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One cool thing about working in IT is that things are very predictable. You generally know how a system or application will react if you do this or that to it. This is how people find and use exploits in software and even hardware. You look at how an application works and identify ways you can use those processes against it. It is like digital judo. However, what many people do not really get is that this also works when setting up a larger organization for an attack. If you can track how they will respond to a particular threat, you can use it against them in very interesting ways.

Tor has pushed out a new version of its privacy enhancing Tor Browser Bundle. We are up to 5.5 now and, according to the Tor Project it is a full stable release. The update fixes a laundry list of bugs and also covers some usability issues that have been plaguing the software for some time. One interesting note is that they are finally working on blocking ways of fingerprinting users through different mechanisms (resolution, keyboard type etc.).

It seems that the stars might finally align to remove one of the largest security holes in the history of… well history itself. Oracle is announcing that it is finally getting rid of the Java Browser Plug-in… sometime. According to a blog post on the Oracle page they are aware that most (if not all) browsers are already blocking plug-ins like the one in the Java Runtime Environment. These are for security, stability and performance, and really should have been done a long time ago. Over the last few years the Java browser plug-in (along with Flash) has been the vector of choice for many web-based attacks.

AMD as a corporate entity is facing some rough times. As of their last earnings call we saw that they are still losing money and really do not have a product ready to combat this. The Rage Fury line of GPUs is doing ok in terms of sales, but as of this writing AMD has not been able to take a significant amount of market share from NVIDIA or even Intel. This is not to say that Radeon Graphics, or AMD’s APUs are bad products, it is just that they are not performing as well as the competition. In terms of the APU AMD still cannot compete with the compute power of Intel’s Core series even though the GPU side of the APU is a much better product.