I am not in the computer security business really, but I find the topic very interesting. The recent wide coverage and analysis of the Flame malware has been fascinating to follow. It is incredibly scary to see a “well-resourced (probably Western) nation-state” develop this kind of spyware, following on the confirmation that Stuxnet was made in the US (and Israel).
In any case, regardless of the resources behind the creation of such malware, one wonders if it could not be a bit more contained with a different way to structure our operating systems. In particular, Flame’s use of microphones, webcams, bluetooth, and screenshots to spy on users should be containable. Basically, wouldn’t cell-phone style sandboxing and capabilities settings make sense for a desktop OS too?
Now I have had my yubikey for about a week, and I have put it on my keychain. It really works extremely well! The only small issue is that I tend not to have my keys immediately within reach while at home in the house or on travel, so there is a step of “go retrieve the keys” before I can use it for login.
In a very roundabout way, I recently got to hear about a cool Sun server feature introduced sometime back in 2003 or 2004: the SCC System Configuration Card. This is a smart card that stores the system hostid and Ethernet MACs, along with other info, and which can be transferred from one server to another.
Everybody seems to think the launch of the 
If you are looking for a good popular introduction to what spam is and how it works, the
DNS: Hardware Accelerator Time!
Read More →