Internet Security and Broad Daylight

Thieves operate under the cover of darkness. It shields them from what would otherwise be watchful eyes, keeping a look out in their neighborhood. Broad daylight makes criminal activity a little more difficult to execute, because the thieve is naturally exposed. This obstacle alone stands in the way — it acts as a security barrier. But the internet is not like that at all. Not only is there no such thing as broad daylight in cyberspace, but the whole idea of neighborhood doesn't really make sense. Security online amounts to every man for himself.

Open source too insecure for government use?

Well, according to an infoworld entry, security firms seem to think so. Rather than go through all the odds and ends of comparing the security differences between proprietary software, I propose a simple experiment. Set up two desktops. Install some variant of Linux on one and install some popular proprietary operating system on the other. Perform some simple everyday tasks and see which one gives you more security problems first.

ECP 2.2.2 released

The 2.2.2 maintenance release of ECP is now available. Changes include:

• SECURITY FIX: Removed the automatic installation of egg files from ECP start-up.
• Added more exception handling to failed ECP startups due to missing database tables.