It seems that the stars might finally align to remove one of the largest security holes in the history of… well history itself. Oracle is announcing that it is finally getting rid of the Java Browser Plug-in… sometime. According to a blog post on the Oracle page they are aware that most (if not all) browsers are already blocking plug-ins like the one in the Java Runtime Environment. These are for security, stability and performance, and really should have been done a long time ago. Over the last few years the Java browser plug-in (along with Flash) has been the vector of choice for many web-based attacks.

The world of copyright and patents is one of ignorance, greed and just plain stupidity. This is, sadly, on just about all sides of the game. From the people complaining all the way to the judges asked to decide these cases. We have already talked (at length) about the fantasy math the copyright holders use in determining damage and the massive impacts on privacy that they want to further their causes, but now we area in a situation where they have “won” something that no one every should have even considered.

AMD as a corporate entity is facing some rough times. As of their last earnings call we saw that they are still losing money and really do not have a product ready to combat this. The Rage Fury line of GPUs is doing ok in terms of sales, but as of this writing AMD has not been able to take a significant amount of market share from NVIDIA or even Intel. This is not to say that Radeon Graphics, or AMD’s APUs are bad products, it is just that they are not performing as well as the competition. In terms of the APU AMD still cannot compete with the compute power of Intel’s Core series even though the GPU side of the APU is a much better product.

In the war against (yes against) encryption there are many things to hide behind. One of the most frequently used is that criminals will use it to mask their dastardly deeds. The term criminal is, of course interchangeable with just about any other popular bad guy; pedophile, drug dealer, terrorist…. You know the list. Anytime there is even a hint that one of these media boogeymen used some sort of encryption, we hear that law enforcement and the government need to be able to break encryption.