David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
“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.
Much has been made of Hillary Clinton’s use of her own mail server, running out of her home. It didn’t change my opinion of her, and I don’t think it changed anyone else’s either–it just reinforces what everyone has thought of her since the early 1990s. Then, Ars Technica came forward with the bizarre case of Scott Gration, an ambassador who ran his own shadow IT shop out of a bathroom stall in Nairobi.
The money quote from Ars: “In other words, Gration was the end user from hell for an understaffed IT team.” And it concluded with, “[A]s with Clinton, Gration was the boss—and the boss got what the boss wanted.”
Indeed. And it doesn’t just happen in the government.
After having an incredibly bad week last month, Lenovo started saying the right things, and perhaps doing some of the right things too. But some laptops with the Superfish malware preinstalled on them are still in the supply chain, which means some people are unwittingly buying them.
This isn’t terribly surprising. But there are a couple of things you can do about it, and they’re things worth doing anyway.
Now that I’ve had a couple of LED bulbs burn out, I can actually give an LED bulb longevity report.
I’ve been buying LED bulbs since 2010, and now I’ve lost three of them. It’s a little disappointing, but two of the bulbs were Philips 420240 bulbs, which are no longer on the market. The first 420240 failed completely within a couple of weeks of getting it, and I exchanged it for a Cree. The second 420240 lasted a shade over two years. Clearly the 420240 just wasn’t a very good bulb, and it accounted for my first LED bulb mortality.
My other failed bulb is one of the early 40W equivalents I bought at either Lowe’s or Home Depot in 2010 or early 2011. So I got about four years out of that one, which is better than Philips at least.
I was reading reviews of televisions and found several televisions had negative reviews because they only had a single HDMI port. The guy who bought it had wanted to connect two game systems to it. But you usually can connect more than one game system to a TV with one HDMI port.
I’m not sure who buys a television without first making sure it has all of the inputs you’ll need in order to connect stuff to it. But this problem has a solution other than buying a more expensive TV with two HDMI ports.