The black bloc tactics would seem to be far superior to the use of such `V' masks, due to the highly generic nature of black clothing, scarves, etc. Alas.
The black clothes have the disadvantage that people associate them with violence and political extremism, opposing the goals of the Anonymous movement.
The company I work for (who for obvious reasons I will refuse to mention) refuses to implement standard cryptographic practises in its product. Several months after starting there, and after a lot of loud complaining, I managed to get them to switch to using bcrypt instead of plaintext passwords in the backend database. Only in the next release are they switching to using TLS for logins, and even then sometimes defaulting to a clearly fucked Javascript implementation of cryptography to send the password (using public key crypto with global server key that only changes on server restart, with replay attacks galore).
The one thing I can say about the JS cryptography is that it normally protects somewhat against passive sniffing attacks, but when it's as broken as this, it doesn't even accomplish that task.
This sort of thing seems chronic in the industry, and it's dismaying.
And as we both know, the "passive sniffing attacker" is a myth. If you can sniff packets, you can intercept traffic. We don't reason about security mechanisms by tying the attackers hands behind their back.
Management made the decision that my trivial change to eliminate replay attacks was "too much effort". I am inclined to agree, since even with such a change the effort required to circumvent their entire so-called security is minimal.
Next quarter they're introducing e-commerce solutions. Dear god.
One might argue that, if an unnamed company's e-commerce solution would put a lot of people at risk, and an unnamed engineer can prove it, that unnamed engineer has an ethical obligation to discreetly report the vulnerability first to the unnamed company, then to successively more influential and more public venues (e.g. consumer protection groups, security research groups, etc.), until the company responds.
This. Finding Spanish speakers for an American can't be that hard, but finding a Swedish speaker could prove much harder, they should prioritize languages like Swedish.
A remote exploit in the Skype application that allows account theft is `minor', because, ``as you can imagine, someone who you deal with frequently is probably unlikely to take advantage of this bug anyways.''
Give me a moment to collect my jaw from the floor.
