Recent Articles
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Black Hat Confab to Spotlight Database Security
LAS VEGAS—Rootkits. Zero-day exploits. Social engineering. Encryption cracking. Cryptography. File format fuzzing. Kernel exploitation. These are just some of the buzzwords making the rounds at the Black Hat USA 2005 security conference here, where some of the sharpest minds in the research community will congregate to share information on computer and Internet security threats. The…
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VARs Wary of Apple’s Transition to Intel
The dust has largely settled following Apple Computer Inc.’s announcement that it would use Intel Corp. microprocessors in its Macintosh computers—a shift that will start in some models by mid-2006 and will include all Macs by the end of 2007—but resellers are still trying to analyze the impact the big switch will have for their…
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Sun Adds Glamour to Thin Clients
Sun Microsystems Inc. has renewed its efforts to get the world interested in its thin-client computing platform, Sun Ray. Earlier this year, the company released both a new hardware client (the Sun Ray 170) and server software—including a version that runs on Linux. I have a long history with thin-client computing, dating back to my…
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‘Critical’ Kerberos Flaws Could Open Networks to Attack
Kerberos, the popular authentication protocol developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is vulnerable to three serious flaws that could allow an attacker to gain access to protected corporate networks, MIT researchers disclosed late on Tuesday. Unix variants such as Solaris and Apple Computer Inc.’s Mac OS X, and Linux distributions such as Red Hat…
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Open Source, Open Market for Ideas
Why would a professional political scientist be interested in the open-source movement? For Steven Weber, a professor of political science and director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, it was the chance to investigate a technological issue that had what he saw as political ramifications. “In the political…
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Microsoft Indemnifies Its OEM Partners Against IP Attacks
The litigation between the SCO Group and IBM is having repercussions in the most unexpected place: at Microsoft. Microsoft Corp. announced Thursday that it is strengthening the IP (intellectual property) protection, or indemnification, it provides to all the PC manufacturers it works with, from the larger OEMs and smaller OEM System Builder partners, to OEM…
