Practical Technology

Over the weekend, Google annoyed numerous one-time Google+ users by blowing away their accounts because they’d broken Google’s name restrictions. That went over well. As I asked at the time, “What was Google thinking!?” Google’s senior VP of social, Vic Gundotra, explained Google’s logic for insisting on real names, as an attempt to set a [...]

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A trio of German security researchers from the University of Ulm have looked into the question of whether “it was possible to launch an impersonation attack against Google services and started our own analysis. The short answer is: Yes, it is possible, and it is quite easy to do so. Further, the attack is not [...]

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Far too many people still aren’t taking the Web security holes that Firefox exposed seriously. I can still sit in any coffee house and look over most users’ shoulders to see what they’re doing on the Web. Facebook to its credit though has taken the threat seriously and is now offering secure Internet connections using [...]

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God knows I understand that going from one Web site to another with one login and password scheme after the other is a real pain-in-the-rump. After the Gawker password fiasco it’s become clearer than ever that using the same brain-dead simple login and password from one system to another is clearly dumb. But, the idea [...]

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When Oracle bought Sun, there were many unanswered questions about Sun’s open-source portfolio of programs. Over a year later, we still don’t know, for example, if OpenSolaris is going to have Oracle’s support. We now know, however, that OpenSSO, an open source access management and federation server platform, will live on as a product under [...]

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