August 3, 2006
8 entries filed this day
Anti-Missile Defenses for Passenger Aircraft
Bruce Schneier · Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Counterpane · it security
It's not happening anytime soon : Congress agreed to pay for the development of the systems to protect the planes from such weapons, but balked at proposals to spend the billions needed to protect all 6,800 commercial U.S. airliners. Probably for the best, actually. One, there are far more effective ways to spend that money on counterterrorism. And two, they're only effective against a particular type of missile technology:
Filed at 9:30am
GeoWeb 2006
Geoff Zeiss · Director of Technology, Autodesk · conferences / Enterprise Applications
GeoWeb 2006 is the outgrowth of an annual conference that used to be called GML Days, but GeoWeb is now much broader than strictly GML. It is also now supported by GITA, which opens the door to a much broader...
Filed at 10:42am
MapGuide Open Source 1.0.1
Geoff Zeiss · Director of Technology, Autodesk · Enterprise Applications / open source geospatial
MapGuide Open Source 1.0.1 was released last week. I would suggest that the most interesting thing about this release is that it is the first release to be bundled with Web Studio, the web-based open source tool for developing MapGuide...
Filed at 1:24pm
OSCON 2006: That's Billion with a "B"
Stephen Walli · VP, Open Source Development Strategy, Optaros · Enterprise Applications
Matt Asay (Alfresco) and Stephen O'Grady (Red Monk) have been having a fascinating debate that began at OSCON last week over whether we will see a billion dollar pure open source play or not, if so when, and whether that's...
Filed at 3:41pm
A Month of Browser Bugs
Bruce Schneier · Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Counterpane · it security
To kick off his new Browser Fun blog , H.D. Moore began with "A Month of Browser Bugs": This blog will serve as a dumping ground for browser-based security research and vulnerability disclosure. To kick off this blog, we are announcing the Month of Browser Bugs (MoBB), where we will publish a new browser hack, every day, for the entire month of July. The hacks we publish are carefully chosen to demonstrate a concept without disclosing a direct path to remote code execution. Enjoy! Thirty-one days, and thirty-one hacks later, the blog lists exploits against all the major browsers:
Filed at 3:53pm
State government CIOs vote for open source
Matt Asay · VP Business Development, Alfresco · government / Knowledge Management
Gary Edwards (Open Document Foundation) and I were talking yesterday, and he mentioned the NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) Conference coming up. I checked out last year’s conference and found an interesting set of slides from an open source session they held. From the slides, some useful data on why state governments...
Filed at 4:38pm
Hackers Clone RFID Passports
Bruce Schneier · Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Counterpane · it security
It was demonstrated today at the BlackHat conference. Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country's e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard. In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker -- Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies -- but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.
Filed at 5:45pm
12:01 Blues Band
Eric Newcomer · Chief Technology Officer, IONA · music / Software Development
Jane and I went to see the 12:01 Blues Band at the Acton Jazz Cafe last Saturday night. It was a great night out. Both cafe and band were very enjoyable. As I mentioned before, Jane and I lived in Chicago just after college (1978-1982, can it really be that long ago?!?) One of the great things about living there then, and living where we did (in the DePaul neighborhood on the near North side), was that we could go see world class blues musicians pretty much any night of the week.
Filed at 7:53pm
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