Well of course it's not secure. I wouldn't imagine that the first thing on the minds of the people who developed this Mickey Mouse software was someone plugging their laptop into the hotel's network & fiddling around where they're not supposed to.

"By plugging the hotel TV cable into a USB TV tuner connected to a laptop computer, Laurie can hack his way into the back-end systems controlling the entertainment and other convenience features found in modern hotels, he said in his presentation."

I personally don't know anyone who's actually looking forward to the release of Windows Vista, but if I could find someone, I think all that I'd have to do is point them at this article. Gives ol' t-ready the heebie-jeebies. I never thought I'd actually say this, but I'm hoping that they don't EOL WinXP for a good long while now....

"The security associated with video and audio rendering on the Longhorn platform include authentication procedures between hardware (graphics cards, mainboard chipsets etc), encryption of video samples and control of output protection mechanisms. Microsoft also dictates robust rules to hardware manufacturers in order to natively support these security schemes."

Yet another update to the Netscape 8 browser's been released as of this morning. This update addresses a couple of security flaws that were just recently patched in a previous Firefox update (1.0.5). I wonder if Netscape updates will always lag 2-3 weeks behind the Firefox ones? Read about the flaws here, & download the latest version, 8.0.3.1, here.

"The updated release fixes only the most serious flaws that were fixed in Firefox 1.0.5. Ten less-serious flaws will be dealt with in another update due in the coming weeks, Weinstein said. 'We wanted to make sure that we tackled the larger issues immediately,' he said."