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People are already calling Conficker the worst worm in years, even though bloggers in Europe (where it’s already April 1) are saying it’s not doing anything. It looks like ESet, makers of the fine NOD32 anti-virus software, have a page on how to remove Conficker, including what seems to be a free tool for its [...]
I used to get a couple hosts bounced a week… They’d try to brute-force username/password combos over ssh and DenyHosts would ban their IP after 5 failed logins. For a couple days last week, I probably had about 50 in a 24-hour period, and then they went away as quickly as they started. Today… Well, [...]
I just finished a show on “NatGeo” about the private security firms working in Iraq. It was a really interesting watch. They’re not there to engage in combat, but they’re there for “security,” such as escorting construction materials for a new police station (something insurgents are eager to stop), and transporting VIPs around. IEDs are [...]
In: Computers|Ideas|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
29 Feb 2008For those of you who don’t monitor police scanners regularly, I’d like to introduce what can be considered a fairly scary fact: their computer systems go down all the time. Where it usually comes up is when they try to run a license plate or a person, or to query NCIC or similar. The officer [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Hero of the Day|Ideas|Interesting|Linux Tips|Living|Photography|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
25 Feb 2008I just discovered PhotoRec, a tool for recovering digital camera images. For the non-geeks, a quick basic background…. When you save a file, it writes it to various blocks on the disk. Then it makes an entry in the File Allocation Table, pointing to where on the disk the file is. When you delete a [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Funny|Insanity|Linux Tips|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
13 Jan 2008I won’t lie–I love OpenBSD’s spamd. In a nutshell, it’s a ‘fake’ mailserver. You set your firewall up to connect obvious spammers to talk to this instead of your real mailserver. It talks to them extremely slowly (1B/sec), which keeps them tied up for quite some time. (As an added bonus, it throws them an [...]
In: Business|Humanitarianism|Interesting|Living|Rants & Raves|Security
7 Jan 2008For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had [...]
In: 2008|Humanitarianism|Insanity|Interesting|Politics|Rants & Raves|Security
4 Jan 2008While I don’t believe Rudy is going to make it far in the campaign, and while I really don’t like the attack ad element of politics, I’m frankly pretty appalled with Rudy Giuliani. I think it’s immoral to try to use 9/11 to your advantage. But Rudy’s use seems particularly insidious. He keeps running ads [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Living|Materialism|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
1 Jan 2008Why isn’t there a really good “network appliance” as a network gateway? You can get a low-end firewall/router, or you can build your own machine. Setting up OpenBSD is no walk in the park, though. I want to build an “appliance” based on OpenBSD, and give it a nice spiffy web GUI. You buy the [...]
In: Computers|Ideas|Linux Tips|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves|Security
28 Dec 2007We’ve been having a lot of intermittent network problems at home. Periodically, our Internet cuts out. At first I assumed it was our ISP–it’s no longer Adelphia (run by pharmacists), though–but subsequent research indicated that it wasn’t our ISP’s fault: our router was going down. My dad set it all up, so I wasn’t too [...]