On Message with Ben Gross

The theme of today’s link roundup is about obtaining access to data you may have stored on one web-based service from another web-based service or an application. The name “data portability” is becoming a popular label for this type of interoperability. As the data people store in online services with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other [...]

419 scams hidden in Google and Yahoo calendar messages: There is a piece on the Commtouch blog about spam arriving in the form of .ics calendar invites. I have received a number of these myself. Users who have their calendar application such as Outlook, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar set to automatically accept calendar invitations [...]

YouTube Offline, Pakistan Telecom Blamed: A few weeks ago, YouTube was temporarily inaccessible to much of the world due routing tables changes from an ISP in Pakistan made at the government’s behest. Data Center Knowledge has an interesting write up about the conditions that allowed a country specific ISP to propagate routing table changes to [...]

USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association is a professional organization that puts on more than twenty conferences a year including the USENIX Security Symposium, Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA), and the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

I have been a member of the USENIX professional association for many years now and I pleased to be able [...]

Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds: Declan McCullagh at CNET has a good overview of the recently discovered attacks on disk encryption systems. It has consequences beyond disk encryption as the attacker will have access to the entire contents of memory. The discovery is likely to cause some major changes in [...]