VMware has announced the availability of their free PCI DSS 2.0 Compliance Checker
Administrators simply point the checker at a target environment (hosts or specific VMs depending on the checker downloaded) and execute a compliance assessment request
Jane Yakowitz has posted an interesting study and analysis of smells detected by dogs as related to privacy/segmentation concepts in American law.
In Florida v. Jardines, the U.S. Supreme Court will determine whether the sniff of a trained narcotics dog at the front door of a person’s home constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. This is very exciting for privacy scholars because it presents two possible shifts in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. First, the court might further expand Justice Scalia’s “magical places†rationale to reinforce that the home is a formidable privacy fortress, protecting all information from the detection of government agents unless that information happens to be visible to the human eye.
The second possibility — the one I root for — is that the court may choose to reopen the holding and reasoning of the previous dog sniff cases, Place and Caballes (which determined that dog sniffs conducted on a car and on luggage did not constitute a search.)
A fun new post from IOActive Labs Research
The attached code is the code I used to win the backdoor hiding (http://backdoorhiding.com) contest @ DEFCON (http://defcon.org). It is a library class written in C++/CLI that exposes a number of methods that allow for the loading/saving of data to a disk file.
See if you can find the backdoor, I’ll post the explanation and details on the flaw soon.
A new study says people who eat red meat have a far higher risk of premature death. The study reviewed more than 100,000 cases over 20 years, which really is just a tiny amount of data. Nonetheless, here’s the news from the LA Times:
…adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.
You might be thinking the researchers are nuts, and you might be right.
Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study.
Not much is said in the article about researcher bias or data integrity issues. This is their best effort at a disclaimer:
…there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.
But Pan said the bottom line was that there was no amount of red meat that’s good for you.
With that out of the way the reporter then highlights the cost savings from reducing risk.
…a plant-based diet could help cut annual healthcare costs from chronic diseases in the U.S., which exceed $1 trillion. Shrinking the livestock industry could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of forests to create pastures, [UC San Francisco researcher and vegetarian diet advocate Dr. Dean Ornish] wrote.
No word yet on whether eating less bacon could have a far greater impact on healthcare costs than patching Windows faster.