David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
This weekend, CBS ran a story about how the NSA foiled a sinister plot to brick millions of PCs and cause a financial meltdown. At least they didn’t say MELTDOWN.
My opinion is that this is a puff piece. A source managed to scare a journalist with a threat that sounded credible enough, and make something routine sound big and threatening.
As you may know, lots of D-Link routers have serious vulnerabilities. Some are patched, some aren’t, and many are being exploited by Javascript on web pages. (See, routers don’t make you invincible.)
The right thing to do is patch. But most exploits will assume that your router lives in the 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x space, whatever the factory default is. So you can get a degree of protection even against future vulnerabilities by moving your IP space somewhere else. Read more
My logging system died rather abruptly one week. It started with the Active Directory account some of our servers use locking. I got the account unlocked–someone else has those rights–and the system came back to life for a while, but then we had to repeat, and each time we repeated, “a while” grew shorter and shorter, bottoming out at about 2 minutes, 40 seconds.
The way you troubleshoot problems like this is by looking at logs. The problem is, you can’t collect very many logs in 2 minutes and 40 seconds.
‘Tis the season for cheapie tablets. They’re everywhere, and they cost $89, $79, even $59. About the only place I haven’t seen one is at a convenience store. But you don’t want them. They’re always underpowered and cheaply built, so they’ll be frustratingly slow to use and the hardware is likely to start failing after a year or so.
But this weekend I saw a budget tablet that hits all of the minimums, for $99, at an unlikely place: Aldi. Yes, the discount grocery store. It’s called the Medion Lifetab. Read more
The subject of the best way to clean train track sure does ruffle some feathers. Everyone, it seems, has their favorite elixir to swab down their tracks and some favorite material to wipe it back up with.
When it comes to Lionel, Marx, and American Flyer track, all of which is tin plated, it’s best to avoid anything abrasive if at all possible. Steel wool is absolutely out, sandpaper is bad news, and even a Scotch Brite-type pad is best to avoid. Scratches attract more dirt, which causes the track to get dirty faster, and eventually the abrasiveness rubs through the tin plating, taking your rust prevention with it.
If the track has already rusted a little, a Scotch Brite pad is about the best bet. But if not, the January 2014 Classic Toy Trains has the best answer I’ve seen yet: microfiber cloth. Read more
I’m catching up on reading. Next on my reading list is The Cuckoo’s Egg, (Amazon link), Clifford Stoll’s memoir of chasing down a computer hacker in the late 1980s. In it, he describes a very different world, ruled by mainframes and minicomputers, where Unix was something special, IBM still made PCs, but desktop PCs and Macintoshes only received occasional mention, and academia and the military owned the Internet, almost literally. And, oh, by the way, the Cold War was still raging.
The remarkable thing about this book is that it’s an approachable spy thriller, written in 1989, that explains computer security to an audience that had never seen or heard of the Internet. You don’t have to be a security professional to appreciate it, though it’s a classic in the computer security world–many people read it in the late 1980s and early 1990s and decided to get into the field. Read more
The revelation that the Federal Government still relies on floppy disks for some of its business is making it the butt of some jokes this week. And although that will serve as confirmation for some people that the government is completely backward, there are actually multiple good explanations for it.
From a security standpoint, using floppy disks isn’t a bad idea at all. Read more
One of the security podcasts I listen to–I’m not sure which one, but this sure sounds like Liquid Matrix–gave some advice the other week about meetings: Bring a raw potato.
With any luck, you won’t need it. But if the meeting gets out of hand, whip out the raw potato and–hopefully you washed it first–eat it. Yes, just like an apple. Supposedly the meeting ends very quickly when you do this.
I was at a meeting about backups last week where I really needed this. We’re at a stalemate. I need some disk space and the ability to connect to it via NFS or SCP. My protagonist wants to come in through MySQL. He’s not coming in through MySQL, and we’re not reverse-engineering a product that costs more than my house. My stance is that we’ll use the product precisely the way it’s designed, so that next week when we need the vendor’s support, they don’t blame whatever problem we’re having on the backups. The product has the facility to back up and restore its data through one of those two protocols, and setting it up takes less time than a single meeting.
Too bad it was a conference call, where I’m not sure it would have the same effect. But the next time I get a meeting request about this when what I need is a destination IP address, account credentials, and a protocol, I’m bringing a potato.
After a bad day at work last week, I went home and ordered The Phoenix Project (or here it is on Amazon), started reading it, and felt better. Like Office Space, but there’s more to learn from it.
Phoenix is more realistic. Every problem every shop I’ve ever worked in is in that shop, plus some I’ve (luckily) only heard about. But unlike Office Space, it has solutions beyond burning the building down. Read more
So I was talking with my boss’ boss’ boss one day last week about parenting. He was talking about sending his kids to Montessori school and what an advantage it was, but how much it cost, and, well, I agree. Two years of Montessori school had me reading at a third grade level before I started first grade, and my math skills were pretty advanced too, even though I already didn’t like math. Then he paused and said, somewhat whimsically, that it doesn’t make much of a difference.
There are only three things a parent can or can’t do that make a big difference in how their kids turn out, he said. Read more