dmca
New Legislation: SAFE and PRO IP
There has been some controversy over two new security-related bills in the United States Congress right now: the SAFE Act and PRO IP. The SAFE Act (Secure Adolescents From Exploitation Online; another case where the acronym almost certainly came first) aims to protect children and teenagers from exploitation by increasing enforcement of child pornography laws. [...]
The Trouble with Copy Protection
SecurityFocus reports that a patch has been issued for a vulnerability in the Macrovision SafeDisc driver. Apparently, due to a flaw in how the driver handles configuration parameters (which probably means a garden-variety buffer overflow), it’s possible for a local user to use the driver to elevate privilege all the way to the kernel. This [...]
Secure P2P for Pirates
According to a recent Reuters article, the unrepentant pirates of Sweden’s The Pirate Bay are working on developing their own peer-to-peer networking system. It turns out that this is a relatively fascinating security problem, even though in this case it’s the criminals needing the security, vs. the law-abiding companies trying to break it — a [...]
Coupon Hacker Beats Bad Trusted Client Security
A man named John Stottlemire has found himself in some legal trouble for developing a piece of software that bypasses the coupon-protection DRM used by Coupons.com. Essentially, to keep users from printing dozens of copies of one of their free online coupons, Coupons.com forces you to install some client-side software which assigns a unique ID [...]
