General: April 2007 Archives

An 8 year old uses a bump key to open a cylinder lock.

McAfee called me earlier this week about their Data Loss Prevention Host software. In addition to host-based software, they have an appliance check for leakage at the network boundary. Enterprises that have implemented full disk encryption now realize that their data is at risk from more than just a stolen laptop. Social Security Numbers, Credit Card info and company proprietary information are routinely passed over the Internet in plain text at many companies.

I haven't looked into this McAfee product, but I see their interest as a validation that this marketspace will continue to develop.

I'm starting to question how much we really need Quicktime. We deployed 7.1.5 last week. As luck would have it, word of a new Quicktime vulnerability came out this week.

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/488

The attack successfully used in last week's CanSecWest competition exploits a Java-based flaw in QuickTime and affects all browsers on systems with the multimedia software installed, possibly including Windows

I thought this article was interesting, Symantec Steps into Software as a Service.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said that the launch of its Online Backup Service, which provides outsourced data storage and disaster recovery services to SMB customers, is merely the first piece in a wider set of offerings it will introduce dubbed Symantec Protection Network, which will eventually include a full range of hosted security tools.

I found it kind of interesting that Alex put a disclaimer on the blog entry asking "Are the Open Sourcerers Selling You a Bill of Goods?" I don't recall Sunbelt putting a disclaimer on a blog entry before. Its clear that they fear the mindless Linux horde the way a Danish Cartoon writer fears going out in public.

Is the article that controversial? I don't think so. It just asks the mindless Linux horde to take it easy. That they should allow for the fact that an intelligent person can use Windows.

It also made me think about 'reflections on trusting trust.' Who has better guarantees that the software, the compiler, etc hasn't been trojaned.

Then I got down to the end of the article and saw it was by Deb Shinder. I guess I should consider the source.

I think I've mentioned a couple of times that I reloaded my laptop. When I went to reinstall Sharpreader, I found the sharpreader domain abandoned. Apparently they've boarded up the windows and left town.

I decided to give Google Reader another chance after my older brother mentioned it to me. I logged in, and it appears they've done some upgrading. It looks good. I deleted my old feeds, and imported my OPML file. After tweaking a few settings I'm finding it quite usable.

My favorite feature is the ability to share items with people. My shared page is here.

What I'm really missing right now is the notification box that my previous rss readers had. Obviously they can't give me a new article notification if I'm not at the site, but I was thinking they should give that notification through the Google Talk software (like I get gmail notifications). Perhaps they already do that. I haven't reinstalled Google Talk since my upgrading.

The other item I'm missing is search. That seems amazingly ironic. Yes this is the one time I"m pretty sure I'm using the term ironic correctly. I want the ability to search my feeds. I wand to easyly be able to search specific folders and even one specific feed. Why can't I search my Google Reader feeds?

Obviously I'm new to Google Reader, so if anyone has an answer, please feel free to jump in the comment section.

I got a call this morning while driving into work that the domain we receive the most mail on is not getting email. Naturally since I recently requested some changes in the way we receive mail that was blamed first.

It turns out they were right, in a way. I had requested that we update DNS so we no longer have a wildcard MX record. With a wild card mx record, you could address mail to anyserver.example.com (obviously not our real domain) and it would be delivered to our MTA. Since this causes us to process a lot of unnecessary email I thought we should remove that.

We use split DNS and run our external DNS through our ISP. When AT&T/SBC performed the update instead of removing the wildcard mx record, they removed example.com.

So we're getting no email addressed @example.com. The negative response cache TTL is 2 hours. So even after we get SBC to fix the record, we may not get email for a while.

At least this is a reminder that people should be using our new domain name instead of the old example.com.

If we had been monitoring our external MX records, we would have seen them go away and possibly gotten it fixed before most peoples cached response expired.