Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Author: Robby Pedrica

  • MotoGP BRNO

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    The pressure was on Casey Stoner to produce in this past weekend’s race as Rossi was leading the championship; pressure or not, Stoner went down after a few laps from the leading position of the race. Rossi went on to win easily from an 11s cushion over the rest of the field. The rest of…

  • Open Source software protected under copyright law

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    A recent US federal appeals court ruling ( which overrules a previous lower court ruling ), has indicated that open source software now has the same protection under copyright law as other content. It’s quite interesting that the Business Software Alliance ( BSA ), which in the past has been the watchdog for such commercial…

  • Software design strategies

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    Open Source and its community-based development model is starting to give some in the commercial world a bit of a headache. You’ll remember that I’ve blogged about the fact that I think all software development will go the OS-type way in future and it seems this is happening already. We’ve already seen behemoths like Microsoft…

  • BOSD’s rule

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    Lenovo, IT providers to the Chinese Olympic Games, decided on XP as their choice of computing platform due to the apparent instability of Vista. It appears they forgot about XP’s instabilities as well – here is a nice BlueScreenOfDeath courtesy of Gizmodo.

  • Microsoft, Intel, Negroponte and the OLPC – we’re all one big happy family

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    Bryan Appleyard from the Times Online recently wrote a brilliant piece on the trials of Nicolas Negroponte’s philanthropic venture, the OLPC. Briefly, Negroponte started out with the vision of having a cheap/low cost laptop-type device that could be used in countries where it was not possible to afford the IT industry’s normal costs. These costs…

  • OpenID and SSL/DNS poisoning

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    Ben Laurie of Google’s Applied Security team, while working with an external researcher, Dr. Richard Clayton of the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, found that various OpenID Providers (OPs) had TLS Server Certificates that used weak keys, as a result of the Debian Predictable Random Number Generator (CVE-2008-0166). In combination with the DNS Cache Poisoning issue…

  • DNS – Source Port Randomisation

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    Dan Kaminsky gave a very interesting talk on the recent DNS issues as part of the Black Hat USA 2008 conference currently on the go in Las Vegas. Originally DJ Bernstein had advocated ( and put into DJBDNS ) source port randomisation as part of the DNS request but no one else had as they…

  • Windows Vista insecurity?

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    The following article comes courtesy of SDV: Some researchers at the recent BlackHat conference have been doing work in the area of Window Vista security and have ( apparently ) found a major hole whereby they can use .Net or similar scripting languages to effectively bypass the memory security functions built into Vista ( DEP…

  • SA WSBK Riders perform well

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    Hudson Kennaugh finished in 10th position in the WSS600 race on Sunday as a wildcard rider. Riding the Yamaha R6 in changeable conditions, he kept his position well until spotting rain caused the front 3 riders to raise the hands as indication of unsafe conditions. However it was only when Smrz slid off the track…

  • Craig Jones WSS600 rider

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    … has sadly passed away this weekend past as a result of head injuries sustained during a crash at Brands Hatch in the UK. Craig was in 2nd position contesting the SuperSport 600 race when he came around onto the main straight and lost rear traction. He fell into the path of Andrew Pitt (…

  • XStore Newsletter 11

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    … is now available, featuring a number of security topics including the recent DNS cache poisoning issue as well as Australias attempt at web site rating.

  • A new search engine? – Cuil

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    Cuil was launched earlier this week and hailed ( by its founder nonetheless ) as having indexed more than tripple the amount of information than its supposed closest rival, Google. Unfortunately, the first day saw porn results been returned for non-pornography related queries – apparently as a result of high load on the quantum computing-based…

  • DNS Issues

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    Dan Kaminsky previewed information relating to possibly the worst DNS-related exploit ever, earlier this month. The issue is a cache poisoning vulnerability and can result in DNS answers containing fiddled information. This is actually a general design issue more than any vendor-specific issue. Imagine entering a url in your browser and been taken to another…

  • KDE 4.1 released

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    The final version of KDE 4.1 is now available. While the 4.x series has been a bone of contention for many in terms of the radical change it has brought, 4.1 completes a lot of the work that has been brewing over the last year. While there are still areas needing to be addressed, 4.1…

  • KDE frontman dies

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    Uwe Thiem, long time Namibian representative of KDE in Africa, died earlier this month of sudden kidney failure. Besides being the first to right a KDE book and being one of the original KDE developers, Uwe worked tirelessly to promote KDE and OSS specifically in the African context. He’ll be sorely missed. KDE 4.1, released…