] In the toughest move to date against unsolicited
] commercial e-mail, Virginia enacted a law yesterday
] imposing harsh felony penalties for sending such messages
] to computer users through deceptive means.

Lots of problems here; not clear what the right answer is.

Spam Sent by Fraud Is Made a Felony Under Virginia Law

] Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems,
] and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between
] packets that have malicious intent and those that are
] merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4
] header as a means of distinguishing the two cases.

Who knows the evil that lurks in the buffers of men? The Stack knows!

This document discusses IAB concerns that ongoing research is needed to further the evolution of the Internet infrastructure, and that consistent, sufficient non-commercial funding is needed to enable such research.

This is a really cool ID ... and puts a finger on a trend that I've been vaguely aware of that the IETF seems to be spending more and more time designing SNMP MIBs and less time on fundamentals.

My boss (director of a lab at CMU) made a remark a few months ago
that sums up the problem: "Why should we work this if industry
can do it?" Academics are simply not interested in building
practical systems! They want to push the limits of the design space. They want to build something that is information-theoretically secure and completely useless in practice.

But industry doesn't seem to be able to do it either: they are
too often brain-damaged by a bean-counting, 6-month-returns mindset.

I would work on this stuff full-time if someone would pay me to do it but noone will since I don't have a PhD and if I did, I probably wouldn't want to anymore!

IAB Concerns Regarding Internet Research and Evolution

Losses at Microsoft Corp.'s Home and Entertainment segment, which includes the Xbox game console, nearly doubled in the last three months of 2002, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Friday.

Xbox losses widen

Needless to say, the ability for any keyholder to obtain system-wide access represents a serious potential threat to the security of master-keyed installations. Individuals and institutions that depend on such locks to protect their safety and property should be aware of these risks and consider alternatives to eliminate or reduce their exposure to this threat.

Matt Blaze is at it again ... this paper has a Markus Kuhn / Ross Anderson flavor to it. (There is a news article in today's NYT about this paper.)

Master-Keyed Lock Vulnerability

This isn't really news; Windows source has been available to e.g.
academics for awhile, now.

Interesting to consider state governments adding their own spyware
to Windows, though.

Seattle Post Intelligencer Microsoft reveals secret source code to Russia

Decius and I were talking about this some last Saturday ... this
paper crystalizes a lot of the problems that OSS will have to overcome
to win on the desktop.

Usability and Open Source Software