Category: proprietary (Page 1 of 1)

WPA2: Broken with KRACK. What now?

On social media right now, strong rumours are spreading that the WPA2 encryption scheme has been broken in a fundamental way. What this means: the security built into WiFi is likely ineffective, and we should not assume it provides any security.

The current name I’m seeing for this is “KRACK”: Key Reinstallation AttaCK. If this is true, it means third parties will be able to eavesdrop on your network traffic: what should be a private conversation could be listened in to.

This has happened before with WiFi: who remembers WEP passwords? However, what is different this time around: there is no obvious, easy, replacement ready and waiting. This is suddenly a very big deal.

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Copyright changes ahead for the UK? SAS v WPL goes to Europe

I don’t particularly like talking law on this blog; it’s boring and – for the most part – disinteresting. However, recent developments in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited (as written up here – thanks to Cristian for bringing this up at FFII) deserve to be aired. The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment.

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Asay and Tiemann, mano a mano.

Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it. Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers.

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Come on, Facebook – re-instate Tom Brake MP

Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing. Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important.

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Windows Vista lameness (for future reference)

I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people. Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else – it’s like other websites just time out.

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Microsoft show off new Office distribution system

Unbeknownst to many, it seems, Microsoft are pushing a new referrals scheme for preinstalled Office 2007s. The “highlights”: OEMs can ship a disabled version of Office 2007 on every computer that they ship; customers can buy a license – potentially online – and put it into their computer, to activate the dormant suite; customers can purchase any version of Office: more basic versions come with the free trial of the full versions, too; OEMs get a referral fee every time a customer of theirs activates Office.

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