In thinking about Bruce Schneier’s post on Wired.com, I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch, I can’t help replaying in my head an Eddie Izzard bit about the kill/stun dichotomy of the “phaser” weapons in Star Trek. There should have been many more settings, not just kill and stun. Kill, stun, limp: … [Read more…]
I remember my first lesson on how to write a letter: how to address an envelope, the rigid explanation of formatting differences between business and personal, the impressive-sounding terms for the parts of a letter (the salutation, the complimentary closing, the postscript). It was in elementary school language arts class. We wrote letters and the … [Read more…]
PayPal just sent me an email saying that starting July 9th, they’ll stop charging for “Personal Payments” if they are funded from a bank account (i.e. not a credit/debit card). I’m guessing this is an attempt to cut into the market share that online banking gets for making these types of payments. It may also … [Read more…]
NatWest, my bank here in good ole England has seen fit to beef up security for some aspects of internet banking by moving to Strong Authentication. Unfortunately, they haven’t seemed to have done the PR on this move as well as hoped. Most of the reaction I’ve read on the net so far has been … [Read more…]
Criminal elements like scammers, spammers, and botnet overlords using internet-based attacks are nothing new. Things got interesting last year, when an army of computers (which appeared to be controlled from Moscow) launched an attack against the government of Estonia, crippling their servers and forcing a shut down of international network access. It was the first … [Read more…]