David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
What happened to Southwestern Bell? The once prominent name disappeared, but the company itself still exists.
Southwestern Bell didn’t go out of business, it’s just changed its name twice since 1995. In its current incarnation, it’s worth $229 billion.
The Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain is a popular model in information security. The model illustrates the typical cyber attack. Like the CIA triad, the Cyber Kill Chain is a fundamental concept that helps people understand what motivates security professionals. Understanding it and being able to explain it makes us more effective at our jobs.
Here’s an explanation of the Cyber Kill Chain, along with a couple of examples, one real, and one imagined.
Someone asked me to recommend a VPN service. Since I’m a security professional, I’m supposed to know how to evaluate things like that. But that question makes me very uncomfortable, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. I’d rather tell you what to look for so you can choose one. So here’s how to choose a VPN service.
Word got out this weekend that a fairly prominent member of my profession is a pedophile. Fortunately I don’t know the guy. But this is hardly the first time this happened. A fairly prominent tech journalist turned out to be a pedophile a couple years ago too. Unfortunately this happens, and unfortunately I came into some experience in this area early in life.
I know from experience, you don’t always know until afterward. If it were easy to know, these people wouldn’t get away with it for so long.
I remember when a 2×4 cost $3. And before you tell me I’m a grumpy old man, that was less sometime in 2019 or 2020. At the moment I’m writing this, a 2×4 costs $8. So what’s going on? Why is lumber so expensive? And will prices ever come back down to normal?
I was involved in an interesting discussion about how long it takes to get a security job. But here’s an even more important question. How long does it take to get a security job with no experience? That’s a tougher question. I’ll also argue there’s no such thing as no experience. But to keep the search engines happy, here’s how long it takes to get a security job with no experience (except there’s no such thing as no experience!).
One of the best estate sales I ever attended was a sale in a modest St. Louis suburb that happened to be the estate of a computer programmer. The sale had almost everything I look for. Books, music, vintage computer gear, and even recent-ish computer gear. There was only one problem. Her books smelled like an ashtray. So I had to learn how to remove cigarette smell from books and other items.
Just turning on automatic updates is one of those bumper sticker-style solutions to IT problems that won’t go away. It sounds really good, and of course it would be cheap. And since nobody’s doing it, it sounds like a new idea. As someone who’s been working in this space more than 20 years, I can tell you there’s a reason nobody does it. And it’s a good reason. It’s even a reason most proponents of bumper sticker-style solutions love to cite as a reason not to do something: unintended consequences.
While allowing systems to auto update seems like a cheap way to solve a difficult IT problem, the unintended consequences can be devastating. There are reasons to do automatic updates in limited circumstances, but it’s easy to cause bigger problems than you solve.
Retailers can and do use prices to manipulate you. But rumors of hidden codes in prices also abound. Home Depot is no exception to that. So what do Home Depot prices mean? Here’s how to find the hidden meaning in prices so you know when you might have found a bargain, and how long that bargain might last.
There are rumors that you can tell how long an item will be on sale from the numbers in the price, but those numbers don’t match what I found at my local store. Still, there are tricks for finding closeouts and other sale items.
FFMPEG is a very versatile command line video editing tool. You can use it to do lots of things, and the last time I used it, I used it to convert between formats. But you can also use it to remove audio. Here are two options to use FFMPEG to remove audio, depending on what exactly you want. But most importantly, both options are fast and you won’t lose any quality.