TaoSecurity compares Sun’s thin client solution Sun Ray with other thin client technologies and concludes that Sun’s approach is more secure, because Sun’s clients are very simple. Most of the work is done on the server, which can be maintained and patched on a central location. The clients hopefully don’t need a lot of patching due to their stripped down operating system.

To be honest, this sounds to me as if Sun has just reinvented the X-terminal.

After only two weeks we are back on the air with another episode of our radio show Nerd Alert. The main topic of the show will be FreeBSD. Tune your radios to FSK 93,0 if you are in Hamburg or jump onto the stream if you are not.

At Maximilan Dornseif’s blog you can find a comprehensive (though obviously subjective) list of books and papers, which are considered by him and his colleagues to be the "Top 18 Papers in Information Security". It is a great collection with lots of food for thoughts. And it is fun to see "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" in the same context as Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".

IBM developerworks recently published an introduction to shared libraries on Linux. The article describes the basic functionality, explains the naming conventions and provides an insight about the way a dynamic linker works. A recommended read if you are interested in the bowels of you digital friend.

The author’s profile is great as well:

Peter Seebach has been sharing libraries ever since kindergarten, and continues to believe that the idea is basically sound, although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) doesn't agree with him.

Recent news reported that Google has become accredited to register and sell web addresses. In the same news Google announced that they are not planning to sell domain names. What are the reasons for Google to become a web registrar then? Here is my guess: fresh URLs. When I was working at a major search engine in Germany (which is now offline), one of our main problems wasn’t the crawling or indexing of web sites - we got that part figured out and did it well - it was finding initial starting points (URLs) for our crawler.

As Fravia has taught us, a large percentage of all websites are not indexed by search engines. Commercial sites (and spammers) make sure that their web pages are known by as many web crawlers as possible. They use "submit a link"-forms, announce their sites via mailing lists and spray paint them on your neighbor’s garage door. On the other hand smaller sites (the so called "long tail" of the internet) rarely make this effort. These pages are the homes of special interest groups, non commercial organizations, communities, fan pages, obscure research projects or plain silliness - in other words: they probably contain interesting stuff. Occasionally it takes quite some time until a search engine discovers these sites, if they are discovered at all.

Being a registrar Google should get access to the master data, which contains a list of all registered domain names. This information could be used by Google to broaden their sources. Note though: this is only my take, I might be mistaken.

This song (done be these fine lads) makes me wanting a piano (and laugh out loud).

[Daily Source Code]

A recording of the latest Nerd Alert show is now available as mp3 (57 minutes, 83 MB). We talked mainly about the 21C3-Conference and the recent clash between the blogosphere and the "real" journalists. If you are visiting this site from the great abroad please note that the show is entirely in German.

If you prefer Ogg Vorbis over mp3, please visit Norbert.

Isn’t it kind of strange that Mircosoft has to buy a company to be able to release a tool to remove spyware from their own operating system? Shouldn’t they have enough expertise on Windows among their employees? They wrote the system after all. Therefore they should know, where and what the hooks and places are, that spyware uses to ensure that it is executed on every startup. And also they should understand the mechanisms which are employed by malicious code to hide itself...

This leaves me puzzled.

Marc Jen is a newly hired Google employee. On his first day he started a weblog to keep a detailed account on his days at Google:

hi, my name is mark jen. i used to work for microsoft, and now i work for google. this is a blog of my personal experience as a new google employee. everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved by google before it is posted.

Most of his entries were very critical with his new employer. He doesn’t describe Google as evil but he puts the shining image of the company in perspective. It is not surprising that he decided to erase his weblog content today.

But even though his page isn’t in the Google cache anymore (surprise, surprise), you still can find his texts on the net. E.g. Bloglines keeps an archived version of every RSS feed they proceed. When you subscribe to his feed in Bloglines, you are able to read his ten last entries, which cover all his Google stories.

This is obviously only one example. There are more places on the web that automatically keep copies of your content. The lesson learned here is: Think twice before you post something. When it is out, it is out and you probably won’t be able to get rid of it.

Update: His blog is back online with a couple of paragraphs missing in his previous posts.

[Google Bogoscoped]