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Bradley Manning : Pictures, Videos, Breaking News …

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The amorphous nature of wars since at least the dawn of the Cold War in the mid-1940s has meant that the U.S. has more or less been at war for generations. This, in turn, has precipitated the ever-burgeoning war-industrial-intelligence complex.

"Listen, all these kids here with a piece, I'd written a line in a song on my last record about "Kids with Uzis, ice suckers, Death is a always thing." You can't get away from that mess. Whatever the kids got, the adults put them in their hands. They don't know what the hell they're doing, the kids."

I have tended to see whistleblowers as courageous individuals performing an often useful function, but also as slightly crazy vigilantes who were participating in that conspiracy against confidentiality, and thus against privacy.

Our state of affairs goes against a pinnacle of American justice, equality before law, facilitating everything from war crimes, to torture, to domestic spying, to a predatory, ravenous Wall Street that feeds on the middle class with impunity.

My fellow Americans: I deliver this address at a time of great distress in our nation. Never before have we faced challenges of such severity as we d...

It is one year since the death of 26-year-old Aaron Swartz, the renowned computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. People all around the world are remembering Swartz

Ruair McKiernan

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Bradley Manning : Pictures, Videos, Breaking News ...

How Stuff Works: Encryption – HowStuffWorks " Computer "

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When we use the Internet, we're not always just clicking around and passively taking in information, such as reading news articles or blog posts -- a great deal of our time online involves sending others our own information. Ordering something over the Internet, whether it's a book, a CD or anything else from an online vendor, or signing up for an online account, requires entering in a good deal of sensitive personal information. A typical transaction might include not only our names, e-mail addresses and physical address and phone number, but also passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs).

The incredible growth of the Internet has excited businesses and consumers alike with its promise of changing the way we live and work. It's extremely easy to buy and sell goods all over the world while sitting in front of a laptop. But security is a major concern on the Internet, especially when you're using it to send sensitive information between parties.

Let's face it, there's a whole lot of information that we don't want other people to see, such as:

Information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods. A simple but straightforward security method is to only keep sensitive information on removable storage media like portable flash memory drives or external hard drives. But the most popular forms of security all rely on encryption, the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

In this article, you will learn about encryption and authentication. You will also learn about public-key and symmetric-key systems, as well as hash algorithms.

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How Stuff Works: Encryption - HowStuffWorks " Computer "

Open source software: a guide for SMBs

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Many businesses are realising the benefits of open source. According to a recent report, up to a third of IT professionals are already using the technology and this figure will grow.

Open source is often cheaper, more flexible and easier to manage than its licensed counterparts. If you've got some technical ability, the basics are easy to implement yourself, with a multitude of 'DIY' guides available online.

So where is the best place to start? The most well known form of open source is Linux: this could suit SMBs new to the technology, experts agree.

And it is possible for SMBs to open source their entire IT environment. Back up, firewall, and security information and event management are ideal areas to open source, according to Dominique Karg, Chief Hacking Officer and Co Founder of AlienVault.

"Those are the areas where the cost difference between 'closed' and open source is biggest, and where open source has matured the most," he says.

If you have some expertise, implementing open source can be done in house. According to Karg, a skilled SMB CEO could put in basic open source without much technical knowledge. "If you're skilled, set two or three machines aside, along with some backup disks," Karg advises. "Read the manuals, apply the suggested guidelines and learn as much as possible."

This approach won't cost anything, Karg says. "What's great about open source is that you can take a peek at the source code to truly understand what it really does; how it works; how it was designed and whether its design matches its intention," he says.

But if you don't have the software expertise, you will need a software vendor or consultant to help implement the technology. In this case, Karg advises firms to hire a skilled 'geek' to implement open source tools, "rather than to pay licenses and rely on the commercial support teams".

Less confident SMBs should start by getting a consultant, advises CEO of Omnis Systems Paolo Vecchi. This kind of expertise is required because open source software is managed differently to Windows. For example, Vecchi says: "You would never connect a Windows server to the internet - but you would with Linux".

Even so, once they are up and running, keeping Linux systems secure is comparatively easier than with Windows. According to Steve Nice, CTO of open source software specialist Reconnix: "While Linux malware does exist, it's only a tiny fraction of what currently affects Windows, so there is much less risk on a day-to-day basis of a system suffering an exploit."

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Open source software: a guide for SMBs


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