President's
File
September 2010
(The President's message will occasionally be writen by editor Patrick Libert)
From the Editor:
Does anyone remember the Maginot Line?
By Patrick Libert
Cyber War- Part Deux
Remember my comments from last month? There have been a few recent articles mentioning potential threats to our infrastructure: “critical system flaws” "Stuxnet could Hijack Power Plants, Refineries"
Those are some of the latest. But, the one that really caught my attention was the one on “What’s Off Limits.”
Of course, our enemies will consider certain sectors to be “off limits” to cyber attack in times of war!
Let’s think back to 1939 and the treaties between the European nations and Germany, in particular France, my native country.
Any invasion would only come from across the Rhine, which was heavily fortified along the Maginot line. Yeah! Right! My father was captured with much of the French army as those “off limits” agreements were honored.
Does anyone think it would be different today? “All is fair in love and war!” Enough said.
July’s Presentation
Jay’s Office 2010 presentation was excellent and peaked my interest as to what Office for Mac 2010 will offer when it is released in October. The integration of several applications within the Office application finally makes it more creative and fun to use. I plan to upgrade from Office for Mac 2008 and will reserve detailed judgment until then.
September’s Presentation or What’s Up Mac?
Disclaimer: The writer of this column is hopelessly prejudiced in favor of the Mac operating system. Any opinions are strictly those of the writer and should not reflect on his sanity.
Now that I have opened the door to unleash endless pro-Mac propaganda on the reading public, I can enthusiastically endorse and recommend the upcoming general meeting presentation by Dave Marra.
Why? Well, I have been using the Mac platform since 1992 and still find it to be simpler, safer and more fun to use. Dave will delve into the details of the latest OS, Snow Leopard with all its capabilities for today’s networking environment.
Mark your calendars for September 7 at 7 p.m.
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Letter to the Editor:
In the August (2010) DACS.doc Letter from the Editor you brought up the National Security Agency, or NSA, which sounds like a bi-polar organization between spying and protecting. We have actually been benefiting from their involvement for a number of years already.
The NSA had provided guidelines on how to secure Windows XP and 2000, and had a hand in securing Vista. It wasn’t until Windows 7 that the NSA was allowed to fully participate in securing it during development [1]. The NSA has also helped Sun and Apple, but to what extent I don’t know.
Meanwhile, the NSA was, and may still be, the primary developer of SELinux which was open sourced under the GPL in 2000, and merged in the mainline kernel by 2003 [2]. Being open source, people more paranoid than you or I have been able to scour the code to ensure it does not include any nefarious back doors.
This SELinux has been included in Fedora since Fedora Core 2 came out in 2004, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 released in 2005. Ubuntu included SELinux support with version 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) released in 2008.
So I think there is little need to split up the NSA, as they have already proven that they can handle the political pitfalls of assisting even the most closed-source systems and has already been available in Linux over five years now.
Drew Kwashnak
REFERENCES:
[1] NSA helped with Windows 7 development http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141105/NSA_helped_with_Windows_7_development
[2] Security-Enhanced Linux - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
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