August 21 2003 -
PC Protection for Procrastinators, DON'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT BIG ATTACK
TO DEFEND YOURSELF - By Mike Langberg, Mercury News,
Congratulations if you're among the 99 percent of personal computer
users who weren't hit with the Blaster worm last week or the SoBig
virus this week. You now have a chance to make your PC safe before
the next threat emerges. Most home computers aren't fully protected
because most home users don't understand the appropriate steps to
take or simply don't want the hassle. So instead of a product review
this week, I'll attempt the impossible: Explain in plain English why
you need basic security, and suggest painless ways to make your
computer safer. The tips here are for users of Windows personal
computers...
August 07 2003 -
DNS inventor says cure to net identity problems is right under our nose
- By David Berlind, Meet Paul Mockapetris. He may not be an industry
celebrity like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond,
or Linus Torvalds, but he should be. Mockapetris was a key figure in the
development of the Domain Name System, the Internet protocol that maps
domain names like zdnet.com to IP addresses like 206.16.6.208. Without a
protocol like DNS, people, software, and computers would be cast adrift
in a sea of incomprehensible and changing numbers. Although others were
involved with the development of the DNS, Mockapetris wrote the
protocol, and for this contribution he was recently awarded the
prestigious IEEE Internet Award. Today, Mockapetris is the chairman
and chief scientist at Nominum, a solution provider offering industrial
strength DNS and DHCP management solutions. But, when he's not running
Nominum, he's thinking about how to combat what he says is the
Internet's number one growth industry and the source of ills: identity
theft. "Most of our problems," says Mockapetris, "whether spam or
hactivism, like what happened to Al-Jazeera or 10 Downing Street, can be
traced back to identity theft." Not surprisingly, Mockapetris believes
the DNS could be the answer to many of the Internet's identity-related
problems "We could start from scratch," says Mockapetris, "or, we can
use something that's already in place, that's lightweight, and that
every computer on the Internet already knows how to use--the DNS..."
August 15 2003 -
Squashing the next worm -
By Robert Lemos, CNET News.com, Another virus, another epidemic.
Two years after the Code Red and Nimda worms spread across the Internet,
home users and many companies still aren't doing enough to secure
themselves against Internet threats, said security experts...
"Software is still flawed, people are still not
patching, and companies are still not making security a focus," said
Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for security software maker eEye
Digital Security. "They didn't after Code Red, they didn't after Nimda,
and they didn't after Sapphire/Slammer. Mostly likely, they won't
after this worm either."
August
2003 -
Being Invisible - Issue 11.08 - August 2003, WiredMag, Next-gen optical camouflage is
busting out of defense labs and into the street. This is technology you
have to see to believe. By Wil McCarthy, Invisibility has been on
humanity's wish list at least since Amon-Ra, a deity who could disappear
and reappear at will, joined the Egyptian pantheon in 2008 BC. With
recent advances in optics and computing, however, this elusive goal is
no longer purely imaginary. Last spring, Susumu Tachi, an engineering
professor at the University of Tokyo, demonstrated a crude invisibility
cloak. Through the clever application of some dirt-cheap technology, the
Japanese inventor has brought personal invisibility a step closer to
reality...
August 20 2003 -
Why Windows Update desperately needs an update -
By David Berlind, ZDNet Tech Update, August 20, 2003 8:57 PM PT, Last
week's global scramble to dodge the Blaster worm and subsequent warning
about a DirectX vulnerability were unpleasant reminders of how unusable
Microsoft's Windows Update (the mechanism that many businesses and
consumers use to keep their systems up-to-date) really is. As Microsoft
pursues its Trustworthy Computing campaign, one need look no further
than Windows Update to see just how far the software giant has to go
before Windows users can sleep at night...
