Stories about: Black Box

The encryption of Skype VoIP phone calls might not be as secure as you think.

In January, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay entitled "Better Than Free" that explained which concepts held value on the Internet. This generated a lot of interest, mostly around the question of how best to make money out of these concepts. As a career security guy, I found myself wondering how on earth my field will respond -- how does security need to adapt to support business models based on these values? When we're used to locking everything down, how do we respond when people start calling for openness?

A house of cards -- that's how I'd describe the current state of the Windows device driver ecosystem. With so many Windows-compatible devices and so few competent driver developers, it's no surprise that hunting for driver updates has become a necessary part of every power user's skill set. Most of the time, the search ends in frustration: Either the new driver doesn't correct the existing problem(s) or, worse, creates a set of new ones. And now, with the introduction of Hyper-V, we have a whole new failure vector to think about.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates expressed his goal many years ago to put "a PC on every desktop, a PC in every home" -- all running Microsoft software, of course. He didn't mention a PC on every driveway.

If I'm not otherwise engaged next Thursday morning, I just might spend my economic stimulus check to enter the PC server business. I could go shopping for a wholesale 1U bare-bones rack server, with my primary criteria being that it boot DOS from a floppy and require you to take your server off-line to change basic system settings. I'll stuff that two-socket black box with RAM, CPUs, and disks; charge you for your choice of Windows or Linux; and unless you're buying these things by the gross, stick you with desktop-grade support. Since I had no involvement in your server's design and engineering, I'll rely on BIOS and driver updates from my volume motherboard supplier. I'll selectively pass these on to you, flagged with warnings about how they may render your system unusable if you misapply them, until my supplier stops issuing them. Don't worry, you'll have a solid year before that happens.

For improving the look and feel of browser-based applications, AJAX technologies work wonders, but RIAs (rich Internet applications) take the browser to a whole new level. RIAs deliver a consistently richer user experience, with functionality and data access more closely approximating native desktop apps.

To make it easier for its customers to deploy new applications on virtualized or standard servers, Novell's SUSE Linux division is jumping into the software appliance wave.

"Ryno" is a 50-something ex-sysadmin, by his own account "burned out and living on disability" in rural Australia.

Computerworld catches up with the man behind Linux, Linus Torvalds, at Linux.conf.au

Increasingly, the most critical networks, those run by telecom carriers, are turning to Linux, and MontaVista's latest release of its "carrier grade" platform is intended to accelerate that trend.

Monta Vista, the mobile and embedded Linux company, unveiled version 5.0 of its carrier-grade embedded Linux kernel this week.