Keyloggers: An Interview With HP

Simon spent time on Friday with Mike Nash, HP’s vice president of consumer PCs, to discuss the keylogger that was found in one of their device drivers. Nash was open, honest, accepted responsibility and demonstrated that HP already had the problem addressed despite the researchers who found the issue being less than effective.

The whole incident shows how vulnerable our Windows-dominated approach to IT is however. Stateful desktops delivered in a cut-throat-competitive market are beyond the oversight of any individual and as the Wanacry worm shows malware can spread rapidly using a defect just like this one.

Simon ends by suggesting “Maybe we need to break that problem apart — stateless desktops, open source code, cloud-hosted statefulness — if we’re to avoid disaster.”

Read more over on InfoWorld.

DLC 1: Hotel arrogance, the no-win laptop and more

Digital Life Clippings from week 1

Marriott will ban shareable WiFi if the FCC don’t let them block it – NYT – Their arrogance in attempting to protect their high-margin abuse of customers’ vulnerability knows no bounds; threatening the FCC is jaw-dropping.
To carry out their threat to ban shareable WiFi, they would need to ban not only MiFis but also Windows, Mac and Linux laptops as well as almost all smartphones. They may think they have a right to break my internet if I won’t use their broken internet, but the “hospitality” they will need to show their “guests” will be deeply harmful.
The bug is not that people want to use their own internet connections; it’s that Marriott think people should have to pay extra for a facility that’s become as fundamental to travellers as hot water or electric light. [Coverage]
HP’s low-cost Windows laptop is not a Chromebook killer – GigaOm – It’s a mistake to try to squeeze Windows into hardware designed for ChromeOS. You end up with a laptop that’s so under-powered it’s best for cloud-hosted applications (as the HP/Microsoft TV advertising in the UK implies). But you still have to maintain anti-malware software, apply updates, manage drivers, buy upgrades and so on.
So you have bought yourself the functionality of a Chromebook but with the upkeep of Windows. Why on earth would anyone think that was a good deal?
A Europe Of Treaties? – Webmink – The UK is entering its election cycle and the political manipulators are trying to whip Britain’s closet xenophobes into an anti-European frenzy intended to justify Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. But what would be the alternative? Britain can’t up-anchor and sail to Florida. Opting out like that would simply mean discarding democratic engagement over the market conditions Britain depends on and instead seeking secretly-negotiated treaties.
Samsung to use Tizen in TVs – Tizen Experts – Samsung’s embrace of Tizen continues, although this move to deploy it to TVs instead of phones may indicate someone has woken up to the need for a large and diverse developer ecosystem to make a platform succeed. All the same, the probem is on clear display in this insider article. This quote embodies the problem.

Tizen TV is expected to be running Tizen 3.0 based on Tizen Common at launch and the non Intellectual Property (IP) Source Code released shortly thereafter.

Secret development, partial code availability, binaries before code; how could any meaningful collaborative community possible emerge in the absence of an existing diverse ecosystem?

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