David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Today I was helping one of my coworkers study for the Security+ exam, and one of his study questions reminded me of a story.
I wrote a few days ago about spending some time in an unhealthy IT shop. One of my cohorts supported one of the departments that decided to outsource its IT to a contractor, rather than use the internal IT department. It was a form of shadow IT on a large scale. The hand-off didn’t exactly go as it should.
I don’t pay a lot of attention to food, and certainly not to celebrity chefs. I don’t think the name Paula Deen would have meant anything to me a week ago. Most likely I’d have heard the name, but if you’d given me a multiple choice test, I probably would have gotten it wrong.
I know who she is now. Read more
Today, the Web protested SOPA and PIPA in various ways. And though momentum seemed to start shifting as long as a week ago, the protest went on, and some Washington politicians started changing sides, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, sometimes representative government can’t be bought.
I even saw a quote somewhere–I wish I’d written down where–that attributed one side-changer as saying it’s more important to get this legislation done right than to get it done fast. Read more
Rupert Murdoch doesn’t understand the difference between piracy and linking. So I’ll explain it in terms any middle-school-aged kid should be able to understand.
Online shoestore Zappos.com got hacked. Among other things, the hackers got names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwords. That’s not as bad as getting unencrypted passwords, but there are some things you need to do immediately if you shop at Zappos.com.
So the server version of Windows 8 is losing the GUI. And some people aren’t happy about it.
Let’s talk about upside.
Read more
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiled three local sign collectors this weekend. Bill Christman, Greg Rhomberg, and Jim May go around buying old storefront signage, particularly enamel-painted metal signs with neon lights.
“Most businesses are branded franchises, so you see the same signs over and over, repeating every few miles,” said Tod Swormstedt, who operates a sign museum in Cincinnati. “But the old signs — the hand-carved shoe or the gold-leaf lettering on a window — were iconic and what made each neighborhood unique. People miss that.”
UEFI is a technology that forces a computer to only load a digitally signed operating system. This has some security benefits, as it makes parts of the operating system unbootable if they become infected, since the viruses won’t be digitally signed by a reputable vendor.
Great idea, right? From a security perspective, absolutely. The more attack vectors for viruses we can eliminate, the better off we’ll be. But Microsoft’s policy on ARM systems shows how it can be abused.
Tom Gatermann told me he succeeded in disabling WPS by upgrading his Linksys router–I didn’t ask what model and probably shouldn’t post that anyway–with DD-WRT.
Explicitly disabling WPS in DD-WRT is unnecessary because DD-WRT doesn’t implement WPS at all–which is a good thing. There’s no setting to look for, it’s just automatic.