JLang wrote:
] Perimeter defense is a lost battle.
]
] Like old generals, we're still fighting the last war, in which
] our network was a castle with impregnable walls, a
] well-defined entry point across the drawbridge (head-end
] router), portcullis (firewall) and guards (IDS).

Well, that was an entertaining article, but I'll offer the following:

1. People have been quoting statistics about attacks coming from the inside for years. I doubt its actually true, and it certainly hasn't slowed the sale of firewalls. If you count the amount of scans and probes that come in on a typical internet connection and compare that to internal threats I would be amazed to find that 70% of the threats are internal. I'm not saying internal threats aren't significant or important. I'm simply saying that this statistic is over quoted and under understood.

2. Yes, of course you should harden your internal servers and firewall your "DMZ" off from your internal network! If you're an IT security professional and this is news you ought to be fired. (This is the reason Checkpoint sells well. You can put 12 interfaces in the thing and it doesn't think twice about it.)

3. Rilling up a bunch of IT guys and telling them to implement a "zero tolerance" policy is stupid. The only thing worse then a beaurocrat is a beaurocrat on a mission. When you are responsible for a service that everyone in a company relies on, all of the employees are your customers, not just upper management. You have to find ways to protect critical assets while simultaneously allowing people to do their jobs. Rifling through people's hard drives in search of contraban propagates an atmosphere of distrust that is far more destructive to company objectives then some file sharing. Yes, you should know whats on your network and elminiate things that create risk. No, you should not be a nazi, even if you really enjoy it.

RE: Network Security: Submarine Warfare

Do some DNS queries that end with .net for some nonexistent domains.. They are all being responded to with an A record pointing to 64.94.110.11, which is a VeriSign search engine.

This is complete bullshit. This must not be allowed.

VeriSign Rerouting .net DNS queries

] Think about it: If you wanted Hail to the Thief and the
] whole album could be downloaded for $5.99, what
] difference does it make that there%u2019s a free album
] from Hootie and the Blowfish somewhere else? If you want
] to download Donnie Darko, who cares if someone else is
] giving away Dances with Wolves? If you want old Firesign
] Theatre recordings, why would the existence of a free
] Henny Youngman collection influence your decision?
] Comparing these decisions to "Coke versus Pepsi"
] denigrates the creative process.

A worthy response to Shirky's recent micropayment article...

Misunderstanding Micropayments - Scott McCloud

] RATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3
] player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database
] of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings
] and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks
] are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal
] downloads of their music.

I've been playing with this for a few hours... doesn't take it long to start pulling reasonable tracks. There is a lot I wish this software did that it doesn't do, but I have to say its pretty close to what I want from internet music...

iRATE radio home

This is the 3d file browser that won the NSF grant... This looks absolutely amazing. I'm going to fire it up on Monday...

3d file browser for linux

] The three-dimensional interface organizes computer
] contents by their relationships rather than their
] physical position on a hard drive. Each spider-web thread
] marks the ties between folders holding contents related
] to the open file folder (in the center in purple). Colors
] show how the other folders are related: The red folder is
] the parent one, blue folders are subdirectories, and the
] yellow and gray folders are located elsewhere but relate
] somehow to the central folder.

Science -- 3D file broswer wins NSF contest...

] SQL4X Manager J is a comprehensive graphical Interface
] for web and database developers to access any JDBC
] compliant database server. You can choose between a
] terminal-like graphical SQL Console with SQL syntax
] coloring and table name auto-completion to execute your
] own SQL commands and a fully graphical schema and table
] browser.

ahh.... finally.

SQL Manager for Mac OS X

] Owners of the conversational websites known as weblogs
] have recently noticed that their referral logs have
] become the newest target for spam.

] Referral logs, intended to collect information on who
] visited a website and how they happened to arrive
] there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious
] bloggers who click on a logged link to see who
] visited their site are instead led to pornography or
] advertising sites.

MemeStreams receives lots of referral spam.

BTW, whoever wrote this article is kind of an idiot... These are not REAL refferals, so they don't have any impact on your google ranking. (duh!)

Wired News: When the Spam Hits the Blogs

" He built a prototype for what he thinks could be the future of voting: an agent that mines your online and other computer habits to extract a political ideology, and then makes voting recommendations — or more omniously, even casts the ballots for you."

Voting by Net Proxy?

] After more than 20 years at Sun Microsystems Inc.,
] cofounder and Chief Scientist Bill Joy is leaving the
] company, Sun announced Tuesday.

Hmmmm....

ITworld.com - Bill Joy to leave Sun