22 Jun 2011
Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

I ran into this somewhat in my recent job search - but not enough to knock me completely out of the market. Then again, I'm in the Midwest, not California. And I've heard horror stories out of the Valley about the near impossibility of getting a decent gig if you're over 50.

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

(link) [Tech Crunch]

22:21 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

Your tax dollars at work - writing rootkits! I'm sure the targets will always be "bad guys" ... with whatever working definition of "bad" happens to be currently in vogue with the government.

And slipping this stuff in via USB ports or Firewire (as mentioned in the article) is not the easiest way to get malware onto a system. The easiest way is to get the user to install it themselves, or better yet, sell them the system with the vuln built in. I wonder if anybody out there in the wide world might think of us as "bad guys"?

In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge.

(link) [Ars Technica]

22:07 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link