Robert Cringely talks about gag orders from Apple, and the day AT&T learned about Moore's Law. A short but interesting read, in several ways. (Ever heard of the PortalPlayer iPod? ...No, I didn't think so.)
In other news, SecurityWire reports that despite a lack of visible activity, Conficker is still quietly out there doing its thing. The Conficker botnet is currently estimated at around 7 million machines. Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure Corp says that due to the botnet's size and the way it is being monitored, "it would be difficult for anyone to use it to make money or break it up and rent portions out without being detected".
"Conficker was unique in many ways and the biggest mystery around Conficker is why?" Hyppönen said. "The most logical explanation is that Conficker got too big and too noisy. It attracted too much attention."
Botnet monitoring organization The ShadowServer Foundation reported that "Conficker has managed to infect, and maintain infections on more systems than any other malicious vector that has been seen before now", but its creators — despite suspicions — have still not been positively identified.
And while I'm at it, the Wall Street Journal reports that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are using off-the-shelf software such as SkyGrabber, purchased off the Internet, to snoop unsecured communication links on US Predator drones and see what the drone's operator is seeing, enabling them to know what roads and buildings are under drone surveillance. The Pentagon has known about the vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign in the 199s, but hadn't done anything about it until now because they didn't think any adversary would possess the know-how to exploit it. The newer, uprated Reaper drone has the same vulnerability, despite the fact that the vulnerability was already known when General Atomics began designing the Reaper.
Personally, I'm boggled that it didn't occur to General Atomics to encrypt drone downlinks in the first place. It seems like a no-brainer.