Context is a funny thing. In most segments of society, Apple is seen as an exemplary company, with an unrivaled record of innovation, much-admired ad campaigns and a stock price that is the envy of every company not named Google. But in the security community, Apple is regarded with some combination of disbelief, confusion and the disdain that once was reserved for Microsoft. 

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced plans Tuesday to break ground on a new center that will be committed to cybersecurity research. The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence will be built near NIST’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus in hopes of strengthening the country’s cybersecurity products and services. 

A domain registered two days ago as groupon500.com, which claims to offer a $500 voucher toward Groupon or its primary competitor, LivingSocial, is actually registering users for ‘free’ trial offers that aren’t free at all. The best part, however, is that everything about this scam is perfectly legal according to Zscaler’s Julien Sobrier.

Thanks to the wonderful tendency of users not to update their applications, old vulnerabilities never die, they just get overtaken by newer and shinier ones. The attackers know this well, and every once in a while they serve up a nice reminder to the rest of us. The most recent one of these is a string of attacks against an Adobe Reader vulnerability from 2010.

Apple's implementation of a semi-new set of technologies collectively known as Gatekeeper in the upcoming Mountain Lion release of Mac OS X is set to give users better control of the security of the machines, specifically which apps are allowed to run. The Gatekeeper system will enable users to decide which apps they trust and then prevent pretty much anything else from running.

The relations among Microsoft, Apple and Google, which are testy in the best of circumstances, are being pressured even more of late as the controversy surrounding Google's actions with cookies and user tracking grows. In the latest installment, Microsoft has said that it has found that Google "is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies."

Researchers are warning about a flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) that could allow attackers to keep a malicious domain alive and accessible, despite efforts to remove it.

Mozilla is preparing to release a fix for a serious vulnerability in both Firefox and Thunderbird that could result in remote code execution. The update comes just a few days after the company released version 10.0.1 of Firefox, fixing a separate security bug. 

It's gotten to the point now where it's almost easier to talk about the mobile apps and services that don't ship your personal data off to some remote server for purposes unknown rather than discussing the ones that do. The latest discussion of privacy invading apps flowed from the discovery that Twitter and some other iPhone apps were uploading users' contact lists without their knowledge. Now, a researcher at Veracode has written a small app that allows users to figure out exactly which iOS apps are doing what with their personal data.

Google is in the process of developing a tool to help users generate strong passwords for the various and sundry Web sites for which they need to register and authenticate. The password-generator is meant to serve as an interim solution for users while Google and other companies continue to work on widespread deployment of the OpenID standard.