For many years in the hidden spaces of the Net, rumors have spread that cryptographic systems as we know them are worthless. Some claim that every cryptographic system out there has already been compromised because the National Security Agency only permits those systems that it has been able to tamper with in subtle ways to be published. Cryptographers they can't compromise, so the stories go, silently disappear and are never to be heard from again. More recently, advances in quantum computing have caused brand new stories to appear on forums and in IRC channels, with the requisite flame wars hot …

The Washington Post ran an interesting article about the one-year anniversary of the release of the Storm Worm botnet agent about two weeks ago, possibly the most successful and virulent malware agent yet released on the Net. The Storm Worm beastie is unusual in that the botnet is a decentralized collective, i.e, all of the infections don't report into a single C&C channel but instead use a peer-to-peer networking protocol (a variant of the eDonkey protocol, specifically), so it can't be killed by taking down a single server. It is also interesting because updates are periodically released for …

A recent interview with Alan Tudyk by Moviehole.net let slip an interesting piece of information, namely, that there was a pretty good chance that a sequel to Serenity would be made by Universal Pictures because the collector's edition DVD of Serenity is selling so well. Even if it's a straight to DVD release (which is something of a fad these days), it would probably still sell well.

We can only hope.