David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
A former supervisor called me the other day. He’s having quality control issues at his new gig, and quality control was one of the things I did when I was working for him. He wanted my insight. And he was very direct with one question he asked me.
“You would always set work aside and then come back to it,” he said. “Why?”
He knew my tactic worked, but wanted to know why it worked. Read more
A couple of my college buddies posted a link to an Ars Technica article about Linksys routers getting hacked. Sorry I didn’t find it myself, I’m prepping for a job interview. Excuses, excuses, I know.
Researchers have been doing this kind of stuff for at least a year, but now we’re seeing the bad guys do it. It was just a matter of time, because bad guys are going to attack whatever is easiest to attack, and consumer routers are direct-connected to the Internet and their security isn’t really all that much better today than it was when Linksys released its first router in 2000.
What’s worse is that two of the affected models, the Linksys E1000 and E1200, are no longer supported by Linksys. The answer is DD-WRT. Visit the linked page, type in the name of your router, check the version (it’s on a sticker), then load DD-WRT like you would load Linksys firmware. If you’re not comfortable doing it, a computer-savvy friend or acquaintance can do it in half an hour for you. I’m running DD-WRT on two routers myself, and put it on my mother-in-law’s router, and find there’s no comparison between it and anything any of the manufacturers are shipping from the factory.
Is its security perfect? Probably not, but it doesn’t even have the feature this exploit is using. And turning off undesirable features is the beginning of good security.
I read Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive last week. I always figured it was an autobiography or memoir, not a business book. But it’s a business book. A very good one.
I avoided it because I didn’t like Andy Grove. I’ve never been a fan of Intel’s business practices during the 1990s and 2000s, including using payola to keep competitors’ chips out of large computer systems, but after reading this book, I’m more disappointed than anything. Whichever company had Andy Grove wins, period. No need to cheat. Read more
I’m fixing up a house that has an Americana (a GE budget brand) gas range in it. One of the last things I did before getting the St. Louis County inspection was to check to see if it had an anti-tip bracket installed. It did, so I didn’t worry about it. The house failed inspection based on two things, basically–a dead battery in the smoke detector downstairs (funny, I installed that about two months ago), and the anti-tip bracket.
The bracket that came with this range is a little different. Rather than grab the leg like most anti-tip brackets, this one grabs a hook on the back of the stove. The problem with mine was that the bracket couldn’t reach the hook on the back of the stove. The gas line comes through the floor about an inch from the wall, so the stove can’t sit close enough to the wall for the bracket to catch. Further investigation revealed that even if the bracket could have reached, it wouldn’t have done much since it was only screwed into drywall. The stove’s weight would have pulled it straight out.
But the remedy was simple and only involved a two-foot scrap of 2×4.
I installed Windows 8.1 last week to see how bad it really is.
And?
Well, it’s more stable than Windows Me, but Windows Me was a lot nicer to use. It’s awful. Because I listen to podcasts, I know that there’s magic in hovering your mouse over the upper right hand screen. And somehow I was able to get to a desktop pretty quickly. The first thing I did was launch Internet Explorer and install Classic Shell, which, as promised, makes it a dead ringer for Windows 7 or XP or even 2000 if you want. Much better.
What else? Read more
I need a Windows box, so I figured I’d experiment with Windows 8.1. I know it’s terrible, but I want to see just how much less terrible I can make it.
The first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to slipstream updates into it. I recommend slipstreaming because you get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD. It’s very similar to slipstreaming Windows 7, but not quite identical.
Let’s pick up again with another error in the Greenberg Marx Trains Pocket Price Guide: The UP 3824 6-inch caboose. The guide lists the 3824 as a brown and yellow caboose, available on both a black or brown frame, valued at $20 in good condition and $30 in excellent.
The description is correct, but the price is only half right.
Read more
There was one other interesting quote in the Post-Dispatch’s Top 10 collectibles for value this week:
10. Boxes (yes, simple boxes!)
For a starter, wooden boxes of all types with and without locking mechanisms, souvenir boxes, tea boxes, cigar boxes, jewelry, knife boxes and the list goes on for value. If you can put something in it, somebody wants to give you money for it.
Don’t get too excited, but a box doesn’t have to be made of wood to be valuable. Even a cardboard box can have some value, depending on what came in it. But don’t get too excited. Read more
There’s an exploit in Flash, on all platforms, being actively exploited in the wild. Adobe rushed out an update. It allows remote code execution, so this one is as bad as it gets.
Installing EMET is a potential mitigation against Flash exploits, so if you’re running Windows, protecting Flash with EMET is an extremely good idea. Uninstalling Flash is an even better idea, but I don’t think HTML5 is quite ready to replace this scourge of computing security just yet.
I noticed that Secunia PSI automatically updated Flash on all of my machines, which was nice.
See, security doesn’t have to be painful.
Disclaimer: I wrote this article back in 2014. I leave it here as a snapshot of the state of how things were in 2014. The situation at the time you are reading this is likely different.
Articles like Top 10 collectibles for value, from the Post-Dispatch this week, frequently make me nervous, mostly because of statements like this one:
[D]id you know that computer parts can bring home cash, too?
Statements like that tend to get people’s hopes up way too high. I find the timing interesting though, seeing as a TRS-80 Model 1 sold at a St. Louis estate sale this past weekend. The estate seller’s reaction? “Normally you can’t give that stuff away.”