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Symantec Will Acquire Controversial Surveillance Firm Blue Coat Systems For $4.65 Billion (helpnetsecurity.com)
Reader LichtSpektren writes: Symantec will acquire Blue Coat for approximately $4.65 billion in cash, the security firm announced on Monday. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016. Greg Clark, CEO of Blue Coat, will be appointed CEO of Symantec and join the Symantec Board upon closing of the transaction.If Blue Coat name sounds familiar to you, it is because this controversial surveillance firm was recently in the news for receiving a grant for a powerful encryption certificate by its now-parent company Symantec.
>> Blue Coat (got) a powerful encryption certificate by its now-parent company Symantec...Symantec will acquire Blue Coat for approximately $4.65 billion in cash
It sounds like Blue Coat also got naked pictures of Symantec's board of director's spouses and/or mistresses.
Wow, Greg Clark just used Symantec's cash to make himself CEO of Symantec.
I'd double-check the trust chain on all those negotiation emails from Symantec's board. Something tells me Blue Coat's shiny, new CA cert will be in there. ;)
As if Symantec were not shitty enough already, now it's going to be a tool of the surveillance state. Nice.
Precisely what was the technology angle? This isn't a general news site, GTFO
For OS X: https://blog.filippo.io/untrusting-an-intermediate-ca-on-os-x/
For WIndows: http://blogs.msmvps.com/alunj/2016/05/26/untrusting-the-blue-coat-intermediate-ca-from-windows/
And why you should: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-controversial-surveillance-firm-was-granted-a-powerful-encryption-certifica
The only upside to all this is that Symantec has an astonishingly powerful ability to turn everything they acquire into utter shit. This doesn't make one of the world's major SSL CAs owning a sleazy SSL MiTM appliance vendor any less disturbing; but it at least means that the various malefactors using Bluecoat products to exploit us will have an incrementally more miserable time.
Just more fuel on the "trusting 'trusted' CAs just doesn't cut it" fire.
You obviously don't know how it works. When you post AC, you're automatically at 0 dumbass. So don't post AC unless you have something the masses will think pertinent enough to upvote you or they'll down vote you especially when you spam as you've done. I doubt it's a "team". You've already lied.
Symantec is buying Blue Coat Systems. Avira Anti-Virus installs the MixPanel data harvester. What's going on with security companies nowadays?
Well it is "stuff that matters". Took them long enough.
Does that mean that Obama hates gays too? He also refuses to call it radical Islam.
Hmm. The geographic proximity of Symantec and the "Utah Data Center" would tend to raise the eyebrows of those paying attention.
You obviously don't know how it works. When you post AC, you're automatically at 0 dumbass. So don't post AC unless you have something the masses will think pertinent enough to upvote you or they'll down vote you
So many great posts get modded down to -1 that I and many others browse at -1. Slashdot isn't the bastion of evidence-based objective truth that its users want to believe it is. It's often an echo chamber. There are shills or rabid fanboys, hard to tell sometimes. But the worst is the people who think, "I use X, therefore if you criticize X, you're attacking MY TEAM and I just MUST retaliate!" morons everywhere. A lot of people cannot seem to use something without becoming personally identified with it, just like you see with sports fans. Just watch for the next Apple or Google story and it will be obvious.
Until some serious metamoderation is brought back or mods grow up and learn to tolerate views they disagree with, -1 is the way to do things. If you're a big boy/girl and can handle "offensive" words then it's really not bad at all.
The line is "news for nerds, stuff that matters" as in "the news for nerds is the stuff that matters." I think you mistook it for "News for nerds; stuff that matters" which would imply it covered nerdy news as well as other important topics. The difference some punctuation can make...
Slashdot is acting funny lately. Has somebody said hey editor, have a seat?
The line is "news for nerds, stuff that matters" as in "the news for nerds is the stuff that matters." I think you mistook it for "News for nerds; stuff that matters" which would imply it covered nerdy news as well as other important topics. The difference some punctuation can make...
More like, the difference it makes when one has mastered basic literacy.
Capitalism demands ever increasing ROI for shorter time horizons. With these changes, the CEO gets a nice bonus yacht, the insiders sell after the next quarterly report with great numbers and all the smart people jump ship leaving the suckers to lose their shirts and pick up the pieces.
Worst system ever, except for all the other ones we've tried.
Corporate use is inspection of traffic to detect security breaches, but Service Provider use is surveillance?
Use of wildcard certs is one thing, but BlueCoat technology isn't designed for surveillance any more than network analysis tools are.
"Symantec acquires Blue Coat." Journalism.
"Symantec acquires controversial surveillance firm Blue Coat." Sensationalism.
I know this is Slashdot, but the world runs on standards that only a small percentage of the population understands let alone creates or manages. Simply living in this world requires a huge amount of trust. For the rest of us, there's medication.
Symantec is buying Blue Coat Systems. Avira Anti-Virus installs the MixPanel data harvester. What's going on with security companies nowadays?
They're having the problem that they can't grow fast enough to please their shareholders/investors. The market for security products is finite, competitive and customers aren't willing to pay ever increasing amounts of cash for their products. So their management is pushed inexorably towards sources of revenue that might not be in the best interests of their customers. Of course Symantec has produced crap software for a long time now so them making bad decisions is nothing new. Removing their crapware is usually among the first things I do with any new PC that is burdened with it.
Of course there is also the old problem that security companies make money by "protecting" against malware but if malware ceased to exist so would their business. So they have a built in conflict of interest in that they want to protect but not actually get rid of malware completely. In theory they could even be the ones creating the malware to ensure there is a threat to protect against. A form of racketeering really.
Neither Symantec nor Blue Coat are security companies. They are signals intelligence operations, and their leadership ranks have rather more "flexible" views on intelligence acquisition and sharing than the narratives offered by their tireless PR/legal/accounting wings. Simply do as I did and spend a decade-plus with root access to the core networks and cryptographic facilities of a few dozen Fortune 500 corps, plus similar access to a bunch of network backbone/transit/telco/satcom infrastructure spread across several continents, with generous dollops of "golly gee that's interesting" discussions in nice conference rooms full of corporate/federal/uniformed/spooky/indie/depends-who's-asking types with Bright Ideas (TM), and you can see for yourself. It's a trip, man. -PCP
This year my blue coat product was just replaced. Guess i couldn't have planned that one any better.
The minute symantec gets ahold of anything - it becomes more expensive, more bloated, slower than any other product out there.
was never impressed by that company