Worth A Glance

Experts have issued a warning of an impending epidemic of swine flu warnings. The number of victims of these thinly disguised, commercially-motivated warnings is expected to exceed the number of victims of the actual swine flu by many orders of magnitude. “Be leery of anyone using the phrase ‘orders of magnitude’ in casual conversation,” cautioned [...]

The word “hacker” is very frequently misused, insomuch as jargon can be misused. But who would dare argue with an RFC? This venerable 15 year old document incontrovertibly defines a hacker as “a person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.  The [...]

Perhaps… if it’s the illusion of security rather than real security that’s being qualified (assuming the all-too likely case that illusion and reality are, in fact, different, and that it’s illusion that is more popularly important). At least that’s a conclusion that one could easily arrive at by extension of this study on wines. Accusations [...]

We design security products for everyman. We don’t have the luxury of designing products for security-savvy users, nor should we seek solace in the feckless admonition “education is the only solution”. That’s why this report is so alarming. It demonstrates that everyman users of online banking sites provide their credentials:

In the absence of HTTPS indicators
In [...]

In doing some reading about the recently launched High Assurance / Extended Validation SSL certificates (which attempt to restore some trust and validity to the identity of the subject) I visited the CA/Browser Forum, who helped to define the requirements. Figuring that they would be the most obvious site at which to test my browser’s [...]