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Tuesday, September 24, 2002

ZD News

Open Source Security Secrets

When asked the way out of the Labrynth, the King of the Goblins made it seem very difficult indeed. No instruction book or picture diagrams were laid out in front of the hapless victim of his eternal puzzles.

The King of the Software Empire has similarly hidden the pathways and passageways around his mortal tomb. If you can be so boring as to wade your way through mountains of documents which are about intangible whatsits with EXTREMELYANNOYINGLYLONGNAMES ... then you will inherit the world. An extremely dull world.

Or in the land of the living, the Open Source world, we can see what we are creating as the impetus is not to squelch the opposition or leave some hapless mortal to wander forever for our wry amusement.

In the land of the living, we call a "link" a "link" and a "function" a "function". We don't go calling it a _DF_FUNCTION( "RME882772736362515152363", "XFXXFFF73482") or anything that is that hard to remember or recognise.

And armed with those tools which the mind can grasp, we can create complex and sophisticated little functions with their own simple names, and write things that encrypt your data and protect it from thieves forever.

The Goblin King is still deciding what to do with you as you scramble through his endless maze and distracts you with wallets in which money disappears, and machines which can be infected with so many viruses, that is it almost a sport to watch then battle for control...





Monday, September 09, 2002

More MS Vulnerabilities


This sounds a bit like the end of the world, doesn't it?


A while back when Linux was nearly brought to its knees by a flaw in Apache (yes, folks, just one), the defenders of the MS faith railed that the Penguin was not water proof afterall. Geeks were never very good at metaphor. Why a Penguin, for goodness sake. Why not a killer whale?


The carrion bird of the register may be more prophetic here if there is a multitude of unfixable (or unlocatable) backdoors in Windows. Back doors (exploits) have been extremely well explored and now protected against in Linux. Also in Microsoft, but it remains a situation where the programmer (MS) is testing its own code and made suffer blind spots in the very culture its company fosters creating a "way of doing things", total anathema for real security you need to be elusive.


Like the hard security in Linux - I can not ftp a new installation anywhere because I set it on Hard security when installing? Not sure. But what did it do to GRUB boot loader on my old hard disk? Blimey can't boot to backup system. This is serious.


If this was Windows, I would be getting out my virus checker, but its Linux, so I will just reinstall, until I get it right.