While this is probably more about marketing than anything, Anti-Virus vendor Computer Associates is offering a free one year subscription (press release) of it’s EZ Antivirus product to beta testers of Windows Vista.
This is the type of responsibility that more vendors should accept, there are thousands of Vista boxes now running, and one can only guess how many have no form of virus protection in place. CA is not only making a great business decision, they are also helping to serve the community by reducing the number of unprotected systems connected to the internet.
It’s good to see a company like CA make this kind of move, anytime a company as large as CA is able to see beyond the bottom line, everybody stands to win.
Visual Basic is at an interesting crossroads, it’s at a critical juncture between two paths. One path, it has followed since its earliest days, where simplicity and ease of use ruled over maintainability and solid design. The other, the longer, harder road, is that of design over ease. With the release of Visual Basic .NET, a major shift occurred in the direction the language is taking, though looking back now, nearly 5 years later, I’m finding myself concerned for the future of the language.
A few days ago, 1Password (my employer) released the first preview of the new application for macOS. The response has been rather dramatic. The release was followed by an excellent blog post by Michael Fey explaining the story of how we got here, and some of the decisions that were made in the process.
I’d like to now to a few minutes to answer some questions, provide some insight, and share my thoughts on this release.
Much has been said, especially recently, about that mess of dependencies that modern applications have – and for those of us working in application security, there is good reason to be concerned about how these dependencies are being handled. While working on YAWAST, I was adding a new feature, and as a result, I needed a new dependency – ssllabs.rb.
While most Ruby dependencies are delivered via Gems, ssllabs.rb is a little different – it pulls directly from Github:
Sometime in the 1990’s I used a 2400-baud modem and connected to the internet for the first time; I found a new world, a better world. A world where ideas and intellect set people apart, not skin color, or political affiliation, of even the pseudo-scandal of the day (which is probably just a disguise for ignorance and intolerance).
It was a time of invention, in a world where everything was new and the potential was unlimited.
Last Friday, Brandon Wilson and I gave a talk on BadUSB at DerbyCon – I wrote some about it yesterday. Yesterday, Wired published an article on the talk, kicking off several others – only the authors of the Wired and Threatpost articles contacted us for input.
There has been some questions raised as to the responsibility of releasing the code – so I want to take a few minutes to talk about what we released, why, and what the risks actually are.
