contributed by Space Rogue
We are still hung over and recovering from Defcon this past weekend. Our plane landed just hours ago and we are currently reading the 1200+ emails that have piled up over the last six days. We should hoepfully have regular news for your tomorrow.

Defcon Notes
The estimated attendance for Defcon this year was 3000 people. 1200 more people than last year.

The BO2K presentation was standing room only. A few early copies of BO2K were thrown out to the crowd on CD. Someone took one of those copies and duplicated it. Unfortunately the dups are infected with CIH. If you did not receive an original copy be sure to double check it.

Carolyn Meinel was escorted out of the Alexis Park Hotel. The official reason given for the ejection was due to two seperate violations of press privilages.

The Defcon.org Web Page was cracked just as the con was starting on Friday. We should hopefully have an archived copy soon.

We hope to return to full coverage of all the news tomorrow. Hopefully we will be sober by then.

contributed by Reid Fleming
With the BO2K launch just days away the articles on BO2K are flourishing. HNN was able to get a sneak preview of the product and we think it will live up to all expectations and then some. This is a highly polished professional looking product. It will give the remote control vendors some competition.

The antivirus industry is gearing up for a busy weekend as they try to figure out a way to detect BO2K. But since cDc is releasing source code under the GNU public license there will be hundreds of spinoffs as people create their own versions of BO2k. Each version will need to be detected seperately by the antivirus software. When will Microsoft and the industry learn that antivirus detection is not the solution?

Time
MSNBC
CNN

contributed by Elvis Duke
This article questions whether or not vendors writing shoddy code or users not being diligent enough is to blame for systems being vulnerable. But there is no answer only users lamenting how complex the solution is. Of course vendors should be made accountable and are to blame. Why should users have to keep up on patches. As software moves into the home there is less security expertise and diligence, hence vendors need to improve if they want to sell into the home market.

AP

contributed by Weld Pond
Jeffrey Hunker spoke at the Black Hat security conference and warned participants that there a a huge vulnerability in US information infrastructure. The visible web site attacks are the least of the governments worry. External threats to the infrastructure done in secret are the big problem. Hunker plans on starting an ROTC-like program to train college students in information security.

ZDNet

contributed by Weld Pond
Interesting report on an online banking scam. An attacker set up a mirror site to simulate the banks login screen. In doing so they were able to get the customer's username and password.

This is just one of many attacks on online banking. Even though the security of such systems has not been worked out the industry proceeds to move forward signing up customers and putting more of them at risk.

Christian Science Monitor

contributed by Simple Nomad
Pandora can test the strength of Netware 4.x and 5.x passwords. It is a must have auditing tool for Netware security people.

Bugtraq - Press Release

Nomad Mobile Research Center

contributed by deepquest
SF Bay Area Cypherpunks July 1999 In Two Places At One Time!

This July, the Bay Area Cypherpunks begin to challenge the laws of physics by meeting in two places at one time. Our first experiment will be on the campus of Stanford University, extracting quantum slack from the Stanford Linear Accelerator (er, actually Tresidder Union coffee shop) and rematerializing in Las Vegas at Defcon at the Alexis Park hotel. Both events will be open public meetings on US soil.

Events:
Sat 10 July 1:00 - 5:00 PM
Stanford University Campus - Tresidder Union courtyard

Spot the Cypherpunk Contest:
This will be somewhat easier at Stanford than at Defcon :-)

Ian Goldberg - Zer0knowledge Network (zks.net)
Using the Internet Pseudonymously: One Year Later
ZKS will be releasing Freedom 1.0 Beta 2

Cypherpunks Meetings

contributed by Silicosis
For those with Palm VII's HNN is pleased to announce the hackernews PQA. With it, you'll be able to keep up with all the headlines through the PalmVII's built-in wireless networking support. Here's some screenshots of the splash screen and headlines.

The hackernews PQA can be downloaded here.