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Friday, August 2, 2002 |
What happens when hackers hit
Glenn Fleishman writes about how one of his Macs was hacked today
Friday: Every Chink in the Armor. You'd think I'd be smart enough not to leave any holes open, but there you go. I accidentally left a caching proxy Web server running on a Macintosh on my network, and, sure enough, within a few weeks, someone probing found it and started attacking through. I count 5,000 unique addresses sending thousands upon thousands of queries that are all illegitimate: retrieving porno sites, logging into Yahoo accounts, etc. All static URLs, from what I can tell. The goal is to run Denial of Service on the remote sites as well as flood my bandwidth. The pattern was determined from looking at our router stats via the MRTG tool that takes five-minute snapshots. I couldn't figure out what kind of attack would flood inbound and outbound traffic to the same extent. Of course, a proxy would: the remote retrieval and then the remote transmission (back to the request location) would be the same size ... [GlennLog]
11:34:46 PM 
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Big media vs. the people
Who do you want to control your computer? Are you going to let the U.S. Congress allow Hollywood and the music industry to hack your computer if you try to use music or movies that you purchased in the way that you want? If not, then this is the time to start paying attention.
Dave Winer of Userland Software (the makers of the Radio software I use to run this site) and Scripting News, is one of the people talking about digital rights, and today he points to a short piece by Ed Cone: How to Fight the Corporate Hacking Bill.
This is as good a place as any to start looking at the issue.
6:47:20 PM
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A Wi-Fi road trip
Glenn at 80211b News notes this story:
And the Award for Wi-Fi Geek Cred for 2002 Goes to...: Four guys. Two cars. A cell phone. Some laptops. And Wi-Fi. Man, they beat me to it: I've been contemplating this idea for a year, and I should have just done it. En route to a conference, these four gentleman used a combination of off-the-shelf, easy-to-configure hardware and a variety of relatively straightforward software to create a two-car mobile Wi-Fi network with a cell uplink. [80211b News]
6:25:14 PM
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Apple releases Security Update 2002-08-02
Go to the Software Update panel in System Preferences to grab the latest system software security update, a 5.2MB download. From the Read Me:
Security Update 2002-08-02 includes the following updated components which provide increased security to prevent unauthorized access to applications, servers, and the operating system.
Apache v1.3.26
OpenSSH v3.4p1
OpenSSL v0.9.6e
SunRPC
mod_ssl v2.8.10
Installing the security update does require a restart...
2:52:54 PM
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Zoe email client update integrates RSS
A new release of the Web browser based email client Zoe 0.2.2 is billed as a maintenance release, but there is an interesting tidbit in this release that should interest the growing number of people enamored with RSS feeds:
* New RSS feed. You can now see a summary of new messages through a rss feed. Clicking a message summary opens the application with the message details.
8:25:03 AM
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New chips extend Wi-Fi range, save battery life
Boosting Wi-Fi's range. Intersil unleashes a new set of chips it says can extend the range of a Wi-Fi network and deter the notorious power drain these wireless networks create on laptops and other devices. [CNET News.com]
8:18:57 AM
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Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1 reviewed
Tom Negrino paints a pretty convincing picture of Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1 as a winning information manager under OS X in his review on Macworld.
6:57:22 AM
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How often do you boot into Mac OS 9?
There has been talk on mailing lists that Mac OS X 10.2 or Jaguar will not ship with Mac OS 9.x installer CDs. The reasoning behind this rumor is that while Apple needs to support Classic - the ability to run older software in an emulation mode under OS X - there is no longer a reason to create dual-boot capabilities into either OS 9.x or OS X on the same machine with the arrival of OS X 10.2.
Do you still occassionally boot into OS 9.x? How long as it been since you last did so?
Use the Comment link and lets start talking about this. If there is enough interest, I will create a special report with all of our comments...
Update: The comments story link is here.
Related stories:
MacSlash: Apple to slam lid on Mac OS 9
MacDevCenter: Jaguar: Time to stop pussyfooting around
MacSlash: Comments on the MacDevCenter article above
6:39:40 AM
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How ergonomics tied me down
I have spent a week now working almost exclusively with an external keyboard and mouse dangling off my Pismo PowerBook, and while my hands and arms are happier with the new gear, I do miss the simplicity of having a PowerBook in my lap and being able to move from room to room under battery power while my machine stays online the whole time thanks to a wireless connection to the Internet. I am still adjusting to the wires and intricacies of being ergonomically correct.
If you are thinking about taking the leap into ergonomic workstation design, check out yesterday's article on ergonomic keyboards on AppleLinks by Charles Moore: More ergonomic keyboards. It is a follow up to a longer article he wrote in July: Ergonomic keyboard and mouse solutions for the Mac.
6:21:35 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Rob McNair-Huff.
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