Archive 15. August 2011

Official Google Blog: Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility. Well, yes. Google is buying Motorola (ok, the part of them that is interesting for phones). Wow. Just spent 12.5 billion. Seen via Twitter by Don Dahlmann. I believe the next Nexus will then probably come from Motorola ...

Schneier on Security: New, Undeletable, Web Cookie. On to the next round: ETags are evil! Since they can be arbitrarily assigned by the server, you can simply insert a visitor's UUID there, and on the next visit, the browser sends the content for checking for file changes (provided it supports conditional-GET, but that's true for all browsers today). The user has no control over the use of ETags - and it actually doesn't make sense to give the user this control - so it's very difficult to defend against this method.