Daily Archives: May 14, 2015

DRM, Firefox

Mozilla’s plans for DRM in Firefox

1 Comment

Mozilla is clearly aware of the negative aspects of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Most people view DRM as needlessly intrusive at best, and an extremely flawed, greed-motivated roadblock at worst.

Knowing all this, Mozilla has been careful to tread lightly when looking at ways to implement DRM in Firefox. The web is moving towards the new HTML5 standard, and HTML5 includes DRM. Mozilla decided to move forward with DRM in Firefox, but will make it easy for users to disable DRM features, and to obtain versions of Firefox that have no DRM features at all.

This seems like a reasonable compromise. Those of us who hate DRM will be able to continue using Firefox without interference from DRM-related technologies.

Hardware, Internet crime, Malware, Security

Insecure routers home to vast botnets

Leave a comment

Huge networks of compromised network routers form the basis of several large botnets. These botnets – described as ‘self-sustaining’ by security researchers – are only possible because routers are shipped with common, known passwords, and because users fail to change those passwords, or leave remote administration features enabled. The compromised routers are mostly used in DDoS attacks.

Users should not depend on their ISP to secure their router. There are numerous guides for improving the security of routers, but this one at HowToGeek is particularly good.