By Soulskill from
Slashdot's according-to-somebody-who-may-or-may-not-be-a-person department:
squiggleslash writes:
"One question arose almost immediately upon the exposure of Heartbleed, the now-infamous OpenSSL exploit that can leak confidential information and even private keys to the Internet: Did the NSA know about it, and did they exploit if so? The answer, according to Bloomberg, is 'Yes.' 'The agency found the Heartbeat glitch shortly after its introduction, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, and it became a basic part of the agency's toolkit for stealing account passwords and other common tasks.'"The NSA has
denied this report. Nobody will believe them, but it's still a good idea to take it with a grain of salt until actual evidence is provided. CloudFlare did some testing and
found it extremely difficult to extract private SSL keys. In fact, they weren't able to do it, though they stop short of claiming it's impossible. Dan Kaminsky has a post
explaining the circumstances that led to Heartbleed, and today's xkcd has the "
for dummies" depiction of how it works. Reader Goonie argues that the whole situation was
a failure of risk analysis by the OpenSSL developers.
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By Roblimo from
Slashdot's computers-for-eager-young-minds-and-fingers department:
Phil Shapiro often loans his Chromebook to patrons of the public library where he works. He says people he loans it to are happily suprised at how fast it is. He wrote an article earlier this month titled
Teachers unite to influence computer manufacturing that was a call to action; he says that if 20,000 teachers demand a simple, low-cost Chromebook appliance -- something like a Chrome-powered
Mac mini with a small SSD instead of a hard drive, and of course without the high Mac mini price -- some computer manufacturer will bite on the idea. Monitors? There are plenty of used ones available. Ditto speakers and keyboards, not that they cost much new. The bottom line is that Phil believes Chromebooks, both in their current form factor and in a simpler one, could be "the" computer for schools and students. Maybe so, not that Android tablets are expensive or hard to use. And wait! Isn't there already a
Chromebox? And even a
Chromebase all-in-one Chrome-based desktop? In any case, Chrome-based computers look pretty good for schools and libraries, especially if and when prices for the simplest members of the family get down to where Phil thinks they should be. (
Alternate video link)
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