Directory —
Technology —
Blog Details for "Things that should matter"
Things that should matter Things that should matter This blog is primary focusing and discussing small and large topics that should matter and that might need to be debated or argued for one reason or another when it comes to governance and security within the IT-industry Articles
Malmo secures it?s position on Swedish national skimming list
2008-12-12 16:25:00 Malmö, Sweden has strengthens its position on the list of places with the greatest problems with hijacking and skimming of credit cards. Several Swedish newspapers write about the recent operation of the Malmö police, which applies to Toys R Us in Sweden, where it has uncovered sophisticated skimming equipment. While skimming of cards is nothing ... More About: National , List , Position
Malmo secures it’s position on Swedish national skimming list
2008-12-12 16:25:00 Malmö, Sweden has strengthens its position on the list of places with the greatest problems with hijacking and skimming of credit cards. Several Swedish newspapers write about the recent operation of the Malmö police, which applies to Toys R Us in Sweden, where it has uncovered sophisticated skimming equipment. While skimming of cards is nothing new, but what surprises me is that Toys R Us doesn’t have any kind of procedures in place to control their terminals at regular or daily basis so that these have not been tampered with. That Malmö have problems with the skimming of the cards has earlier been notified by the Police in Malmö and in turn this problem has grown to such extend that it also has been discussed at political level in the city. The problem is so large that some foreign mail order companies now refuse to send packages to Malmo-based addresses. Unfortunately, has the banks in Sweden been extremely slowly to implement chip-based cards to their customers. Alrea... More About: National , List
OOXML changes granted without discussions
2008-03-03 10:39:00 OOXML changes was granted without further discussion and the delegates from 87 nationals that has gathered in Geneva are exhausted and frustrated with an agenda with over thousands points of order ? Chaos seems one word on everyone?s lips according to several reports from the meeting. How do you go through 6000 pages in one week; ... More About: Microsoft
OOXML changes granted without discussions
2008-03-03 10:39:00 OOXML changes was granted without further discussion and the delegates from 87 nationals that has gathered in Geneva are exhausted and frustrated with an agenda with over thousands points of order – Chaos seems one word on everyone’s lips according to several reports from the meeting. How do you go through 6000 pages in one week; well you don’t and this has been proven by the ISO-organisations themselves. So what do they do then? Well, the next best seems to just take the formal decisions to accepting the suggested changes without any discussion – this ought to be good enough for everyone shouldn’t it? ”There just is not enough time to cover the large number of problems in the document. I believe that a lot of the nations are frustrated with the process in general.” This might just be the strategy from Microsoft to present a massive documentation and hope that people actually won’t read it. Microsoft learned from the first round that it didn’t quite wor...
Remote bank fraud against Swedish Swedebank
2008-01-30 19:48:00 Most people have heard about card skimming and other credit card fraud but in Swedish media there are several interesting articles regarding how a local branch office to Swedebank manage to stop a fraud transaction in the last minute. The Swedish police won’t talk about it but media claims that a bank employee took notice off that the mouse pointer on his system was moving by it self. He then quickly looked behind the computer and finally found under his desk a hidden device that was connected to the computer to remotely control his computer. Pulling the cables stopped a transfer of several million Swedish Kronor to vanish. First question that comes in my mind is how did they manage to set up this equipment without any one taking notice? Well, according to the Swedish police there was a break in during August last year where nothing was stolen… Why didn’t that itself not raise a couple of questions? And better up; the alarm did not go off due to that the alarm wasn’t activat... More About: Fraud , Bank
Remote bank fraud against Swedish Swedebank
2008-01-30 19:48:00 Most people have heard about card skimming and other credit card fraud but in Swedish media there are several interesting articles regarding how a local branch office to Swedebank manage to stop a fraud transaction in the last minute. The Swedish police won?t talk about it but media claims that a bank employee took notice ... More About: Fraud , Privacy , Bank , Remote
What if IBM actually had ported the OS/2 WPS code to Linux?
2007-12-11 00:47:00 Referring to the ongoing OS/2 Open Source Petition at OS2 World there is an interesting story from inside of IBM that goes back to 1998 when I worked at IBM in Stockholm and had the opportunity of meeting Jeff Smith who at that time had the short and consist titel as Director of OS/2 Business Line and Network Computing Software. Jeff mentioned that there actually had been quite a bit of discussion if IBM should port the OS/2 WPS to Linux environment or not. Problem was that the top management wasn’t that convinced about this little project and felt that they already stretched check book enough with the WorkSpace On-Demand (remote boot of DOS, OS2 and Windows 98). Saddly, as he stated it; it was and still is a great piece of code. Porting it to Linix might well have been a commercial activity for IBM; question if they had done that; I would guess that they would open-sourced that code sooner or later to the Linux community. So one way or another IBM could open-source parts of t... More About: Code
What if IBM actually had ported the OS/2 WPS code to Linux?
2007-12-11 00:47:00 Referring to the ongoing OS/2 Open Source Petition at OS2 World there is an interesting story from inside of IBM that goes back to 1998 when I worked at IBM in Stockholm and had the opportunity of meeting Jeff Smith who at that time had the short and consist titel as Director of OS/2 Business ... More About: Linux , Code
Is it possible to get IBM to open Source OS/2?
2007-12-07 12:21:00 As a big enthusiast of open source and as well since I have earlier has been product manager for OS/2 at IBM Sweden; I really feel for this great operating system that have during many years been far more productive than for example Windows XP for me should be open sourced. IBM has so far been totally ignorant to an earlier petition where almost 12.000 people signed it and didn’t even bother to answer the letter sent to them together with the signatures. What is the current position with OS2 today then? Well, the last release from IBM was version 4.52 for both the client and server. Did it stop there? No, US based corporation Serenity picked up an OEM license at IBM and has together with Mensys in the Netherlands continued to develop and enhanced the system with new features and components such as wireless network support and as well multicore CPU support; so this old work horse still does quite fine together with the endless work of porting application from the linux communit... More About: Open Source , Open , Source , Open-Source
Is it possible to get IBM to open Source OS/2?
2007-12-07 12:21:00 As a big enthusiast of open source and as well since I have earlier has been product manager for OS/2 at IBM Sweden; I really feel for this great operating system that have during many years been far more productive than for example Windows XP for me should be open sourced. IBM has so far ... More About: Open Source , Open , Source , Open-Source
Smartcard for multiply operating systems
2007-11-04 20:44:00 Have you ever been trying to get commercial smart card solution available on the marked to work with more than just one operating system? Then you might be familiar with that it’s not a walk in the park to get it to work. During my evaluation of both hardware and software I quickly noticed that ... More About: Security , Operating Systems , Systems , Operating , Stem
MSN Hotmail - New King of Spam a lot
2007-11-03 02:28:00 Couple of month ago and after getting totally sick of all the spam in my mailboxes, so I changed the configuration and installed greylisting support on the mail server. So how does greylisting work? What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected ... More About: Security , Spam , Hotmail , King
Has airport security improved?
2007-11-03 00:57:00 As a frequent flyer within Europe one takes notice of the increased and changed security activities due to the unprecedented events of 11 September 2001. Although there has been an increase in the level of security at many airports, the question is still if all airports have made the proper changes. Let’s take Sweden?s largest airport, ... More About: Security , Airport , Improv , Prove
WordPress Cross-Site Scripting
2007-10-31 01:02:00 Well, it’s time to update your Word Press installation to the latest release (2.3.1) if you haven’t done so yet. Janek Vind has posted a less critical cross-site scripting vulnerability that applies to version <2.3.0. Input passed to the “posts_columns” parameter in wp-admin/edit-post-rows.php is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. So this can be ... More About: Wordpress , Security , Site
Swedish tax authorities wants customer records from ISP:s
2007-10-25 22:37:00 The Swedish tax authorities (IRS), Skatteverket, has lately started to look into home pages that they think generate revenue via banner income and now wants to force Swedish ISP:s to release their customers records. Swedish ISP Bahnhof is one of several companies that received a request from Swedish IRS to release customer records between 2004-2006 and ... More About: Customer , Privacy , Records , Authorities
Shall we all become the sole property of FaceBook?
2007-10-25 11:44:00 Computer World, IDG and DN today writes that Microsoft has bought 1.6% of the shares in Facebook for the amount of 240 million dollars! I can just congratulate Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. But, the questions remains if it’s in the best interest of the users to get Microsoft involved in Facebook due to the enormous ... More About: Security , Property , Privacy , Prop
Malicious code insertion in Wordpress
2007-09-30 01:14:00 I finally got around to upgrade to the latest WordPress (version 2.3) and I think it was highly needed due to that I’ve received unwanted comments posted to the blog from unregistered user. The vulnerabilities that have been reported in Wordpress lets malicious users to conduct script insertion attacks and to conduct SQL injection attacks. Checking ... More About: Security , Code
Could Russian hackers take down Denmark?
2007-09-08 02:32:00 The Danish security firm CSIS was taken down by a massive attack by Russian hackers last week by using a zombie network to perform a denial of service attack against them. The best guess why they where attacked might has to do that they accidentally scanned botnet servers and properly got attacked as a counter-measure. Several ... More About: Security , Hackers , Denmark
Disturbed & deranged security
2007-09-07 18:12:00 By now I guess that no one has missed out on the embassy password hack that was pulled off by Swedish individual. I’m saying individual since I don’t believe in the way how the entire affair was handled or should I say miss handled? Based on what the Swedish IT tabloid press has written about ... More About: Security
Risk Management isn?t prioritised enough
2007-09-05 21:39:00 One thing that I’m quite often astonished about is how low awareness is when it comes to risk management and where risk management can and should be applied. So reading an interview with Thomas Djurling, FRA (the National Defence Radio Establishment) in Computer Sweden where he says that Swedish companies are naive when it comes ... More About: Security , Management , Risk Management , Risk
Volvo key encryption cracked
2007-09-05 11:24:00 Quite recently there has been a number of articles talking about how the KeeLoq cipher encryption has been cracked and this by using a new method to speed up the processing to crack a key 500 times. Basically what Eli Biham, Orr Dunkelman, Sebastiaan Indesteege, Nathan Keller and Bart Preneel has proven is that by ... More About: Security , Encryption , Volvo , Crypt , Cracked
Swedish ISP?s could be forced to hunt filesharers
2007-09-03 15:29:00 Dagens Nyheter has a quite interesting article about the Swedish Department of Justice has received a report from a one man committee where it’s suggested that ISP’s should either close down broadband subscription for an individual or be forced to pay the fine for copyright infraction. According to an interview with Cecilia Renfors who wrote the ... More About: Security , Forced , Hunt
Catch 22 in Germany when it comes to IT-Security
2007-09-03 00:01:00 It’s seems that Germ any are willing to legalize malicious software such as spyware and trojan horses according to an article posted by Herald Tribune as a necessary measure against terrorism. Question is just who will define what and when a crime would fall under terrorism and since this could eventually be hard to guarantee that ... More About: Security , Catch 22 , Catch
Tomorrow is the big OOXML day
2007-09-01 00:59:00 Tomorrow is the big OOXML day since the international community will cast their vote in the ballot. As some of you already taken notice about is that the campaigns has been far from clean and Microsoft has really manage to gather loads of negative PR around in Europe. Sweden will abstain to vote due to that ... More About: General , Tomorrow , Morrow , Tomo
Catch 22 in Germany when it comes to IT-Security
2007-08-31 23:43:00 It’s seems that Germ any are willing to legalize malicious software such as spyware and trojan horses according to an article posted by Herald Tribune as a necessary measure against terrorism. Question is just who will define what and when a crime would fall under terrorism and since this could eventually be hard to guarantee that ... More About: Security , Catch 22 , Catch
Catch 22 in Germany when it comes to IT-Security
2007-08-18 23:43:00 It’s seems that Germ any are willing to legalize malicious software such as spyware and trojan horses according to an article posted by Herald Tribune as a necessary measure against terrorism. Question is just who will define what and when a crime would fall under terrorism and since this could eventually be hard to guarantee that ... More About: Security , Catch 22 , Catch |
