[Quote:]

So thanks to some folks on Twitter, I hear this story…it is a story of such astounding stupidity that it beggared even my imagination, because it spoke of such arrogance, such a lack of thought towards one’s customers that it couldn’t be true.

Yes, an installer with worse habits than a CS3 installer. You doubt me. I see it in your eyes. You doubt me. Well, here, behold the preflight script of which I speak:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

ps axco pid,command | grep Safari | awk ‘{ print $1; }’ | xargs kill -9

ps axco pid,command | grep firefox-bin | awk ‘{ print $1; }’ | xargs kill -9

exit 0

Yeah. That’s right. It kills Firefox and Safari, without warning, without dialog, without any kind of “You might have been working on something, I’ll ask you if I can do this”. Nope. None of that shit. You run this installer, bang, Safari and Firefox are dead. It’s for a browser plugin.

[Quote:]

In interviews, several high-level music executives, who spoke on the condition that they not be named to avoid angering Apple, said they operated in fear of Apple’s removing a label’s products from the iTunes store over a disagreement, even though that has never happened. The labels do not have much leverage in negotiating with Apple.

“I think Steve has been smart, and he knows he has the upper hand,” said Dave Goldberg, the former general manager of Yahoo Music who is now an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “They can’t afford to pull their music.”

Although the new movie “Milk,” about San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, is a very recent release, a pirated DVD of it is already available in China.

It’s called “Melamine.”

[Quote:]

With a $250 used RFID scanner he purchased on eBay and a low-profile antenna tucked away in his car, a security researcher recently cruised the streets along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where he captured — and cloned — a half-dozen electronic passports within an hour.

Chris Paget, who will demonstrate the privacy risks with these IDs at the Shmoocon hacker confab later this week in Washington, D.C., coined this newest RFID attack “war cloning” given its similarity to war-driving, or wireless sniffing. “War cloning — it’s the new hacker sport,” he says.

The security weaknesses of the EPC Gen 2 RFID tags, which lack encryption and true authentication, have been well-known and of concern to privacy advocates for some time. These tags are being used in the new wallet-sized passport cards that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers under the new Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative for travel to and from Western Hemisphere countries. The e-cards are aimed at simplifying and speeding up the border-crossing process, providing U.S. Customs and border agents with information on the individual as he or she queues up to inspection booths at the border.