Ben Edelman reports that Utah’s governor signed HB323 into law yesterday. That’s the anti-spyware law I discussed two weeks ago. I guess we’ll find out whether the bill’s opponents were right about its supposed burden on legitimate software businesses.
Archives for March 2004
Used Hard Disks Packed with Confidential Information
March 24, 2004 by
Simson Garfinkel has an eye-opening piece in CSO magazine about the contents of used hard drives. Simson bought a pile of used hard drives and systematically examined them to see what could be recovered from them.
I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.
Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm.
…
One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions
Lawyers, Lawyers Everywhere
March 23, 2004 by
Frank Field points to an upcoming symposium at Seton Hall on “Peer to Peer at the Crossroads: New Developments and New Directions for the Law and Business of Peer-to-Peer Networking”. Here’s a summary from the symposium announcement:
This Symposium will review recent developments in the law and business of peer-to-peer networks, with a view to determining where the law is going and where it should go. We will examine both the theoretical and practical implications of recent decisions and legislative initiatives, and will offer different perspectives on where the intersection between P2P technology and the law should lie. Our panelists include scholars and practitioners as well as representative from the U.S. Copyright Office.
This sounded pretty good. But reading the announcement more carefully, I noticied something odd: the speakers are all lawyers. If you’re having a conference whose scope includes business and technology, it seems reasonable to have at least some representation from the technology or business communities. Maybe on the panel about “Business Models, Technology, and Trends”?
Now I have nothing against lawyers. Some lawyers really understand technology. A few even understand it deeply. But if I were running a conference on law and technology, and I invited only technologists to speak, this would be seen, rightly, as a big problem. It wouldn’t be much of an excuse for me to say that those technologists know a lot about the law. If I’m inviting ten speakers for a conference on technology and the law, surely I have one slot for somebody whose primary expertise is in the law.
Yet the same argument, running in the other direction, seems not to apply sometimes. Why not?
Security Attacks on Security Software
March 22, 2004 by
A new computer worm infects PCs by attacking security software, according to a Brian Krebs story in Saturday’s Washington Post. The worm exploits flaws in two personal firewall products, made by Black Ice and Real Secure Internet. Just to be clear: the firewalls’ flaw is not that they fail to stop the worm, but that they actively create a hole that the worm exploits. People who didn’t buy these firewalls are safe from the worm.
This has to be really embarrassing for the vendor, ISS. The last thing a security product should do is to create more vulnerabilities.
This problem is not unique. Last week, another security product, Norton Internet Security, had a vulnerability reported.
Consumers are still better off, on balance, using PC security products. On the whole, these products close more holes than they open. But this is a useful reminder that all network software caries risks. Careful software engineering is needed everywhere, and especially for security products.
Gleick on the Naming Conundrum
March 20, 2004 by
James Gleick has an interesting piece in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, on the problems associated with naming online. If you’re already immersed in the ICANN/DNS/UDRP acronym complex, you won’t learn much; but if you’re not a naming wonk, you’ll find the piece a very nice introduction to the naming wars.
