obama

PayPal XSS vulnerability affects EV SSL

A new attack on PayPal could have allowed users who thought they were on a trusted page to access a fraudulent page and possibly expose personal information. On Friday, Finnish researcher Harry Sintonen reported the vulnerability on an IRC chat room.

In an interview with Netcraft, Sintonen said the issue was critical. "You could easily steal credentials." He added that in this case you can't trust the URL http://www.paypal.com.

A few weeks ago PayPal announced it would block users whose browsers did not support EV SSL. Sintonen, who is credited with finding an XSS attack on Barack Obama's Web site … Read more

You wanna talk about train wrecks? Well then, let's get real

"I can't remember a debate in which the only memorable moment was the audience's heckling of a moderator."

That's the opening line of Frank Rich's eminently entertaining essay in Sunday's New York Times on the recent Clinton-Obama debate.

Rich obviously missed the ruckus over Sarah Lacy's ill-fated interview of Mark Zuckerberg last month at the South by Southwest conference. That episode was well-chronicled elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Lacy wasn't at her best that evening and a crowd of nerds jumped ugly when their patience ran out. What followed was … Read more

Chinese search engine Baidu hails Barack Obama's Web cred

Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He's holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse--get it? It's the Internet.

This is part of a "person of the month" feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. … Read more

How about sending Clinton, Obama, and McCain to Foo Camp?

Hillary Clinton is on to something but she's not thinking big enough.

On Wednesday, the Democratic presidential nominee wannabe issued another one of those insufferably boring candidate white papers on how she would improve the country as its 43rd president. The main news? Clinton wants to spend $7 billion to promote what she terms an "insourcing" agenda, offering a package of tax incentives and investments to companies that create jobs in America.

OK, nothing wrong with a little pork barrel action this time of the campaign season. And some of the ideas are not half-bad: So, for … Read more

A new (Obama) brand of politics: yes, we can...remix America!

I just read Ellen McGirt's poignant feature story on "The Brand Called Obama" in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. "The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news," she writes, "but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well." Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes … Read more

Survey: Obama, McCain tied among tech workers

If the outcome of this year's presidential race depended solely on the whims of computer industry workers, it appears that there'd be a draw.

Or at least that's what a survey of 600 employees in that space recently found. The questionnaire was conducted just before the early March primaries by the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, a trade association that represents mostly smaller technology companies, and Rasmussen Reports, a public-opinion research organization.

In response to a question about who'd get their votes if the election were "today," both Democrat Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain … Read more

Give me the candidates' words--raw and now

Any one of sound mind must be disappointed that Hillary Clinton hasn't yet put away Barack Obama. Or that Barack Obama hasn't yet put away Hillary Clinton.

Because it means both sides are going to drive us nuts up until the Democratic convention this summer.

I suppose that's a small price to pay to live in a republic. So since the spin-meisters from the competing Democratic camps are so hell bent on convincing the rest of us that God is on their side, here's a golden opportunity to use the Internet to advance the cause of … Read more

Clinton snubs journalists at University of Washington

The Clinton campaign is counting on Texas to stay alive, but as David Domke describes in his account at the Crosscut Seattle, they haven't exactly reached out to student journalists to keep the fire burning (at least not his students).

David Domke teaches journalism at the University of Washington. In order to cover the presidential race, 16 of his students created SeattlePoliticore. In David's words: We've gone new media, adopting a mode of blogging that combines traditional reporting, insights from other news outlets, and first-person commentary. It's somewhere between the voice of The Seattle Times' David Postman and the rancor of the blogosphere: part journalism, part pundit, part political newbies. Altogether, we have presented the campaign through youthful eyes.… Read more

Time for MoveOn.org to move on

Speaking as someone whose political views are decidedly left, I never thought I'd say this, but would Moveon.Org just put a plug in it already?

As an Internet phenomenon, MoveOn certainly demonstrated how to mobilize public opinion. Indeed, the organization, founded in 1998 by a married couple of nouveau-riche techies, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, acquitted itself well during the Monica Lewinsky uproar.

Unlike a sadly servile mainstream media, which insisted upon playing to the lowest common denominator, a spunky MoveOn appeared seemingly out of nowhere to rally online opposition to the sham taking place in Washington.

But … Read more