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Friday, March 29 2024

Bruce Schnier on Wholesale Surveillance and the Psychology of Terror

Security

While perusing Bruce Schneier's new weblog, Schneier on Security, (I'm a long time Crypto-Gram subscriber) I found that a couple of issues he raises this month really resonate with the upcoming election. First, an analysis of the psychology of terror alerts, and the follow-up ... the move towards "wholesale" surveillance.

posted by Loki on Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:17:21 -0500Read More...

PHP Function Index for Mac OS X

Software

Here's a nifty tool that was posted to the ranchero.com weblog. It provides an attractive and easy to navigate front-end to the PHP documentation. Very handy for writing code when you're off the net.

The PHP Function Index for Mac OS X"is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function. Its search offers realtime-filtering of the function list and its AppleScript interface lets you look up functions easily from within your favorite editor (like BBEdit or any other scriptable app)."

posted by Loki on Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:24:27 -0500

OpenBSD, Apache, Kerberos, and Windows 2000

BSD

Admittedly, one topic you won't see very often on the OpenBSD mailing lists is Windows 2000. However, for many of us who use OpenBSD in a corporate environment, Windows, and OpenBSD-Windows integration is an important issue. After the recent post of mod_auth_kerb to to the ports@ mailing list, I decided to take advantage of Kerberos to secure an OpenBSD hosted website, using Windows 2000 as the KDC so I wouldn't have to maintain local accounts. I've documented below how I accomplished it.

Fortunately, I came across this tutorial, which described exactly what I was trying to accomplish, although it wasn't OpenBSD specific. I had to make some changes to account for OpenBSD, and I also decided to take advantage of login_krb5 to eliminate local passwords for login accounts as well.

posted by Loki on Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:02:46 -0500Read More...

Novell Patent Policy

Software

Take a look at Novell's Patent Policy.

They must be feeling guilty for selling off the Santa Cruz Operation, eh?

posted by Loki on Wed, 13 Oct 2004 14:56:40 -0500

Thieving iPod Users !!

Microsoft

From Slashdot: Ballmer Says iPod Users are Thieves

Ballmer is high. Microsoft has proven on many occasions that they have absolutely no understanding of the consumer market. Their one consumer success story, Xbox, wouldn't exist without Halo & Bungie, which as we all know was originally a Mac software company. Even then, Xbox is just another console, with no real innovation.

MS just doesn't do innovative consumer products, and never will.

posted by Loki on Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:38:19 -0500

FreeBSD Snapshot Management

BSD

Snapshots are one of the best features of FreeBSD 5.x, something that has only been available previously as part of Network Appliance's proprietary ONTAP OS. However, snapshot management on FreeBSD is still somewhat lacking, as creating & mounting snapshots is an entirely manual process. Fortunately, someone has now written a front-end designed to make working with snapshots easier. I have installed this on my FreeBSD RELENG_5 test system, and I can say that it works very well, and provides most of the functionality you get from a NetApp Filer.

posted by Loki on Sun, 19 Sep 2004 11:25:43 -0500

A really bad idea for Public Health

News

Older news, but I came across this interesting blog entry. (The original article is here)

Am I alone in thinking that a policy that would likely keep illegal immigrants from seeking medical care is a bad idea? This is completely backwards. Public health officials in the county I live in come to your house and watch you take your tuberculosis medication to make sure you're being treated. (and TB is not even that contagious!) You'd think that we would want to make every effort to get everyone with an infectious disease into the system to prevent an outbreak.

Yet another seemingly innocent, yet totally stupid, policy decision.

posted by Loki on Sun, 12 Sep 2004 10:39:35 -0500

"DirecTV will kill you"

Hackers

I recall a question at a talk (by OldSkoolS) on satellite broadcasts at DefCon 2 years ago; the person asked if The Dish Network went after pirates like DirecTV did. (The talk covered free broadcasts on the same signal band as TDN) Although the speaker had repeatedly pointed out that he didn't know DirecTV, he answered the question by saying (paraphrased) "No. If you pirate DirecTV, they will kill you, but TDN is more interested in expanding market share at this point than going after pirates."

posted by Loki on Sun, 12 Sep 2004 09:38:18 -0500Read More...

Time to pull the plug on "Spyware"

Security

Another one for the security soapbox: spyware. The problem is, that some (if not much) adware/spyware has become malicious: impossible to remove without reinstalling the entire system, as this column describes. The time has come to support (already proposed) anti-spyware legislation, that will define limits on what spyware is allowed to do, and demand action from the anti-virus vendors to add, at a minimum, malicious spyware to the list of viruses scanned & cleaned by their software.

posted by Loki on Fri, 10 Sep 2004 20:58:02 -0500

Mullen breaks from the routine.

Security

IE sucks. So much so that SecurityFocus columnist and regular Microsoft apologist Tim Mullen even admits as much. To me, what's shocking isn't that someone is saying that it's time to abandon IE, but even Tim says so - although he only suggests that MS split IE into a regular and "Enterprise Edition".

I'll go one step further (as many other security professionals have) and endorse the Browse Happy campaign to switch to an alternate browser. I can say from personal experience that even large corporations and government agencies are seriously considering switching away from IE, or in one case, already have. (usually to Firefox)

posted by Loki on Fri, 10 Sep 2004 20:34:58 -0500