No viruses and no spyware does not mean its more secure.
I hear this argument all the time that Mac OS X is better than windows becuase it is more secure. The proof alot of people stat is there are very few virus and spyware on OS X. Yes that is true there are also very few on OS/2 warp, minux, BeOS, windows 3.11, NT 3.51, Irix, linux, solaris, BSD, and pretty much every other operating system know to man compared to windows. That doesn’t make them more secure. That makes them a small target compared to windows, it doesn’t make OS X more secure. There is a reason why tons of bugs were found in safari when Apple ported it to windows. Was the code so different from the OS X code base? I doupt it, there are many more automated security tools build for use on windows which also makes it that much easier to find the flaws in XP and Vista than in OS X. Any one who thinks apple cares that much about security let me remind you it took apple three weeks to patch the DNS vulnurability!! Weeks after there were working exploits. The larger the market share grows for Apple the more virus and malware you will see released targeting OS X.
Apple fan boys please don’t bug me. I personally use a mac as my main lap top now. I personally like OS X better than Vista and XP because I am a unix fan boy. But that is a personal choice. Also Linux fan boys I love linux and am a RHCE but I need an OS for my day to day work where I don’t have to wory about breaking everything because I upgraded lib c compat, or installed a new kernel. I run Cent OS on all my servers when I can and I also have another Ubuntu laptop that I use for certain security tools. Windows fan boys, securing mainly windows boxs is my bread and butter. Windows with AD in an enterprise is the way to go.
Best Fark.com comment ever
Best damn fark comment ever.
“I like to eat a bowl of Kraft Dinner (a.k.a. “KD”) while watching some opera or ballet. There’s nothing better than a little arts & Kraft.”
In response to winy poor Canadians not wanting to eat free kraft mac and cheese.
Open Source Asset Tracking software
The University of Washington has released a free and open source system for tracking computers called Adeona. I have installed it on my work laptop and it gets the job done. This is a great solution for home users as it works on Linux, Mac, and PC and doesn’t require anything else from the user as far as a server or service fee to use it. There are some defiant short comings though.
- First as with all non BIOS tracking software this won’t work if a thief wipes the drive without booting up.
- Second it sends the location data pseudo randomly every half hour, so if a thief boots a laptop and sees a login screen and shuts it down, it probably won’t be recorded.
- Third would be a nightmare to mass deploy. I have thousands of computers I would want to install this on. To do this I would have to manually install it on everyone since it asks questions during the install and you have to copy a file to a central server that you have to have to check on the location data.
- Fourth it uses OpenDHT to store the location information. I don’t trust the stability of an open source distributed storage system that anyone can use for distributed storage. Its only a matter of time before this starts to be used to distribute illegal material or the popularity of it cripples it. I am all for open access to things but time and time again a few people always ruin it.
For my purposes I think it would be better just to write a program that posts the computer name and IP address to web server that stores the information in a MySQL database.
Roku Netflix Player
There has been some buzz about the Roku netflix player releasing some of its source code. The thing is they have to release the code as its GPL open source code that they modified. The truth is the code should have been available since day 1. This is no different than the Tivo source code that has been released. They didn’t release any of their proprietary code. Now that I know that this is based on Linux though this should hopefully be pretty hackable. It would be great if Xvid and H.264 support can be added. Then I won’t have to use my noisey Xbox 360 to stream my movies off my computer.
Riverside Fireworks Sting
I have seen the lowest of the low today. I live in Riverside where fireworks are illegal and went and bought fireworks in San Bernardino County where they are legal. I was followed into Riverside County and pulled over by Cal Fire and sited for possession of fire works. They did not care that I was going to my friends in Chino to light them off no its illegal to even be in possession. This is the most under handed slimy bullshit I have ever seen in my entire life. They are obviously only doing this for revenue as you know safe and sane fireworks used properly are not a hazard. What do they think they are accomplishing by doing this? Now I have a chip on my shoulder and have to pay a fine for possession of safe and sane fireworks. Do they really think this fosters good will within the community? No now ever time I see a Cal fire or Riverside PD officer I think what ass holes. I no longer feel good to live in Riverside County where they do everything to make upstanding law abiding citizen pay for technicalities so they can make money. I hope the county goes bankrupt and all the county supervisors are thrown the hell out of office. I will do everything possible to make up that money in BS from the county. I will get my 2 bulk pickups every year from the trash service even if I don’t need one and I only have a garbage bag of trash. I will put as many requests into code enforcement office as I can. I will do anything and everything I can to make Riverside County and City spend money and in general be a pain their ass without breaking any laws. Thanks for fostering good will to your citizens Riverside. If you treat everyone as a criminal you will have nothing but criminals left in your city. I for one will be moving as soon as possibly can so say good by to even more tax revenue, and hopefully I can sell my house to some dead beat drunk a hole that will bring the city even further down the tubes.
Linux Cisco VPN
The Linux Cisco VPN client seems to try the first avalable interface to make a connection. In my case this was eth0 which is my wired port which isn’t connected to anything. In order to get it to work I had to down the interface with ifconfig eth- down then it would connect fine with my wireless interface eth1. I haven’t seen any documentation to see if there is a way to manually bind it to a specific interface, and there is no MAN page installed. At least –help gives some usage, which is heads and shoulders over the tsmc tivoli command line I was using today what a royal PITA. Just encase anyone needs it the command to restore a previous version of a file is “tsmc restore -todate=yyyy-mm-dd -inactive /path/to/file” the documentation gave the format for the date as mm/dd/yyyy and the command would just come back and say -todate not recognized. Not wrong date format no that would have saved Jeff an hour of goggling.
Died in a bloging accident
It is mind blowing how fast thing spread on the internet. Take this XKCD comic there were only 2 results in google when you searched for “died in a blogging accident” just yesterday. Now there are over 2,000 results and climbing every hour. “Died in a knitting accident isn’t so popular so only a rise to 107 results from 7. Also of note not many people read the title tag of the image since “Died in a snake charming accident” rose from 0 results to 10 and “Died in a haberdashery accident” also rose from 0 to 10 results. The sadist part of all of this is that when someone does die in a blogging accident we won’t be able to find it on google. Remember kids don’t walk around blogging on your iphone or you will end up dying in a blogging accident.
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