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Irish Blog Awards

12/01/2007

I’m a sponsor of the Most Humorous Post category in the Irish Blog Awards again this year, albeit with my new company name of Beecher Networks Ltd. I guess this year I’d better actually attend the event? Or should I send a masked man in my place? :)

More on Beecher Networks over the next couple of weeks. Lots of fun ahead!

A new type of spam?

12/01/2007

Hopefully Justin or someone else in the antispam community will browse past here and tell me I’m way behind the times, but I’m seeing a new type of spam in the last couple of day, stock shills with dynamically-generated subject lines that appear to come from news feeds. The news items are usually up to date, and the “More” is often appended to the subject to make it look even more like an email feed.

I don’t think I’ve seen it done in this sophisticated a manner before, although the bodies are still woefully amateurish, with the result than most of the messages are tagged correctly as spam and sidelined on the server.

That being said, the bodies don’t seem to focus on a particular stock symbol at all, which makes me wonder if they’re rotated dynamically, and thus perhaps a test run?

I hope not. We really, really don’t want to see spammers get too clever. It’s their relative stupidity that protects us from a real flood imho.

Here’s a screenshot from my quarantine:

Spam subjects

Schneier on Passwords

12/01/2007

I’m a big fan of Bruce Schneier, I think he’s probably the best plain-speak security guy around, one that can see past the bluff and bluster to the underlying issues. He calls the TSA and their ilk on bullshit airport security procedures regularly, for example, and watching him out the latest “unbreakable” cipher as complete guff is a wonder to behold.

In this Wired article he goes into how easy most passwords are to crack, including – much to my surprise – passwords that I would have considered relatively secure, such as a pronounceable root with an appendage. I found the comparative frequencies of prefixes and suffixes particularly interesting. Of course, as Bruce constantly tells us, security is relative, so your passwords should be too.

Here’s the critical paragraph, although I’d recommend reading the entire article for context, and just because it’s as well-written as nearly all of Bruce’s pieces:

So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.

I agree strongly with his recommendation that a password store should be used by anyone needing to deal with large numbers of passwords. Personally I use KeePass, but I’ll be switching back to PasswordSafe shortly because no matter how hard I try, KeePass databases simply can’t be used across platforms.)

Upside-Down-Ternet

12/01/2007

Did I post this before? Dammit, so what if I did, it’s the berries!

Upside-Down-Ternet

The Wisdom of Parasites

05/01/2007

Absolutely bizarre. And disgusting. And fascinating!

The Loom: The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

Happy Christmas

25/12/2006

Personally I think it’s over-rated, but I’m sure you suckers love it just as much as my demented gf, so Happy Christmas to ye. Have a great day.

I’m getting the major family stuff out of the way by 3.30, then I’m getting locked.

20 facts about eVoting in the US

24/12/2006

I’ve cherry-picked the best ones from the list, some of which I knew about and bear repeating (the quote from the boss of Diebold) and some of which I wasn’t aware of (Jeff Dean planting back doors is software).

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

5. 35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a long-time friend of the Bush family, was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice- presidential candidates.

9. Diebold’s new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

12. Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the people who write the voting machine computer code.

13. Diebold’s Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

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