Notes, pointers, highlights

[unixronin]

• house_pundit on how the schools are failing to produce entrepreneurs
• The Baltimore Sun on the rise of the New McCarthyism
• Bruce schneier asks whether the NSA has secretly inserted a backdoor into the new NIST pseudorandom-number-generator standard.
• Breitbart reports the US Supreme Court will hear Parker vs. District of Columbia, a case which will decide whether Washington DC — or ANY municipality — can ban handguns in defiance of the Second Amendment.  This is long overdue, but needs to be broadened to a general ruling of "The US Constitution (with its amendments) is not an à-la-carte menu; honor it ALL, or fuck off."
• According to the Taipei Times, Maxtor-branded 500GB hard disks produced in Thailand by Seagate have been found to carry trojan-horse viruses that secretly upload everything written to the disk to two websites hosted in Beijing.  The trojans are believed to be the work of the Chinese government.

Comments

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see some corroboration on the trojan horse story. That one has a chance of getting very big, very fast.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Seems like it'd generate a whole god awful lot of traffic.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Yah. I don't think it's a method of technical espionage that would be successful for very long. The traffic would eventually get noticed. OTOH, a bunch of "We've replicated their results, and confirmed we were not victimized" would help outline exactly how widespread these things got, world wide, before they were caught.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The schools are designed to produce worker drones for the industrial era. That is why we are so screwed over in the information era. Read, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, for a start.