RTFA: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_…

Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.

Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.

Really good Bruce Schneier essay about reporting suspicions and spying on your neighbor.

RTFA: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/1372…

“Windows Update is a service that primarily delivers updates to Windows,” said Nate Clinton, program manager in the WU group on the team’s blog Thursday. “To ensure ongoing service reliability and operation, we must also update and enhance the Windows Update service itself, including its client-side software.”

Microsoft was moved to respond after the popular “Windows Secrets” newsletter looked into complaints that WU had modified numerous files in both XP and Vista, even though users had set the operating system to not install updates without their permission. In many cases, users who dug into Windows’ event logs found that the updates had been done in the middle of the night.

Whatever – shady is shady.

RTFA: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.

Comcast lowers its bandwidth bills by spoofing TCP RST packets. The net effect is that if their customers run normal TCP/IP stacks, the customer’s computer will think the remote host has disconnected. Right now, they use this on Bittorrent traffic, but the same technique is used in China to perform per-keyword HTTP-over-TCP filtering, too. One solution, presented in this paper, is to hack your TCP/IP stack to ignore, or at least be smarter, about spoofed TCP RST packets.