Windows allowed users to talk to everybody and anybody. Now it seems they have found another way to cut out 3rd-party companies, or get license fees (thus still dominating the market).
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At a Harvard workshop last week on user-centric identity, a bunch of us agreed to collect InfoCard issues as we hear about them. While work in progress, and your mileage my vary, I put an initial list of those on my blog.
s oft-infocard-issues.html
http://netmesh.info/jernst/Digital_Identity/micro
Kim Cameron, the chief identity architect at Microsoft, agreed to take them back into Microsoft to hopefully get them resolved.
Troll on, but you miss the mark, my uninformed friend.
4 1f tware_token.phpi d=566
This is nothing to do with data aggregation, targeted advertising or behavior tracking. It is not invasive software, surreptitiously installed while a user beleives they are performing another action.
This is more akin to "soft token" technologies:
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=21
http://www.actividentity.com/en/products/4_2_6_so
http://www.securehq.com/group.wml&deptid=80&group
The catcher is that this is not tied to X.509 PKI infrastructures, per se. Identity is established by locally configurable means - usually a Kerberos ID - and presented by signed XML markups, rather than the static, signed ASN.1 encodings in certificates. The exchange is still fundamentally an RSA public key validation type problem, but with an extensible policy mechanism in XML. This is an application of the work done by multiple vendors in the WS-Security space. Dynamic policy, negotiated in a federated manner between endpoints, is not possible with x.509, which has permanent policy encoded in the cert.
There is integration with Windows AD Federation, which means there is possibility to interoperate with SAML clients. Trust can also be established by reputation - with attesters signing a keychain for particular identities.
The short story is that this could end phishing attacks.
The long story is that most banks and investment firms won't make this mandatory for transactions, since their Businesses still insist on Win95/IE4 compatibility from their IT and InfoSec personnel.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I hate how lazy and irresponsible the mainstream media is these days.
The original article basically implied that Quinn was taking gifts from vendors to travel to conferences all over the world. This turned out to be false. So basically falsehoods. My feeling is that Quinn deserves an appology at minimum.
Then the "investigation" is just the Ombudsman phoning the reporter up, the reporter says there isn't any issue so it's fine. Plus some excuses about how busy the Ombudsman is and how his assistant is only part time. Mix in a few ad hominem attacks.
Nice. Way to go. It's goot that we have moronic lazy turd to keep everyone honest.
Microsoft already had a universal password system fail: Passport. The majority of web site owners simply didn't trust Microsoft enough to integrate their security in any way.
Developers: We can use your help.
McKinnon did not accidently wander into those systems, he did it intentionally knowing he was breaking the laws in both the UK and the USA. I took over as SA on a machine he had previously compromised. When it was determined that it had been "hacked" (yeah it takes mad skillz to exploit the old default MS SQL password) I had to report it and deal with the ensuing fun. After the forensic analysis (which was very fruitful) the box had to be reinstalled from scratch:NT,SQL and a particularly ugly document management application. Now those of you reading this who are actual professional system administrators know that we probably had other things to do. So if Gary is worried about spending time in a Virginia prison, tough. Thats where we keep criminals. (Sorry, didn't mean to rant).
You have some good questions and I don't have the answers however, I can share some insight that I do have.
Any woody or grassy plant is an excellent source of cellulose. This means that much land that is currently thought of as unprofitable would be well suited to grow the crop. For instance swamps could be harvested (without harming the wetlands in the winter) and could provide a huge amount of the raw matterials. "Slash and trash" from forests being harvested for lumber and pulp could also supply a lot of cellulose from the branches, leaves, and roots that are currently unused.
From what I have read the conversion of cellulose to ethanol is pretty efficient; the bugs eat the woody stuff and crap out suggary stuff that is made into ethanol using pretty normal, efficient processes. Think of these bugs like yeast, they eat and reproduce quite well given the proper circumstances so their added cost is minimal.
While the amount of land required to produce the feedstock for an ethanol production facility is something to consider, along with the costs of producing ethanol, this is only one part of the formula. The other side is the fact that oil that the United States imports puts us at the mercy of some people who we don't want controlling us. If we can put ourselves on a diet and reduce the amount of energy we import, we have a safer country and a more stable economy while we put Americans to work making something that we currently pay someone else for. When we reduce the demand for oil it is even likely that the oil that we do import will be less expensive (we are a major consumer of oil and the law of supply and demand will slide in our favor).
Ethanol is not a new, unique, or unusual fuel. Brazil is already up and running on an alcohol based economy, the lion's share of their fuel is produced in Brazil from sugar cane. In the MidWest of the United States, many states require all of the fuel sold in their state contain ten percent ethanol. In Minnesota (where I live) we recently increased the minimum amount of ethanol to twenty percent. We have a number of ethanol plants here that are distilling ethanol from corn. E85 us also making inroads. I have not noticed any difference in the way my cars run (2000 Dodge pickup, 2000 Chevy Venture, and a 1993 Ford Explorer) since the switch. Regular gas here today was $2.04/gal. Some people say their gas mileage is about the same but I'd say that I have seen a slight decrease in the MPG from "real" gas, I would guess the number to be about 5% reduction in MPG. Still even assuming a slight reduction in MPG, how does $2.04 stack up against the price you are paying for gas?