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Election day 2010
Well I’ve gone and cast my vote in the local community centre and was stuck behind a woman who was not allowed to vote because she was a foreign national I think and a little old lady who was casting a proxy vote for a friend and was a bit confused about how to go about it.
For the first time in along time I don’t feel like I’m wasting my vote as I’ve moved from a safe Tory constituency to Bath which is a relatively safe Liberal Democrat seat. There was some worry that the bloke that David Cameron parachuted in might sway some of the electorate but Don Foster has campaigned well and has attracted a lot of the young voters. There has apparently been record numbers of students registering to vote here.
On a national scale though I’m a little depressed as it seems that the Tories might get a majority or near as damn it that they can do a deal with Ulster Unionist party.
Help! My Gmail and Facebook accounts have been stolen and the passwords changed. Someone I know just called to tell me that he got an email saying that I’m in London in a hospital and need money immediately. What do I do?
Firstly report the fact that your account has been hacked to Facebook and Google using the following links.
Next notify any close friends or family that your accounts have been hacked and to ignore any pleas to send money.
If you get your accounts returned I recommend using http://strongpasswordgenerator.com to create a new password.
The Digital economy bill has been passed and now just awaits the Royal Assent.
I think that the bill will spectacularly fail to prevent file-sharing instead it will be a boon for the companies that offer virtual private networking services and teenagers will start file-sharing offline by exchanging DVD-ROMs full of MP3s.
I’m torn with regard to the Liberal Democrats as my local MP is Don Foster who not only voted against the bill, but was present at the barely attended second reading of the bill and argued against it in the debate. I’m displeased with the party as a whole though as they didn’t oppose the bill and it was Lib Dem peers Lords Razzall and Clement Jones who sought to amend the Digital Economy Bill to allow site blocking for copyright infringement, although in the end that clause was dropped.
Mark Millar’s comic book attracted some interest but the story was not controversial until it became adapted for the big screen. The idea of a 12 year old girl calling gangsters cunts and then slaughtering them was considered by many people who hadn’t even seen the film to be beyond the pale.
But that is kind of the point. It firmly establishes early on that this is set in the real world where the bad guys can win and innocent people can be killed or gravely injured, but then it throws at the viewers the traditional tropes of the superhero action movie. It messes with how the viewer is supposed to watch and enjoy the film, it dares people to enjoy stuff that they see as immoral.
You are supposed to be unnerved by the violence performed by Hit Girl and see Big Daddy as being as monstrous as the mob boss Frank D’Amico.
Ars Technica reports that 90 percent of Windows 7 flaws fixed by removing admin rights
After tabulating all the vulnerabilities published in Microsoft’s 2009 Security Bulletins, it turns out 90 percent of the vulnerabilities can be mitigated by configuring users to operate without administrator rights, according to a report by BeyondTrust.
Ars Technica describes this as being good news for IT departments who can reduce security breaches by mandating the use of the ‘Standard User’ account, but it is still not common practice for home users to do the same.
Mikko of F-Secure argues that the ongoing security problems with Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is now the primary vector for malware having overtaken Microsoft Word sometime in 2009, is to do with fundamental issues with the PDF format itself.
Looking at the 756 page specification document (PDF format naturally) one finds details about how to embed all kinds of things from multimedia to executable JavaScript into PDF files.
So using an alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader such as the Foxit Reader is not the solution as it is just as vulnerable due to including the same functionality as Adobe Acrobat Reader. There might be alternative PDF readers that simply render the documents without the additional functions but another secure workaround is to open them up in Google Docs.
What might be just another run of the mill vote-buying scandal is made all the more interesting by the fact that some of the corrupting of the electoral process was down to exploiting a flaw in electronic voting machines.
The exploit was far more low-tech than those uncovered by the likes of Ed Felten as it exploited the poorly designed user interface which required voters to confirm their vote after they had pressed the button to make their voting selection. [via]
Edit: Bruce Schneier has of course covered the same story and has links to much deeper analyses of the situation.
BBC News reports that an unemployed man has been arrested by French police for hacking the Twitter accounts of US President Barack Obama and celebrities.
The unemployed 25-year-old was arrested on Tuesday after an operation lasting several months, conducted by French police with agents from the FBI.
He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets’ e-mail accounts, according to investigators.
This is the same method that was famously used to hack into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! webmail account and is yet another real world example of the failure of the typical password reminder function that the study by the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory showed.
As I wrote previously that until such time as the companies that use password reminder questions as a security method change the system they use I recommend that people give a nonsense answer to the question. Particularly people such as President Obama where such information is easily researched.