18 August 2004

Hi y'all!

Thanks for the invite, Patrice/Patty/Pat/girlie/hon, your invite was of course stuck in my spam filter right between "BiGger mAnhOod" and "Refinance Mister dino". After I wrote out and mailed the check to the enlargement/enhancement folks, I promptly signed up here. Joe, thanks for the link to the Japanese news site--my partner at the office has had to physically drag me out of the cafeteria at times due to some programming genius' decision to put the beach volleyball on during business hours (all this technology and they can't tape- or digi-delay it?). Of course, my interest is purely technical...
Now, in the Worst Kept Secrets Dept., here's a site I consult at least once daily to keep me abreast (insert Beavis/Butthead laugh here) of impending and occurring security issues:
http://www.incidents.org
I found that site a few jobs ago and haven't looked back since...obviously I still hit CERT, SecurityFocus, et al, but incidents.org is updated at least daily and more often during large virus outbreaks, worms, DDOS attacks, etc. And before you ask, I have Mozilla, Firefox, and IE installed on the Windoze boxes I use regularly, Mozilla and Firefox on the Linux boxes. My problem with Microsoft is not that their stuff is any more vulnerable than other products, it's that since they've consolidated their updates and patches to this idiotic one-per-month schedule, you could conceivably wait 29 days for a patch to be issued for a detected (and admitted-to) vulnerability. At least with the open source software, that wait is lessened drastically; in some cases, patches have been issued hours after a vulnerability is found. And these days, the time bloc between announcement of a vulnerability and exploit code being written and made public is getting smaller all the time.
I was just informed the second pot of coffee is done brewing...now I'm faced with the difficult decision....ESPN or CNN (Daryn Kagan)....at least THAT part of my brain still works...


1 comment:

Eric said...

"By the pricking of my thumbs"