The SoapVox

Ok, I’ve been not-reading my RSS feeds for the last few days, and today decided to catch up with Bruce Schneier’s blog, and found several interesting posts.

First, OpenSSL is now FIPS 140-2 Certified. The important thing, I believe, is not the certification itself (which is nice to have, but OpenSSL’s usefulness has nothing to do with being or not certified), but what Bruce says in his comment about it:

This is one problem with long certification cycles; software development cycles are faster.

This is absolutely true, specially when it comes to FLOSS software…there’s software that at times has weekly releases…how the hell do you get something like that certified?

Then, he posts about a brain scanning technique that reads people’s intentions. Yes, a technique to read your mind. And, appropriately, he points out what the really important thing is about this…the ethical and legal approach to this.

There’s not a lot of detail, but my guess is that it doesn’t work
very well. But that’s not really the point. If it doesn’t work today,
it will in five, ten, twenty years; it will work eventually.
What we need to do, today, is debate the legality and ethics of these sorts of interrogations:

Another interesting article is about DRM, aka C.R.A.P.
, in Windows Vista. You can guess how he feels about it just by reading the very first phrase of the post:

Windows Vista includes an array of “features” that you don’t want.

He really likes it, doesn’t he? hehehe :)

Then we get to the more whimsical posts, the ones that make you think that people are, indeed, stupid and/or greedy beyond limits.

USA’s Homeland Security Pork, talks about a small town (3.500 people) asking the government for money for a fire truck…they get a $665,962 homeland security grant. Damn, with that they can buy a dozen trucks, easy, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, with that amount of cash, they can afford a dozen trucks, but the grant comes with a little problem:

And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck.

Ok, so…can you imagine how many other cases like that there are? How much money that could be used for things that matter is being wasted that way?

Then, and this one is fun, his post titled Is Everything a Bomb these Days? which talks about the incredible stupidity of overreacting. There’s not much that you can say about this, except…uh?

And last, a funny one for the programmers out there…Random Number Humor.

Technorati Tags: bruce schneier, security, homeland security, drm, windows vista, c.r.a.p. mind reading, openssl

Tags: Security, Tech

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