October 2010

A newly discovered Internet threat can compromise networks by combining attacks into something that's too advanced for most intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to prepare for. Researchers at Stonesoft, a network security vendor, have proclaimed that these advanced evasion techniques (AET), can bypass most of today's products -- 99 percent of them. "We discovered that there's a whole new set of techniques that can also be used in addition to the dozen or so well-known ones that have been cited in previous research," said Mark Boltz, a senior solutions architect at Stonesoft. "If you then combine different techniques together -- either any of the new ones [alone] or any of the new ones with any of the old ones -- you make all of them more effective at bypassing just about any kind of IPS technology."

Filmmaking is currently in a state of crisis that has left directors struggling to find their footing, with many struggling even to survive.

One key villain is the Internet, which eats into traditional audiences and has made it hard for directors to get films made, said Irish director Neil Jordan. He said that while he was sure cinema-going would revive, it was currently extremely hard for good movies to break out from the confines of an increasing number of festivals into wider audiences. "I think it's very important that films do not find themselves in a 'ghetto' of festivals," said Jordan. "Festivals are enormously important because they're one of the few avenues left for serious filmmaking, but it's also important that films leap beyond the festival circuit to find audiences around the world."

[Commentary] The White House message machine has been rather clunky. President Barack Obama basically saved the auto industry, and the feds will likely turn a profit on the banking bailout that began at the end of the Bush era -- but these points have all but vanished into the ether. And President Obama might have found a way to publicize that he cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans in the much-derided stimulus bill -- a fact that fewer than one in 10 people realizes, according to a CBS/New York Times poll. A conflict-hungry news business that rarely reflects on success is partially to blame, but that's life in the big leagues. You go to war with the media you have. Despite Obama's sky-high profile, White House advisers scoff at suggestions of overexposure, saying that shrinking viewership requires the president to make multiple appearances to reach the same audience that Reagan could with a single network interview.

With a Republican Congress potentially on the way, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is running out of options -- and time -- to find a strategy for regulating broadband that his fellow commissioners will accept and the courts will allow. Without it, he and his top advisers believe, Chairman Genachowski may be stymied in his drive to preserve the Internet's openness and extend affordable broadband to most Americans within 10 years.

After a court challenge prevented the chairman from implementing key tenets of his national broadband plan, a last-ditch compromise that might have elicited bipartisan support from the other FCC members has, instead, drawn resistance from three of the four.

Republican commissioners are urging Chairman Genachowski to scrap his original fix, which involves regulating broadband under a different provision, and instead defer to Congress -- or else face a backlash. But Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps wants Chairman Genachowski to stop stalling and put the remedy up for a commission vote while he still can -- and the clock is running down. "I would've liked to have taken that vote some time ago," Commissioner Copps said.