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What the market will bear
Very frequently I see the idea that capitalism (or market economy) will somehow ensure that the end-users get the best possible products with the lowest prices. Yet many times common wisdom contradicts this. How is it possible? (Disclaimer: I’m no economist, these are just some personal ideas and observations). Personally I think that there are…
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Month of PHP bugs started
The Month of PHP bugs started off today with not one, but three bugs. Two of them can be protected against by using Suhosin (you might accuse the guy of some grey area marketing – but you can’t since his product is both free and open source) and the third by upgrading to PHP5 (because…
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PHP security, an oxymoron?
I’m in the finishing phase in the development of a medium sized web application and would like to share some of my findings. The system is developed in PHP for two reasons: The LAMP platform is a well accepted one and finding hosting companies supplying it or convincing the IT administrator to deploy it internally…
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Disclosure policy = dead horse?
Over at the nCircle blog Ryan Poppa concludes that debating disclosure policy is beating a dead horse because after many years of debate there is still no industry standard. The only positive things in his opinion is that the continuing debate introduces people who might not have heard all the arguments in this matter to…
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Removing Snap
Snap.com previews seem to be very fashionable these days (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, its those previews of the sites which appear when you place your mouse cursor over a link), but it is very annoying (almost as annoying as those ads which appear when you hover over certain words in the…
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Managed security
It is funny (or sad, depending on how you look at it) when you realize that all modern OSs have the ability to run with a very high safety level (where 99.99% of the security issues don’t affect them), yet malware is so widespread. Some people who get blamed for this are: Microsoft for making…
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Full disclosure – repaired
That was quick. Thanks to my emails the blog posting which posted detailed information about how to root a given ISPs routers via an erroneous default configuration got sanitized. Just to be clear: I’m not against full disclosure. I’m pretty much in favor of it – if used for doing good. Because this sounds to…
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Full disclosure gone bad
I’m for full disclosure when (a) it makes the vendor put out a patch sooner than later or (b) it contains enough information so that the people affected can mitigate the risk and it is posted at places where these people are probable to read it. But this recent post on security team screams of…
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The Acunetix saga
As they say: better late then never. Here are my comments on the whole Acunetix saga. First of all, you should read the great posting at Computer Defense about the matter. It contains links to all the important events in this area, including the original press release, the reaction on Network World and others. So…
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Kernel malware on the rise!
Not to gloat (well, maybe a little 🙂 ), but F-Secure also thinks that kernel malware is on the rise. There is no better time to run as limited user and make kernel malware irrelevant