• Book Review: City Come A-Walkin’

    Author: John ShirleyISBN: 0-9642505-1-9Dell Publishing / Eyeball Books Depending on who you ask, the history of Cyberpunk literature starts around 1980, but is heavily influenced by different people. According to cyberpunk.ru: William Gibson, one of the five writers associated with the cyberpunk genre, is credited by critics and peers for typifying the cyberpunk writing form in…

  • OS Security, Old Debate, New Info

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Check out this article/report by OmniNerd, which tested various operating systems for security. They performed a base line vulnerability scan during installation, after installation and after patches had been applied. Each installation was done to mimick as close to a ‘default install’ by clicking ‘next’ when possible.…

  • OSVDB Chosen for Google Summer of Code 2007

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] For the second year now, OSVDB has been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code program. It’s pretty neat to be in this program along with other relatively unheard of projects like Debian, FreeBSD, GNU, KDE, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Samba, Apache, EFF, Fedora…

  • Month of MySpace Bugs (MOMSB)

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Yes, the trend continues and gets more .. odd. The Washington Post decided to cover this story giving it more attention than it probably deserves. From the home page of the effort: The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose Myspace as a hive…

  • Month of PHP Bugs

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Hell hath no fury like a PHP developer scorned… http://blog.php-security.org/archives/46-Month-of-PHP-bugs.html During the last months there have been the Month of the Browser bugs and the Month of the Kernel bugs projects that tried to raise awareness for security vulnerabilities in browsers and kernels. After thinking a bit…

  • The Perfect Patch Storm

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] Steven Christey of CVE recently commented on the fact that Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Sun and HP all released multi-issue advisories on the same day (Feb 13). My first reaction was to come up with an amusing graphic depicting this perfect storm. Due to not having any graphic…

  • BumpTop 3D and Computer Interfaces: The Real Hurdle

    I’m a fan of videos showing advanced in computer interaction. The BumpTop 3D model is definitely neat, and the fundamental technology behind it is no doubt revolutionary. I say this sincerely because i recognize the functionality it offers and the difficulty in converting such ideas into graphic output, and more to the point, I take…

  • “We recovered the laptop!” … so what?

    [This was written with Lyger and originally published on attrition.org.] In May of 2006, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs publicly disclosed the fact that “Personal data on about 26.5 million U.S. military veterans was stolen from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs data analyst who improperly took the material home”, prompting a mass…

  • “We recovered the laptop!” … so what?

    [This was originally published on attrition.org. It was written by Lyger and Jericho.] In May of 2006, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs publicly disclosed the fact that “Personal data on about 26.5 million U.S. military veterans was stolen from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs data analyst who improperly took the material home“,…

  • Month of .. who?!

    [This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] http://rixstep.com/2/20070104,00.shtml A Month of Rixstep Bugs It’s a win-win proposition. Starting now and for the duration of January 2007 Rixstep will be holding a ‘Month of Rixstep Bugs’ campaign: find a bug in any Rixstep software product and win a prize. It’s not a win-win proposition, it…