Security

I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists. The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist: young muslim male young muslim female asian male or female caucasian male or female black male or female hispanic male or female If you said that 1 and 2 have been terrorists and therefore we should profile them, you are partially right. However, what about all of the asian terrorists (e.g. Fillipinos)? Caucasians? Hmm, the IRA, David Koresh, Timmothy McVeigh, etc. As near as I can guess, the only racial groups that shouldn’t be profiled would be blacks and hispanics. This can’t work. ...

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like: form name=foo method=post action= This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the form – at least not in the html world. So, I took a closer look and found that each of the buttons (submit and clear) actually had a field “onclick=’doSomething();’ attribute. ...

given that the vulnerability and the patches haven’t yet been released, does this constitute a “-1 day exploit?

I wonder if these folks have read the recent article in the NY Times regarding prosopagnosia? The company Passfaces has a password replacement technology that uses the brain’s ability to recognize faces. The idea is that the user selects a set of faces. They are then presented with a series of options where each of their faces is hidden in a group of other faces. By correctly selecting their faces, they authenticate themselves. The company says that using Passfaces will reduce calls to a help desk because people can remember faces for years without seeing them. There’s a demo which allows you to test how easy the system is. ...