Today I was working with a security product developed by a major player on the market. I had to change a default password by something “stronger” and the following dialog box popped up: Limiting a password to letters only in 2009? No comment!
Google As Torrent Search Engine
A few days ago, four members of the Pirate Bay were found guilty by the Swedish court of justice. One of their lines of defense was based on the fact that they did not host files under copyrights but they just provided an index of them. Hmmm… Index? Does it
Do We Need Safer (Encrypted) SMS?
Today no one doubts the usefulness of data encryption. It’s a fact: IP traffic and stored data must be encrypted using more and more powerful tools. Data can also be encrypted on mobile devices like PDAs. But what about SMS? Tapping of mobile communications is not easy for the common
Hacked Nacked Truck?
Yesterday, on the way back to home, I saw the following truck: A pauldotcom.com “Hack Naked” fan? 😉
Just Switched to Ubuntu “Jaunty”
A lot has been written about Ubuntu “Jaunty” 9.04 since it has been released. My corporate laptop runs Ubuntu very smoothly. Unfortunately, since the last Nvidia drivers upgrade, I faced a nasty bug. I was running version ‘180-11’ but ‘180-44’ is officially available by default in the latest release. No
Take Care of Rogue Free Software Mirrors
Yesterday, first of May, the new OpenBSD release was made available! Like major big open source projects, to be able to serve all the download requests, the source code is available through mirrors around the world. I read the following post on the security-announce mailing list today: “It has come
Where is Linux?
Today I participated in a survey organized by a major Belgian bank. The goal was to improve their web services (which is always a nice initiative). At the middle of the survey, came the following question: Of course, I answered “I don’t know“. How can they restrict the choice to
Use Google Mail as a Sandbox
Google announced via his Official Gmail Blog the support of TIFF and Powerpoint files in their Gmail application. PDF files were already supported for a while. For a few months, PDF files have been hit by several security issues and recently, a zero-day exploit targeted Powerpoint files. Why not use
Tell Me How You Work and I’ll Monitor You!
Today, I read an interesting story in Datanews, a Belgian IT newspapers. To briefly resume, “Company A”, the customer, complains about “Company B”, the telecom operator, which installed a telephone central at the first one premises. During a weekend, hackers took control of the system and used it perform calls
The Great Firewall of Belgium
Due to an official request from the federal authorities, Belgian Internet Service Providers are preventing their customers to access four very-controversial URLs (all of them pointing to the same website). When I say “controversial”, it means, regarding the Belgian law, “illegal”. This website publishes personal information about people who performed