John Pescatore

There are a number of life sayings that are generally good advice, such as “Don’t defecate where you eat” or “Don’t fornicate where you work.” Basically, creating zones with separation between fundamentally different activities that don’t go well together.

So, it was good to see Ford Motor Company taking a shot at building some security zones into its on-car Sync networking for the 2011 model year. If you remember, when the commercial aircraft manufacturers first came out with passenger uses of the data networking on the planes, pretty much security through obscurity was what they were relying on for security.

Now, history says that the first generation of firewalling and other security features Ford has built in will have easily exploitable flaws, unless Ford has been atypical and brought in external security expertise to thoroughly evaluate the design and implementation. But, kudos to Ford for a good start.

Twitter blogged that they will begin examining Direct Message links to filter out known malicious URLs. This follows some similar steps bit.ly has taken to filter out shortened URLs.  The problems will likely occur where advertiser sites or links have been compromised and these advertising-dependent sites have to make the decision to put up the big red hand between users and the advertisers paying to get to those users. But, still: more of this type of built-in filtering is all good.

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