...more recent posts
It's the 15th of the month, so that means a new crypto-gram from computer security big boss man Bruce Schneier. The first item is about honeypots, which are network connected computers set up to monitor crackers "in the wild." One such installation is called Honeynet, and is described this way:
The Honeynet Project was initiated to shine a light into this darkness. This team of researchers has built an entire computerWhat did they find out? Well...
network and completely wired it with sensors. Then it put the network up on the Internet, giving it a suitably enticing name and content, and recorded what happened.
A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network.
Morning meditation: Fibonacci grid.
I usually don't link to java applets, but this one's pretty cool: visual thesaurus. Pretty slow on my machine, but Mac java support is poor, so you may have better results.
Datasynapse just got $15 million in new financing. Nice going guys.
photo series of the basement office construction.