Well, that's one way. Another might be
to donate them to a Computer Security program that might invent a
cheap method of decontamination.
"German IT magazine Heise
reports
(original
in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a
Conficker virus
infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing
them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that
'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and
economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of
virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier
estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more
conventional means to 130,000 Euro."
For my Ethical Hackers and my Computer
Forensics students
"ESET researchers, together
with web security firm Sucuri,
have been analyzing a new threat affecting Apache webservers. The
threat is a highly advanced and stealthy backdoor
being used to drive traffic to malicious websites carrying Blackhole
exploit packs. Researchers have named the backdoor
Linux/Cdorked.A, and it is the most sophisticated Apache backdoor
seen so far. The Linux/Cdorked.A backdoor does not leave traces on
the hard-disk other than a modified 'httpd' file, the daemon (or
service) used by Apache. All information
related to the backdoor is stored in shared memory on the server,
making detection difficult and hampering analysis."
Yes, we do.
April 29, 2013
Article
- The Dangers of Surveillance
The Dangers of Surveillance, Neil M.
Richards, Washington University in Saint Louis - School of Law. March
25, 2013, Harvard Law Review, 2013 [Via
SSRN]
- "From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our culture is full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices have made this problem more urgent. Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered. And even when they are, courts frequently dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the theory that mere surveillance creates no tangible harms, as the Supreme Court did recently in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International. We need a better account of the dangers of surveillance."
You are either a servent of the state
or you are an enemy of the state.
Government
Seeks to Fine Companies for Not Complying With Wiretap Orders
It isn’t often that communications
companies push back against government requests to monitor customers
and hand over information about them, but a government task force is
seeking to make it even harder for companies to say no.
The task force is pushing for
legislation that would penalize
companies like Google, Facebook and Skype that fail to comply with
court orders for wiretapping, according to the Washington
Post. The cost of non-complying would be an escalating series
of fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars. Fines that
remained unpaid after 90 days would double daily.
Unlike telecommunications companies
that are required under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law
Enforcement Act (CALEA) to have systems that are wiretap-enabled,
some internet communication methods — such as social networking
sites and online gaming sites — aren’t easily wiretapped and are
not required to enable the capability under CALEA. Companies that
argue that they don’t have the means to enable wiretapping have
avoided complying with court orders seeking real-time surveillance,
the paper notes. The legislation is intended to
force these companies into finding technology solutions that would
enable real-time surveillance.
Perspective
Facebook
Says It’s Now as Big as Windows (Literally)
… The massive collection of
software code needed to create that Facebook page inside your web
browser, he says, has now expanded to the point where it’s about
the same size as the code that underpins the Windows operating
system.
… In January of 2011, in a post to
question-and-answer site Quora, Facebook engineer Evan Priestly said
that Facebook spanned
9.2 million lines of code — a figure that didn’t include
various services used to support the main Facebook application.
Jason Evans says that this post was spot on, but then he points out
that it happened two years ago — an eternity in the life of
Facebook — and he confirms that the figure only applies to a
portion of the site as we know it.
...but is it accurate?
Colorado
ad bought by local residents has upset Native Americans.
My weekly amusement (a bit late)
… The state of Washington
has passed and signed into law HB1472,
a bill that creates initiatives to “improve and expand computer
science education” in the state. In part, the
legislation will allow CS to count as a math or science requirement
towards high school graduation.
… Universities from 11 European
countries have joined forces to launch the MOOC initiative OpenupEd.
It will offer 40 classes, taught in 12 different launches.
… Bravo to Mozilla
for remixing the meaning of the MOOC acronym — a “Mozilla Open
Online Collaboration.” You can join the organization’s MOOC
“Teach the Web,”
which will help folks learn how to teach digital literacy and
webmaking skills and starts May 2.
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