Get APLawrence.com by RSSIt is going to get better, right?
2008/06/04
Right now there are untold numbers of lobotomized machines that unknowingly do the bidding of their masters, whether that is adding to our daily pile of spam email or bonding together with other compromised machines in attacks against more resilient targets.
It's an ugly world, but it has to get better, right?
After all, Vista is far more secure than XP ever was and of course that holds true for Mac OS X and Linux too.. as the owners of those zombie machines replace and upgrade them, won't our lives get that much better? That much less spam, that many less 'bots able to be directed into a DOS attack?
Oh sure, there will be new infiltration vectors, so there'll be replacements.. but surely it will be less? If the new OSes can't guarantee their own safety, at least they should last longer against assault, shouldn't they?
Yes, I am trying to talk myself into this. No, I don't believe it any more than you do.
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- Nov 20 07:43
I took a random stab at the free upgrades and ordered a new cell phone. Didn't check features or reviews. Hope I don't hate it. - Nov 19 18:52
We'll be spending just as much on holiday gifts as we did last year: exactly $0. Doing our part to help the retail stores as we always do.
Related Posts
Wed Jun 4 20:42:21 2008: Subject: You are providing me no comfort MikeHostetler
http://mike.hostetlerhome.com
I just found out that tonight I need to put a Windows machine permanently on the network at home. I haven't had a Windows machine in my house for, like, 10 years. Technically I have the machine now but it is not hooked up to the network now I need to.
So now I have to look at cheap/free firewalls and antivirus. Does anyone know of any good open source firewalls for Windows? I'm not concerned about stuff going out -- just stuff coming in. The user can do whatever they want, AFAIC.
Wed Jun 4 21:36:22 2008: Subject: TonyLawrence
Your firewall should be on the network, not on the machine.
And it should be concerned about outgoing - for example I block port 25 outbound at most sites except to the designated mailserver (so that compromised machines can't become spammers without us knowing it).
Thu Jun 5 00:42:03 2008: Subject: Netgear badanov
http://www.freefirezone.org
Try ' http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=405220&CatId=198' Netgear
I use the FR114P and i swear by these things. Easy to use with a nice set of in and outbound firewall rules.
Thu Jun 5 01:23:40 2008: Subject: MikeHostetler
http://mike.hostetlerhome.com
Thanks for the pointers.
This machine is strictly for some data-entry work my wife is doing, but we just discovered that her boss will occasionally email stuff to her. She gets other updates via floppy. Don't ask about the details, but the overall effect reminds me of 1990.
I have a linksys router that doesn't allow much in, and an unroutable IP address, because I refuse to pay my ISP's price for one. Nor do I want to buy much more. But blocking port 25 to the outside is a good idea, in case any nasties get in there.
Thanks as always . . . good advice and good thoughts is why I read aplawrence.com.
Thu Jun 5 03:20:08 2008: Subject: drag
I have a Windows OS, just for completeness, that I keep on my Linux machine and run in a VM.
I don't really use it for anything right now, but they gave me a Windows machine for work (which I installed Debian on and use almost exclusively) so I figure I need it for something.
The Linux machine acts as a NAT firewall for it, literally. I have some simple routing rules for my 'internal' virtual network and such. I use VMs for more then just Windows so I have a virtual ethernet switch I have setup and all that happy stuff.
I can optionally run it in 'snapshot' mode so that when the VM runs it makes no changes to the original drive image. Once the VM is shutdown all changes are lost. This is nice if I have to deal with any questionable software.
Also USB passthrough from the host to guest works. This way I can attach a USB device, like a USB floppy drive, to my laptop and then 'connect' it to my Windows guest running in the VM. It sees the USB device and loads up the drivers and everything, just like real hardware.
I use Linux KVM for this. But most people will prefer Virtualbox on Linux. It's much more slick. Other OSes have similar things, like Parallels for Mac. Everything I just described is quite possible for half a dozen other sort of VM technologies.
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