David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
My neighbor asked me for advice on setting up wi-fi in his new house. I realized it’s been a while since I’ve written about wi-fi, and it’s never been cheaper or easier to blanket your house and yard with a good signal.
Blanketing your house and yard while remaining secure, though, is still important.
A good way to eliminate dead zones in your house where wifi doesn’t work is to add one or two wireless access points to your setup.
Access points, thankfully, are no longer stupid expensive–they used to cost twice as much as a router in spite of being nothing more than a cut-down router–but almost every access point I’ve looked at has one or more compromises built in. That said, if you want something you can plug in and configure by filling out three or four things, you might be willing to live with those compromises.
Several times now, I’ve seen people like me, who used to collect baseball cards, went on hiatus, then came back, ask how to avoid counterfeit baseball cards, or at least detect them before it’s too late.
There’s a surprisingly simple answer that often works really well.
So I took the plunge and bought a package of the Ecosmart 40w equivalent soft white LED bulbs last week. As long as you’re aware that it’s not dimmable–let me repeat that, it’s not dimmable–it’s a really good bulb, especially at $10 for a package of two, assuming no local subsidies.
For $5 each, you get 450 lumens of soft white light while consuming only 6 watts of power.
“Whatever happened to the Legions of Doom server?” a coworker asked me as a technician swapped her computer.
I smiled a wicked smile. “Victory ping!” I then turned to my computer. “Ping pmprint02. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out,” I read as the words scrolled onto my screen.
“Victory ping?” my boss–yes, my lunch ninja boss–came over and asked.
“I know that box,” the technician said. There’s a good reason he didn’t say “server.”
Anthem recently refused to allow the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) to perform an audit of its networks. Coming on the heels of a large breach, there’s been a bit of an uproar about it.
There are a few things to keep in mind, the first being that this isn’t driven by law enforcement–it’s a customer requesting an audit.
I got a point-blank question in the comments earlier this week: Did Hillary Clinton’s home-made mail server put national secrets at risk of being hacked by our enemies?
Depending on the enemies, maybe marginally. But not enough that any security professional that I know of is worried about it. Here’s why.
So my buddy, we’ll call him Bob, runs Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for a big company. DLP is software that limits what you can do with sensitive information, in order to block it from going out of the company. The NSA wasn’t using DLP back when Ed Snowden was working for them; they probably are now.
Sometimes DLP blocks people from sending their own personal information. Doing so is their right–it’s their information–but from a security point of view, I’m really glad DLP kept them from e-mailing their entire life around in plaintext.
Firewall maker Palo Alto Networks is sponsoring the Cyber-Security Canon, a sort of Hall of Fame of timeless, classic information security books.
I have to say I haven’t read every book on the list, by a long shot, but the books I have read that made the cut were, indeed, very good indeed. So I think I would be willing to recommend anything on this list without looking any further. Indeed, I probably need to buy a few of these books that I haven’t read and get reading myself.
My boss doesn’t think I’m human. His proof: He asks anyone who knows me if he or she has ever seen me eat. No one has.
They’ve seen evidence of me eating. But actually taking a bite? No. Not even the time we went out for BBQ.