Slashdot crashes the NSA
OK, so yesterday I pointed you all to some really cool guides from the National Security Agency on securing Windows 2000 servers, services and networks. Unfortunately for you, Slashdot was pointing its readers to the guides at the same time.
And so the NSA server housing the guides suffered a slashdotted meltdown. Yes, the NSA, guardian of American security interests, couldn't deal with what was effectively (if not maliciously) a denial-of-service attack. Today, the NSA home page has this pop-up message:
Because of the amount of interest in the Windows 2000 Security Recommendation Guides, we are updating our Web site to better handle the demands placed on downloading the files. We expect to make the guides available once again during the week of June 18, 2001.
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So here's hoping they're adding some load-balanced servers to the mix. And no, the meltdown was not because they're running Windows. According to Netcraft, www.nsa.gov is running Apache on Solaris.
They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags
Meanwhile, the latest controversy swirling around the Demons of Redmond involves their plot to enslave the Web with those new Smart Tags.
Naturally, Microsoft is not the first to come up with the idea. The three of you who actually used NBCi may remember its QuickClick (actually, a lot more of you may remember it from that hyperventilating woman on the ads who always seemed ready to have a heart attack if you didn't drop everything and use it RIGHT NOW!).
There's also ActiveWords, which extends the concept to garden-variety Windows apps (one of their examples: You're in Excel and you need to see the news right this second, but instead of ponderously calling up your browser and connecting to, oh, CNN, you type "News" in a spreadsheet cell and voila: news).
For the contrarian view on Smart Tags, see Roberto Alsina's SmartTags, a trigger for hypocrisy, in which he wonders why people so upset about alleged copyright violations don't froth at the mouth at existing software that modifies Web pages by stripping out ads and pop-up windows. And, yes, read the follow-up comments, among which is one that notes that at least that software has to be installed by the user, unlike Microsoft's Smart Quotes which may come built into Internet Explorer 6.0.
What open source and California wines have in common
One of the more unusual discussions in our forums of late is the thread on a recent Dave Kearns column calling open source un-American.
Sure, there's the predictable "you bozo" stuff. But the discussion has drifted to, let's see, the Allied invasion of Russia after World War I, Marxism, Plato's "Republic" and the state of wine making in Modesto, California.
And that's after just four days.
Jakob Nielsen no tyro
Alert reader Nicholas Bodley picked up on a recent reference to Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen as a "tyro." Did I perhaps mean "guru," he asked, gently.
Indeed. A "tyro" is a young student. Say what you will about Nielsen (as one guy so eloquently does in his Flash game Driving over Jakob Nielsen), he is no tyro. I've got to learn to stop using words just because I like the sound of 'em!
06/14/01
How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure
If anybody knows how to secure a computer, it's the National Security Agency, right?
The NSA has published its Windows 2000 Security Recommendation Guides, which cover everything from network architecture to Active Directory and DNS. There are 17 of these guides in all, as well as an overall guide to network security, a guide to securing Office 97 and one on running iPlanet's Entprise Web Server.
And no cracks about how the best way to secure Win2K is to run Linux. Puh-leze!
Via Kuro5hin.
Where the Internet begins
Yesterday, we discussed that hoary chestnut, the site at the end of the Internet. Unlike the poseur we found, however, this site really is the end of the Internet - it has the map to prove it.
Of course, if the Internet does have an end, that implies it has a beginning, too, like, say, this page (via MetaFilter).
06/13/01
A useful computer bug
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a strain of bacteria that can act as biological AND and OR gates. The bacteria can be "cascaded," just like transistors, to solve some fairly complex equations. Jeffrey Harrow, in the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, waxes enthusiastic:
We're now beginning to compute at the molecular level! And although it will take time, the molecular computing end-game promises to change all the rules!
Harrow's article also discusses the basics of logic gates (and tells you just how much a yottabyte is).
The clothes make the geek
Ripley is a wearable computer designed specifically to run Linux and other open source software with a custom glasses-mounted display. It is always connected to the internet via a simple serial wireless modem.Clothe yourself in the latest Linuxware right here. Via Doc Searls Weblog.
The end of the Internet
It's at this site.
Yeah, yeah, it's an old joke. But still a good one. Via Memepool.
06/12/01
Why PDF bites
Usability tyro Jakob Nielsen says you should never, never, never used Adobe's PDF on your Web site:
Forcing users to browse PDF documents makes your website's usability about 300% worse relative to HTML pages. This is my rough estimate, based on watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that used either PDF or regular Web pages. Because I have not performed a detailed measurement study of PDF on its own, I can't calculate the precise usability degradation. However, whether the true number is 280% or 320%, one thing is certain: the number is big and reflects significant user suffering in terms of increased task time and more frequent failures.
Novel use of a wireless phone
A Taiwanese woman had to have doctors remove a Nokia 8850 wireless phone from one woman's body, Ananova reports
X-rays revealed the 20-year-old had a Nokia 8850 inside her rectum.
Hospital spokeswoman Elaine Weng said staff were wondering why they had used the mobile as a sex toy.
She said: "We guessed it's because some cellphones have a vibrating function."
Hidden info
Steganography is the art of hiding information inside digital images. Hide in Picture is a DOS/Windows app that lets you steganize information:
With HIP, you can hide your secret data inside an innocent family photograph or even your Windows background, which nobody will ever suspect of.
Via Danelope.
06/11/01
When Web sites tell too much
Sometimes, Web sites can be just a little bit too informative. Ask Fortune magazine, which recently greated visitors with an odd error page instead of actual documents.
As recounted on Doc Searls' Weblog, somebody who knows his application servers deciphered the whole thing: Fortune was not only using ATG Dynamo to serve up its pages, it was using javac, a slow compiler that comes with the Java Development Kit.
Finally, the detailed error message spells it out in just enough gory detail: Fortune's server ran out of disk space. My wife came running, I was laughing so hard.
Two important Web translators
TTS Demo is an AT&T text-to-voice translator. Type or paste in some text and here it spoken by a male or female voice. Hours, well, minutes of fun.
Via Anil Dash.The buzzword analyzer goes to a Web site of your choosing and tells you how buzzword-heavy the site is. No fair trying it on Fusion!
Via Boing Boing.
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Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
