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How the Amiga could have lived to age 30 and beyond

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing July 25, 2015February 18, 20171980s, 1990s, amiga, amiga os, apple, atari, Bill Gates, commodore, commodore 128, commodore 64, IBM, intel, irving gould, jack tramiel, macintosh, Mehdi Ali, Microsoft Basic, MOS, motorola, nbc, os x

It was 30 years ago this week that Commodore released its landmark, long-time-coming Amiga 1000 computer–the first 1990s computer in a field full of 1970s retreads.

Yes, it was a 1990s computer in 1985. It had color and sound built in, not as expensive, clunky, hard-to-configure add-ons. It could address up to 8 megabytes of memory, though it ran admirably on a mere 512 kilobytes. Most importantly, it had fully pre-emptive multitasking, something that previously only existed in commercial workstations that cost five figures.

It was so revolutionary that even NBC is acknowledging the anniversary.

Being a decade or so ahead of its time was only the beginning of its problems, unfortunately.

Looking for a career change? Consider web app pentesting

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, security July 24, 2015July 11, 20181980s, 1990s, apple, atari, commodore, Proxy server, radio shack

IT jobs aren’t as easy to come by as they were 20 years ago, but web app pentesting is one subset of the field that I don’t see slowing down any time soon. Unfortunately it’s a poorly understood one.

But if you spent any significant time in the 1980s or early 1990s abusing commercial software, especially Commodore and Apple and Atari and Radio Shack software, I’m looking at you. Even if you don’t know it, you’re uniquely qualified to be a web app pentester.

Stunt Hacking: Why Charlie Miller hacked a Jeep driving on I-64

Dave Farquhar security July 23, 2015July 22, 2015Charlie Miller, Chrysler, greenberg, Jeep, KIM, podcast

St. Louis-based security researcher Charlie Miller and his collaborator Chris Valasek got themselves in the news this week by hacking a Jeep driven by Wired journalist Andy Greenberg on I-64.

The reaction was mixed, but one common theme was, why I-64, where lives could have been at risk, rather than an abandoned parking lot?

I don’t know Miller or Valasek, so it goes without saying I don’t speak for either one of them, but I think I have a pretty good idea why they did it that way.

Need a good, cheap dual gigabit NIC? I have just the thing.

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 22, 2015July 13, 2016Broadcom, hp, intel, PCI-X, pcie

If you need gigabit ports for your home server or router project and you’re short on available expansion slots, I have just the thing. Home sysadmins have known for a while that you can get cheap PCI-X Intel NICs and run them in PCI mode, but you may not know that you can find the very same thing by searching Ebay for HP 7170 and it’s usually cheaper. It’s not rare to find them for $7, shipped.

How to mitigate MS15-078 or future Microsoft font driver vulnerabilities

Dave Farquhar security July 21, 2015December 6, 2015chrome, firefox, journalism, Proxy server, SUBSYSTEM, vector, vulnerability, Whitelist

Microsoft rushed out an out-of-band patch, MS15-078, to deal with active exploits in their font driver yesterday. Since pushing out patches takes time, my boss asked me what we could do to mitigate the issue in the meantime.

The biggest threat, by far, is exploit-bearing fonts being downloaded from web sites. Ideally you only install trusted fonts from trusted sources locally on your workstations, right? If not, I suggest you start that practice as well.

You have a couple of options when it comes to blocking fonts in browsers.

Health insurance between jobs

Dave Farquhar Health July 20, 2015February 15, 2018COBRA, CVS, insurance company

I recently changed jobs, and although I’ve dealt with gaps in medical coverage before, I didn’t anticipate everything this time. Let’s talk about what to do for health insurance between jobs. And let’s talk coverage too–they aren’t always the same thing.

First things first: gaps are likely, and the laws are written under the assumption that small gaps will happen. The system still isn’t what I would call fair, not that it ever has been, but generally it’s possible to navigate the system and get the coverage you need. I’m not here to complain about the system; I’m here to tell you what I did, or could have done, to navigate it.

Yes, an ethical journalist protects his/her sources

Dave Farquhar Writing July 17, 2015July 15, 2015journalism, Missouri, university of missouri

An anonymous reader asked why journalists protect their sources.

It’s a fair question but an easy one to answer. Part of a journalist’s role in society is accountability. When something is wrong, the journalist is supposed to raise awareness.

Why this latest attempt to resurrect the Commodore brand will probably flop

Dave Farquhar Android, Retro Computing July 16, 2015August 3, 20171980s, 1990s, amiga, android, apple, commodore, dell, lenovo, motorola, Packard Bell

The Commodore brand is back again, this time on an Android smartphone. For a premium price, you get an Android 5.0 phone with the Commodore logo on it, preloaded with VICE and an Amiga emulator, which, between the two of them, emulate just about everything Commodore ever made, except, perhaps, the products that can be emulated with the Android calculator app.

But I don’t expect this attempt to be any more successful than earlier efforts to resurrect the brand.

Expect a rough road ahead for Flash

Dave Farquhar security July 15, 2015July 14, 2015android, apple, breach, chrome, IOS, ipad, iphone, oracle, os x, Patch Tuesday, yahoo

Adobe has patched Flash twice in two weeks now. The reason for this was due to Hacking Team, an Italian company that sells hacking tools to government agencies, getting hacked. Hacking Team, it turns out, knew of at least three unpatched vulnerabilities (also known as “zero-days” or “0days”) in Flash, and exploits for these vulnerabilities were among the things that got breached.

That’s why Adobe is having a bad month.

What to look for in a performance SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 14, 2015July 12, 2015PCI Express, pcie

The Register has a nice writeup on performance SSDs. The only problem is that performance is really a matter of diminishing returns, and The Reg didn’t report on random I/O.