In March the same researcher showed up at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver and was able to compromise Chrome in the first edition of the Pwnium contest, winning a $60,000 reward for his work. At the time, Google security officials said that they knew who the researcher was and that he had been working on that specific attack for some time. Google later detailed the process that PinkiePie used in that attack, after the vulnerabilities had been fixed, and said that the researcher had chained together six individual vulnerabilities in order to accomplish the compromise of Chrome.

PinkiePie used several discrete bugs in order to get to a point where he could impersonate the Chrome extensions manager. After that, he focused on finding a way to break out of the browser’s sandbox.

“Once he was impersonating the extensions manager, Pinkie used two more bugs to finally break out of the sandbox. The first bug (117715) allowed him to specify a load path for an extension from the extension manager’s renderer, something only the browser should be allowed to do. The second bug (117736) was a failure to prompt for confirmation prior to installing an unpacked NPAPI plug-in extension. With these two bugs Pinkie was able to install and run his own NPAPI plug-in that executed outside the sandbox at full user privilege,” Google said.

HTTPS Everywhere gives users a basic level of protection against several classes of attack that rely on eavesdropping on user sessions. One limitation of the browser extension, which is available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, is that it can’t do much about the insecure content elements supplied by third-party sites to pages that are protected by the encryption. 

HTTPS Everywhere 3.0, released on Monday, now contains rulesets for more than 1,500 sites.

“Today we released version 3.0 of HTTPS Everywhere, which adds encryption protection to 1,500 more websites, twice as many as previous stable releases. Our current estimate is that HTTPS Everywhere 3 should encrypt at least a hundred billion page views in the next year, and trillions of individual HTTP requests,” Peter Eckersley of the EFF wrote in a blog post.

Starting today, we’re adding CardDAV – an open protocol for contacts – to that list. CardDAV enables 3rd
party clients, like the iOS contacts app, to sync your Google contacts. By supporting IMAP, CalDAV, and
CardDAV together, we’re making it possible for 3rd parties to build a seamless Google Account sync
experience.

To sync your Google Contacts on iOS using CardDAV, please follow these instructions in our Gmail Help
Center.

With the arrival of new versions of Windows and the previously “closed” mobile operating systems becoming more accessible and mainstream, the ability to develop penetration techniques across these platforms is a key part of what clients are looking for in an experienced penetration tester.

“When I hire a penetration tester, one of the first things I have them do is take a Metasploit script written for a vulnerability on one version of Windows and have them fix it to get it working on a different, but still vulnerable, version of Windows,” explains Sims, “Those with this skill can do it in less than five minutes and I consider this a test to determine if the candidate is someone who will solve a problem where others will likely fail.”

The bar continues to rise. Hitting ‘go’ on Nessus is no long acceptable.

On Tea Leaves

Some people have got the time to make loose leaf tea. Well done you. How was art school? I also like loose leaf tea. I drink it when I have nothing better to do or am at a tea shop and have the leisure time to deal with loose leaf. On the whole though, teabags will suffice. Yes they will. Stop it.

People forget or did not know that once upon a time The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and NASA as an informative/instructional network focused on providing real education through the medium of TV; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite. Then it was privatized in 1980 (See Reaganism) and was then named the Appalachian Community Service Network. In November 1980 this name was changed to “The Learning Channel”, which was subsequently shortened to “TLC.” From then on we have a sad decline to the abomination of child and poverty exploitation of the TLC’s current hit freak show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”.

As I talked about in a recent post, profit is not king. It’s not the highest calling. And it often encourages the exact opposite of what’s best for people. Case in point: public television pushing education vs. what people want to see.

Walk into a public school and offer kids candy or vegetables and they’ll eat candy until they puke.

The mistake is thinking that somehow people hit adulthood and become hyper-evolved. Most people do need guidance; if you doubt me then go to a Walmart and look at some grocery carts.

This doesn’t mean force every little decision on them, but it sure as hell means provide a basic framework aimed at raising the bar on nutrition, safety, health, education, etc.

BARTLET They told you to make sure you didn’t seem condescending, right? They told you, “First, do no harm,” and in your case that means don’t appear condescending, and you bought it. ’Cause for the American right, condescension is the worst crime you can commit.

OBAMA What’s your suggestion?

BARTLET Appear condescending. Now it comes naturally to me —

OBAMA I know.

BARTLET It’s a gift, but I’m likable and you’re likable enough. Thirty straight months of job growth — blown off. G.M. showing record profits — unmentioned. “Governor, would you still let Detroit go bankrupt as you urged us to do four years ago?” — unasked. (shouting) I’m talkin’ to you, too, Lehrer!

Entertaining. Hopeful.

A new book about Strom Thurmond, the openly racist senator from South Carolina (he ran as a “Dixiecrat” against Truman in 1948) details how Thurmond’s switch from the Democratic Party to the GOP in 1964 was the harbinger and instigator for that shift to a solidly Republican South. Eventually the party became somewhat less overt in its public statements but not in its appeal at the voting booth.

Which means in practice that the GOP starts out every presidential election with (depending on census changes in electoral vote numbers) some 100 electoral votes, more than a third of the way to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Is it an accident that these 100 votes come from the core states of the Old Confederacy—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina?

Looked at another way, as things stand, there would be no presidential “race” at the moment if it weren’t for those ex-confederate states—even if they split their votes. Mitt Romney would have little or no chance of winning and might as well quit the race now. Nor would the GOP have much chance of re-taking the Senate or even winning the House again. They would be dead as a political party if not for the legacy of racism. I think that’s a fact. Do you think it’s “he said/she said”?

There’s also what’s known as Push Kharma. This stems from profile pages tied to each engineer. Rossi can pull up someone’s name and see what code they have submitted. “Every developer is born with four stars to their name,” he says, pointing to a ranking system on the profile page. “If we have an issue when we take someone’s code—and it blows us out of the water—then it takes them down half a star and I write what happened,” Rossi says. The system has a thumbs-down indicator, a feature many Facebook users have long sought. “I am the only guy who has a’ dislike’ button on Facebook,” he says. “A lot of people want [one], but this is the only place you will see it.”