Government dummies and HP's black ops
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Also: Electronic devices seized at border searches. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Today Jonathan Moore  and I headed over to LinuxWorld after lunch to see what kind of cool hardware and Linux hacks they had on the expo floor.  Only $15 to get in the door so I figure why not.  I'm a bit of a privacy freak.  When you're trading some security for liberty there are situations where it *might* be worth it.  In situations of extreme violence having the police by your side might be a good idea.    I think we can all agree that trading liberty for *nothing* isn't worth it. This country was *founded* on liberty after the British were abusing their colonial powers.  Every true American should cherish their liberty and think long and hard about just turning them over for no reason.  ...
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Beware the Babbio The executives willing to testify about their roles in the HP spy scandal have claimed a blissful ignorance around the legal ins and outs of obtaining phone records. Their defense has hinged on the idea that they were assured by hired investigators that any phone snooping was legal and that they did not become really concerned about how phone records were obtained until learning of the euphemism "pretexting." Even after learning about pretexting, it took executives weeks to comprehend in full the fraud behind the practice.â¦
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Recent "phishing" episodes are still often overlooked by tech-savvy users, but a lesson in history shows how entire nations have been fooled.
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(InfoWorld) - Obtaining private records under false pretenses is bad, but some in the technology industry say it happens all the time and wonder whether new federal legislation will curb "pretexting." Pretexting came up in a discussion about tech industry legislation at the Tech Policy Forum Tuesday in San Jose, California. State charges are pending in San Jose against people charged inÂ the pretexting scandal at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Four people, including ousted HP Chairman Patricia Dunn,Â were charged in October 2006 for their part in a scheme to identify leaks to media by HP directors by obtaining their phone records and those of some reporters. Agents working on behalf of HP allegedly tricked phone companies into divulging people's phone records by pretending to be them. In the wake of the HP pretexting scandal, which promptedÂ a House subcommittee to call HP executives and others to testify, Congress passed federal legislation signed by President George Bush in JanuaryÂ outlawing pretexting. But a new bill has been introduced in the current session of Congress to direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to enforce the ban on pretexting. The FTC already enforces a ban on pretexting, but it is narrowly defined, said Mozelle Thompson, a consultant who once served as an FTC commissioner. "It only covers pretexting for the purpose of identity theft, and you have to show a direct harm to a consumer" because of it, Thompson said at the summit. Although some speakers at the summit criticized phone companies for not protecting call records well enough, another wondered how pretexting could be stopped. "This has been happening for years," said Shari Steele, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The latest bill, co-authored by Representatives Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, is a complement to the earlier pretexting ban. The FTC should enforce the pretexting ban because it has more expertise and interest in prosecuting identity theft cases than local prosecutors, a spokeswoman for Inslee said. The two introduced their bill in 2006, but it never came up for a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.
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Plus: My GPS proves your radar gun is wrong. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Crosses swords with IBM security purchase Two weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard stared jealously across the street as IBM pulled into the driveway with a brand new web application security specialist company. Not to be outclassed by a neighbor, HP has bought one too.â¦
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Also: Army expects 'suicide hacker' attacks. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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(InfoWorld) - It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. Thatâs probably why âyear in reviewâ stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal compunction among editors and readers alike. But what to make of 2006? Itâs a year in which some enterprises and IT firms made bold moves to set themselves on a new course, while others failed, in spectacular fashion, to learn the lessons of the past. For this penultimate Tech Watch, we review the year with the aid of some pithy quotes. âIf I knew then what I know now, Iâd have done things differently.â -- Patricia Dunn, former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Sometimes you come across a product or corporate initiative -- letâs take Sonyâs recent DRM spyware as an example -- that is so patently wrongheaded you canât imagine how it ever came to see the light of day. When you dig into the history of those decisions, you often find that they were made by people who were trying, earnestly, to solve a very specific problem without seeing how their âsolutionâ might affect the company as a whole. Thatâs what makes the scandal that led to the resignation of HP Chairman Patricia Dunn and the criminal charges against her, HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, and three outside investigators all the more exceptional. These were the folks at the top of the totem pole. The dispute arose over the handling of an investigation by HP to see which members of its board of directors leaked information, including arguments about the ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, to the press. Hurd and other board members, it seems, became distracted by a âplumbingâ expedition, as it was called in the Nixon White House, and contracted with a company to use âpretexting,â a controversial technique where investigators pretend to be the people being investigated in order to access private information. Despite intense media and legal scrutiny, though, the squabble has not fazed HP shareholders or customers. Under Mark Hurd, CEO and newly appointed chairman, the company is fulfilling the promise of the controversial HP-Compaq merger engineered by Fiorina: It has overtaken Dell as the leading PC maker and IBM as the biggest IT company. The spy scandal has broad implications, however. Congress is now considering federal laws against pretexting, and increased oversight of corporate governance is becoming a shareholder rallying cry. --Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service ââFree has to have a price?â Thatâs nonsense.â -- Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz After years of staving off open source proponents, Sun Microsystems in November 2006 bit the bullet and made Java available via open source, and doubled down on that by offering up Java to the GNU General Public License, ensuring that revisions to Java are submitted back to the community at large. Naturally, the move raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: Can Sunâs Java gurus adapt to the new paradigm and relinquish some degree of control? Looking at the evidence, it seems likely that Sun can. Java already has spawned a whole industryâs worth of open source projects such as the popular Spring Framework. Sunâs Solaris OS has thrived under open source. Inside Sun, however, not everyone shared Schwartzâs optimism. Graham Hamilton, a Sun Fellow for the Java team, departed the company over the momentous announcement, according to one insider. Outside Sun, IBM protested that it wanted Java placed under the jurisdiction of the Apache Software Foundation. Schwartzâs decision regarding Java will be remembered as a high point of 2006, and further proof that commercial vendors must find a way to ride, not fight the open source wave. -- Paul Krill âI am having personal difficulty looking veterans in the eye.â -- VA CISO Pedro Cadenas With mega blow-ups like the hack of CardSystems, many labeled 2005 the âYear of the Data Breach.â But that year seemed to extend, seamlessly, into 2006, as well. No incident epitomized the bumbling of sensitive data than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairsâ loss of a laptop containing personal data of more than 26 million vets. The device in question was stolen from the home of a VA analyst, and was later recovered. Stories like the VAâs were sadly common this year. Chevron, GE, AT&T, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo all reported losing customer or employee data. One of the common themes in many cases was that data was being carried around, unencrypted, on portable PCs stolen from or lost by employees of third-party companies. That troubling trend bears out in a study that Vontu and the Ponemon Institute conducted this year, which found that 81 percent of the 500 companies surveyed âreported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months.â --Ted Samson âI wouldnât be surprised to see SaaS services (at) $5 per month, per user.â -- Josh Greenbaum, EAConsult 2006 didnât quite make it as âThe Year of SaaS,â but it came darn close. Spurred by the success of firms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAS created SaaS CRM products with integration to their on-premises software as a differentiator. Even more important: SaaS providers, led by Salesforce, laid down a solid foundation on which to build new services in 2007 and beyond. Take, for example, AppExchange, an online market of sorts that Salesforce launched in October. AppExchange allows third-party providers to post their wares, and gives users the ability to pick and choose from applications and features that enhance the Salesforce.com software. AppExchange implies a recognition by Salesforce and, we can now assume, other SaaS providers that if enterprise-level companies are to adopt SaaS, then SaaS solutions canât be siloed. Integration of CRM with ERP, business intelligence and product lifecycle management are a must for the enterprise. -- Ephraim Schwartz âthe best season to visit Italyâ -- search query by Thelma Arnold, aka AOL user No. 4417749 Connect users to the world of information â¦ then betray their trust. Itâs not exactly the long-term strategy AOL had in mind, nor one to stay on top in todayâs Web 2.0-influenced Internet. Yet AOLâs infamous search data leak in August, which resulted in the ousting of CTO Maureen Govern, was just one headline head-scratcher involving the online giant this year. AOL, with its huge user base, has a track record of developing innovative new services to keep users loyal. That should have put the company at the forefront of the Web 2.0 wave that gave birth to sites such as FaceBook. But AOL, like other âold lineâ dot-coms Yahoo and Microsoft, proved too slow on the uptake, as firms with bigger visions and faster feet cherry-picked hot properties and left them standing on the sidelines. AOL hurt itself, too, with news reports of horror stories from customers who tried to cancel accounts, and a âbadwareâ label for AOL 9.0. By the time The New York Timesâ triangulated Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga., from the search record of AOL user No. 4417749, it was merely putting a face on AOLâs already eroding relationship with its expansive user base. By yearâs end, firms such as AOL and Yahoo were taking bolder steps to right their listing vessels: AOL dropped its subscription-services model and a quarter of its workforce, including CEO Jonathan Miller. Yahoo also shook up its boardroom, amid disappointing earnings and signs of discontent from senior management. Shortly before he lost his job, CEO Miller had observed in a keynote speech that âthe big companies will stay big companiesâ as the Internet evolves. Going into 2007, AOL isnât alone among big companies that are praying that adage rings true. -- Jason Snyder
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Why is the government paying for our consumer electronics? A contrary opinion on the voucher program for mandatory analog TV conversion. In Gadget Lab.
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Pretexting now part of the HP Way Put the cheery comeback stories on hold. HP has a boardroom scandal that deserves some attention.â¦
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Hobbyists uncover some of the deepest of the governmentâs secrets and share them on the Internet.
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Also: High security built right into $100 laptop's OS. Read these stories and more from around the Web at News.com Extra.