Here is my write up of the CheckPoint Experience, held in Las Vegas this February...

Let me know what you're seeing from your security vendors...

CheckPoint [in]Experience 2008 - what a waste of time

Deregulation of telecommunications has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster for U.S. businesses. If the broadband mess isn’t hurting your business today, it soon will be. It’s time to do something about it.

This is a great article, and an idiotic comment from Scott Cleland of "precursorblog.com", an apparent puppet of the Cable and Telco vendors.

What do you think?

Opinion: Keeping a lid on broadband

The 2GB and 4GB versions will be available early in 2008; 8GB and 16GB versions are expected out later in 2008 or in 2009. All versions are designed to work within the new Intel "Menlow" platform (which includes the "Silverthorne" processor and the "Poulsbo" chip set) for mobile devices, Larson said.

Larson said the new drive will be used in laptops, PDAs, GPS devices, digital phones, gaming machines—the whole gamut of IT devices.

"We project that we'll be producing 64GB versions of this by 2010," Larson said. "NAND is really at the gates to replace disk hard drives, although this will still take some time."

How come when I read this do I start to think about the "Terminator" movie series?

Intel Unveils Low-Power SSD for Portable Devices

Rattle wrote:
Dagmar posted up this summary of the situation with Dan Egerstad (Google Cache).

In a move almost staggeringly myopic, agents from Swedish National Crime and the Swedish Security Police raided Dan Egerstad on Monday of this week, rather clearly on the basis of his massive non-hack of the TOR routing service.

For those not catching on, Dan is the gentleman we all cheered a short while ago for having the ingenuity to set up and connect several new TOR (an anonymizing packet routing system) nodes and see if people were actually using the network with unencrypted protocols (which would basically be foolish in the extreme). It turns out that Dan's suspicions were right, and that not only were people using the network insecurely, lots of people, up to and including embassies and government and military offices were using the network unsafely--effectively sending emails and other sensitive traffic across the network completely in the clear where anyone who added their connectivity to the network could see it. This is very, very bad.

Let me make this clear... Anyone, myself included, can at any time, add their resources to and use the TOR network, simply by joining it and using it. (Non-technical explanation for simplicity) Participants in the network pass each other's traffic back and forth randomly through encrypted links, counting on the misdirection of a massive shell game to protect their privacy. Users are supposed to encrypt all their traffic as well as an additional step to keep the last site that handles the traffic before it goes back out to the Internet at large from being able to see what's being sent around. The encryption of the TOR network itself protects the contents up to that point, but no farther. For embassies and other installations that might have things going on where a breach of security could mean people die, incorrect use of the network almost guarantees that someone's likely to get hurt--possibly many, many someones. Dan figured that if anyone can do this, bad people were probably already doing it.

After doing his due diligence and trying to tell the people using the network unsafely the mistakes they were making (and getting nowhere), Dan took the more civic-minded approach of shouting it to the heavens by publishing samples and account information of the hapless fools on his website, and announcing the disturbing results of his completely legal and ethical research to security-oriented mailing lists in hopes that people would take notice and stop endangering themselves and others. The resulting splash shou... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Hacker arrested for... um... *not* hacking?

(music in the background... Queen - Another One Bites the Dust)

Well, it was said best in this quote:

According to the company FAQ, today is the last day of service for the hipster-focused MVNO Amp'd Mobile, who recently filed for bankruptcy after nearly half of their very hip customers failed to pay their bills.

Amp'd Dies At Midnight - Assets being auctioned off... - dslreports.com

PhreakNIC is having a bit of a struggle this year. Presentation submissions have been very slow this year, artwork is still stalled at the inspiration stage, and now toorcon has plopped down on the same weekend of the calendar as PhreakNIC. That's ok, things like this happen and you can't grow every year. Toorcon may or may not have an impact on a regional con like PhreakNIC in terms of pulling away attendees, but it will definitely have an impact on us in terms of speaking engagements.

I am asking for help here. I need people to commit to speaking at PhreakNIC now - not later. Over the past several years we've hosted some great presentations and have had the wonderful success of reaching new audiences. In last year's opening talk, a good 75% of the people in the room at that time were first year attendees. Those people are the reason why PhreakNIC exists today, even though it started out as a get together of old school people to party. It has evolved since then.

Skydog will be handing out literally hundreds of "marketing items" (condoms with the logo and URL printed on them) at DEFCON and I hope that means a lot of page hits. The best way for us to capitalize on that would be to have some worthwhile presentations listed. Can you help us out?

Thanks,
Dolemite

Come on guys, step up....

PhreakNIC Appeal

Here is a funny eweek slideshow...

Just up my ally... hopefully, you'll like it...

10 Answers to Your Questions About the Past, Present and Future of the Internet

Spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said the airline did not know the cause of the problem, which affected the systems United uses to dispatch flights for departure. ....

....United said about 268 domestic and international flights were delayed for an average of one and a half hours and 24 domestic flights were canceled. No international flights were canceled, Urbanski said.

Just another reason we need backup processes that do NOT rely on computerized systems. Have we learned nothing in the past 20 years?

How much money did the outage cost the struggling airline? Come on people, think.

Computer Snafu Snarls United Airlines, Nearly 300 Of Wednesday's Flights Were Cancelled Or Delayed - CBS News

It looks like the DOJ is forcing Microsoft's hand to comply with their previous rulings, including Vista...

Worth a read...

Microsoft Vista and Compliance with the DOJ...

Here's a great summary article on the Personal Data Privacy And Security Act Of 2007 and the SAFETY Act. (Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth.)

It's amazing. It's scary. It's real.

Congress' Split Personality