I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this news story from ComputerWorld. NBC TV producer, Michelle Madigan, for the show Dateline, was at the DefCon security conference as an undercover attendee. It was believed that she was going to film other attendees at the conference with a hidden camera in an attempt to ‘out’ them. I must admit if I were an IT manager and found my network guru was attending such a conference, the first thing I’d want to know was what freebies he’d gotta his grubby little mitts on. Anyway I digress, the conference organisers had got wind of her dastardly plans which probably wasn’t surprising as the producer had told a show volunteer ‘I have to go into the bathroom and put on my hidden camera’. I don’t think the CIA will be asking her for any tips on undercover operations.

The farce situation came to a head when conference organiser Dark Tangent (!), aka Jeff Moss, outed Madigan during a conference session.

“It came to our attention that a reporter might be here with a hidden pinhole camera,” Moss told the crowd. He said that he had two options: to let her corner some 13-year-old and get him to admit to hacking, or to escort her away.

At this point Madigan made a swift exit from the conference building with chants of ‘burn the witch’ ringing in her ears!

As I said at the beginning I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this - DefCon is obviously based around a ’shared knowledge’ principle, it’s a place where people can go and discuss security concepts (aka hacking tips) openly and without fear of their motives being questioned. If I was responsible for network security at a big corporation, I’d be keen to attend as well. What Madigan tried to do was despicable and would have irreparably broken the trust that DefCon has built up amongst its attendees. If people say that hackers are the scum of the earth, then TV producers are the next layer down.

Oh yes, except to see the NBC site down ‘for maintenance’ soon!

Source: ComputerWorld

While on a visit in Romania, where Bill Gates participated in the celebration of 10 years since the Microsoft branch has been running there, and the launch of Vista, Microsoft’s president declared that, with the right amount of administration, the new Vista could run life support systems in hospitals. Here is a fragment from the interview:

Journalist: Let’s imagine a hospital where life support systems are running Vista. Would you trust it with your life?

Bill Gates: Security has been the top priority for Microsoft for quite some time and that’s why I put out a key call for us to focus on that in a very big way over three years ago, and that’s why we’ve made investments like having people from Gecad ( Romanian company ) join on the security action from Microsoft. The answer to your question is that, absolutely, Vista is the most secure operating system we’ve ever done, and if it’s administred properly, absolutely, it can be used to run a hospital or any kind of mission crytical thing. But it’s not as simple as saying “If you use Vista, that happens automatically”. The issues about patient records and who should be able to see them, the issue about setting up a network, so that authorized people can connect up to that hospital network, the issue about having backup power, so that the computer systems can run even if the generators go down. There are a lot of issues to properly set up that system, so that you have the redundancy and the security walls to make sure it fullfils that very crytical function. So we are working with partners to raise their skills to make sure that when get involved in an installation like that they can make it secure. So I feel better about Vista than any other operating system, but there’s a lot of things that need to be done well, and we’re certaintly committed to step up and make sure these security issues are ieasier and better understood.

This could be the truth or it could be one man’s opinion. You can download the above segment of the interview here. (Big thanks to Alex Radescu for the recording)

But the real question that I must ask is this: Would YOU put your life in Vista’s hands? Do you trust it enough?

This would really give a new meaning to the “Blue Screen of Death“