Free Press trivializes the very real plight of people who have to fear disappearing in the dead of night for criticizing a regime – all to make a political point in a policy fight.

However, there is a legitimate point to be explored in their over-the-top rhetoric. While Free Press would have you believe that your cable company bears some resemblance to totalitarian governments, the better comparison would be government-to-government.

Last Friday, a new version of Adobe Flash came out which patched the most recent critical flaws in Flash Player. Yet because the update process isn’t automatic, most of you have not updated your Flash Player in your web browser. The fact that Adobe makes the manual update process a pain to use and forces you to install yet another download manager and tries to get you to install yet another browser toolbar doesn’t help. The end result is that most of your computers are vulnerable to websites that display malicious flash content.

Mozilla has patched a very critical flaw in Firefox that allows attackers to pose as a legitimate Firefox update server and implant harmful code into a victim’s computer. Firefox 3.0.13 and 3.5.2 are no longer vulnerable to this attack and the update should automatically run. It would be prudent to check it manually under the Firefox “Help” menu and open the “About” window.

If the bad news about all the new critical iPhone and Mac OS X vulnerabilities announced at BlackHat 2009 weren’t bad enough, there now appears to be a new vulnerability in Apple’s hardware. This type of a hack however isn’t something where you can go into an Apple store and have an Apple “genius” exorcise because once the Apple keyboard is infected and locked; there is no practical way of undoing the damage.

Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike gave one of the more interesting and terrifying presentations at BlackHat 2009 in Las Vegas yesterday. Marlinspike demonstrated how the X.509 digital certificates used by Secure Socket Layer to secure online communications such as eCommerce and online banking were was completely broken. This allowed Marlinspike to pose as the Mozilla update server which allows him to distribute malware in the guise of of a Mozilla Firefox update.

Here at DigitalSociety.org, we believe that cyber security should be everyone’s priority. So what better way to prove our sincerity by eating our own dog food and implementing Secure Socket Layer (SSL) security on our own website. Digitalsociety.org does not use unencrypted communication protocols such as standard Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and we use encrypted HTTPS and Secure Shell FTP (SFTP) for all sensitive communications.