More on the Comodo Fiasco
Bruce Schneier has some observations about the Comodo hack. This bit is something I had not thought about:
This isn’t the first time Comodo has screwed up with certificates. The safest thing for us users to do would be to remove the Comodo root certificate from our browsers so that none of their certificates work, but we don’t have the capability to do that. The browser companies — Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, etc. — could do that, but my guess is they won’t. The economic incentives don’t work properly. Comodo is likely to sue any browser company that takes this sort of action, and Comodo’s customers might as well. So it’s smarter for the browser companies to just ignore issue and pass the problem to us users
It does make sense though. Why invite the grief?
Time for some cuteness
Time for some cuteness overload.
First Sony, Now Samsung
This does not bode well.
On March 1, 2011, I called and logged incident 2101163379 with Samsung Support (SS). First, as Sony BMG did six years ago, the SS personnel denied the presence of such software on its laptops. After having been informed of the two models where the software was found and the location, SS changed its story by referring the author to Microsoft since “all Samsung did was to manufacture the hardware.” When told that did not make sense, SS personnel relented and escalated the incident to one of the support supervisors.
The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.”
So Samsung has been snooping on their users for various reasons and did not tell anyone. I hope this is something they get slammed hard for. Class Action lawsuit anyone?
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