Nicotine Vaccine... WTF?!

While browsing the news sites, I stumbled upon this Nicotine Vaccine video on Reuters. Nicotine (smoking)... Vaccine? Since when is smoking caused by a virus?

A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism, and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.

What's next? A vaccine for Kleptomania? Bad driving? Being obnoxious? This is (in my opinion) nothing more than an effort of Big Pharma to have us take more and more drugs. They have to do something to keep their investors happy since more and more drug patents are expiring.

The Leica M-Monochrom and More

Last Tuesday (May 10th), Leica announced a couple of new Leica goodies to the world. Of the items, the Leica X2 was the least shocking (IMO). The other two items, a monochrome version of the M9-P (Leica M-Monochrom) and a new 50mm Summicron-M f/2, were quite the news. The Leica M9-P Hermès Special Editions were just overpriced versions of the current M9-P for the filthy rich (@ $50,000 USD).

Click to read more ...

Hollywood's Next DRM Failure in the Making

Later this week several Hollywood-related companies will announce a new digital media distribution system that's suppose to ignite digital downloads of movies (and possible other digital content). They call it DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem). The key-feature being 'portability'.

This time a name without 'protection' or 'rights' in its name, but the result is much the same.
In the 'old' days DRM was implemented by protecting the resource with a key, and if you had the proper 'key' on your device the content was playable. Downside was that playback was mainly limited to only one device, or it was OS/player dependent (Windows -> Windows Media Player, or Apple iTunes, OSX -> Itunes).

If you wanted it to play on another device you had a problem, since you lacked the proper key to 'unlock' the digital content. Thankfully Apple has lot's of DRM-free mp3's in it's iTunes store, but not everything (like the movies / TV Shows) is DRM free, or watchable on lots of devices.

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Mobile Phone Communication Codes Cracked

The German scientist Karsten Nohl published his findings this week on the CCC (Chaos Communications Congress) in Berlin. The CCC is an annual hacking convention, which is being held in Berlin, Germany.

Normally, the GSM communication switches frequency regularly, and therefor it's hard to listen in, but if you can crack the frequency switching algorithm..... Which is exactly what Karsten Nohl and his team did.
They cracked the so-called stream-cipher A5/1 which protects the voice conversations, and published details off it on the CCC in Berlin.

Click to read more ...

Buma/Stemra Changes Licensing Fees 2010

The all knowing, and all wise Dutch music copyright organisation BUMA/Stemra (BS, and yes, pun intended) decides to charge €130 (for copyright infringement) euros per embedded copyrighted file (do your own math). You are allowed 6 embedding violations/files for €130,00 (original pdf).
No need to mention that this caused a massive uproar in the (worldwide) blogosphere, news and politics.

Click to read more ...

XS4ALL Plans Outbound Port Filtering

A usenet posting suggests that XS4ALL will provide a filtering service to their subscribers. The filter would consist of 5 levels. Ranging from fully open to 'fully' closed. The first will give you the possibility of running your own services at home, and the latter means you're only able to e.g. surf and e-mail (through the XS4ALL SMTP server).

The filters would give the basic/ignorant user the opportunity of preventing the spreading of malware and other stuff by default. The more tech savvy subscribers can remove the filter for running a bunch of services (webserver, ftp, mail, DNS, etc).

Definitely a good decision. I just hope that the other ISP's will do something similar, because most of the virus/malware/massmailing 'software' is running on PC's run by the average user. Totally ignorant of the malware running on their PC's.

Yet another 'thumbs up' for the quality provider of the Netherlands

Full Disk Encryption for the Mac

Checkpoint acquired a company called PointSec a while ago. This company made full hard disk encryption software for Windows. Now, Checkpoint has released a hard disk encryption version for the Mac. I guess they are taking OSX seriously.

Disk encryption is available today for the Mac (TrueCrypt, PGP), but these aren't able to encrypt the boot partition. Only partitions are by the use of containers. This type of software was available to Windows only primarily.

Now that the 'trick' has been done, I guess more will follow.

I do wonder if it's still possible to use SuperDuper for cloning a bootdisk....

OpenSSH Vulnerabilities

It seems that public key authentication isn't as save as you might have thought. That is if you're using a Debian based OpenSSH solution. This package can be found in many Linux distributions like;

• Debian (duh ;) )
• Ubuntu
• Kubuntu
• etc.

The problem is that the random number generator (which is of vital importance in generating key-pairs) isn't as random as you might think. It seems that there are only about 30.000 combinations in this specific generator. This leaves the door wide open for brute-force attacks.

So, the first you must do is update your OpenSSH software, and generate new keypairs for all devices / users which might have keys which were generated with the vulnerable OpenSSH software. Softwarepackages depending on OpenSSH are;

• OpenVPN
• DNSSEC
• OpenSSH
• Certificates used in TLS connections
• etc.

More info on the subject can be found here [1, 2, 3].

A Slow Week

Biggest (techno) news in the Netherlands was probably the failure of the Internet. The largest ATM Internet backbone massively failed in the Netherlands. This resulted in thousands of people without any Internet access for 1-3 days.
Currently the problems are temporarily patched, but they are still on high alert.

For the first time I wasn't affected. Normally this only occurs to me.

Purely coincidentally, I found a South Park episode (s12e06/Over Logging) in which the Internet fails. This results in mayhem in South Park (just like it did over here).

Furthermore, I drove 170 kilometer today, and it took me about 5 hours. Traffic jams due to spring rain (????) were to blame (according to the traffic information services). Basically, because people are egoistic when they're driving, and won't anticipate (when they're reading the paper, shaving, and/or applying make-up using the rear view mirror) on their surroundings.

So no Internet (for large parts of the Netherlands), and traffic jams from here to Tokyo. So 'slow' might be an understatement.

Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' Released

As of yesterday, the latest Ubuntu release 'Hardy Heron' is available for download (both client and server). Every time a major Linux distri(bution) hits 'the shelves', the Linux community roars. With each release (Ubuntu or whatever flavor) the Linux community gets closer, and closer to Windows.

Even though the OS itself is getting better and better. It still lacks the support of decent major software like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It's missing the software people use in every day (business)life.
Sure, there a million different ways of running Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on a Linux OS, but these require a commercial piece of software (CrossOver) , or in depth knowledge of the OS to make it work (Wine in some cases). Two things that shouldn't be required. Not if you're used to Windows (or Apple's OSX). And even if you find a 'substitute' it's most likely to have an awful user experience.

The average housewife won't use Linux, because her friends all use Windows. All those nice little Windows programs, which makes life easier (or a living hell with all the mal/spyware out there). So if the Linux community wants to make a difference they need to create some sort of critical mass (by their selves, or by Microsoft screwing up) to get the attention of the 'normal' user. But in a community where there's no real (commercial) business model, it's gonna be damn hard.

Microsoft created this critical mass by playing (probably) the best marketing trick in the world; Release Windows 95, and turn a blind eye to those who use a pirated copy at home. The home users create demand on the workfloor, so businesses start to use it on their workstations. Soon everyone was addicted. And now it's damn hard to beat the addiction.

B.t.w., Apple is doing it a lot better. They created a nice and stable OS (just like the average Linux desktop distribution), BUT the OS has ALL the relevant drivers for the hardware used. ALSO they have a complete (and cheap) software suite (iLife and iWork), which is more than enough for the average family. No need to search the caverns of the Internet for software, and they look and feel the same as the OS.

So, I guess that my conclusion is that the OS is nearing perfection, but it (Linux in general) lacks good and decent third party software (and a good marketing machine :) )

In the mean time; I'm gonna upgrade my Linux (mail, web, and ssh) servers at work to 'Hardy Heron'.