Vuze speeds up torrent downloads with swarm merging

Virtually every torrent client on the Internet operates in the same fashion, but Azureus Software is trying something a little different with the popular Vuze app. In the newest v5.6 build of Vuze, users have the option to merge two swarms sharing the same file in order to boost the overall speed of a download. Is the era of the unified swarm at hand?

Torrent clients come in all shapes and sizes — some offer loads of features and others are simply a UI for monitoring downloads. Vuze leans toward the former with support for RSS subscriptions, Web control, torrent search, video playback, and device conversion/sync. It tries to do it all, which not everyone is a fan of, but the new swarm merging feature might have you taking a second look at Vuze.

Google discovers new security holes in SSL — is the entire system fundamentally flawed?

The reason it’s critical that companies not mint certificates for websites they don’t operate themselves is because doing so breaks the function of SSL itself. Here’s how the system is supposed to operate:Google has discovered that an intermediate certificate authority had issued unauthorized certificates for multiple Google domains. The problem arose because the intermediate authority, MCS Holdings, had issued certificates for the Google domains, despite not holding those domains itself.

Lenovo PCs ship with adware that destroys system security, breaks HTTPS

Lenovo is selling PCs equipped with a pre-installed adware package that destroys the security of HTTPS and creates a perfect man-in-the-middle (MTM) scenario against the host PC. The software in question is called Superfish Visual Discovery, and its basic function — it injects advertising into browser sessions — is bad enough. Superfish’s five-alarm functionality is that it installs its own signed root certificates to a user’s operating system. What this means, in essence, is that Superfish substitutes its own signed certificate for the certificate that’s supposed to be provided by the actual website.