By Justin James on
5/29/2008 12:49 AM
So, after literally dozens of man-hours trying to get the VPN working in ISA Server 2006, the end culprit turned out to be... my fat fingers. When I entered the IP address for the domain controller in a "Computer" network entity (which I later added to the network groups used by access rulles), I typed it in wrong. As a result, traffic to/from the docmain controller didn't go through in the cases where the rules should have judged it based on that incorrectly typed IP address and not some other criteria.
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By George Ou on
5/28/2008 1:08 AM
My former blogging partner at ZDNet Zero-Day Nate McFeters asked me to come up with a power house gaming system that doesn't needlessly spend money on components that merely give slightly better performance. I figured a lot of people would be interested in this sort of system so I came up with the following computer build list. You won't really get much better performance with a system costing two or three times more money.
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By George Ou on
5/26/2008 5:00 PM
Fry's electronics has a one day sale for Memorial day where they offer an ECS NVIDIA 7150 based motherboard and Intel E7200 2.53 GHz 45nm dual-core processor for $130. This will allow you to build a great computer for $379 which is even lower cost than my previous budget built list.
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By George Ou on
5/23/2008 12:23 AM
AMD just released a "new" low-power 1.8 GHz quad-core model X4 9100e and dubbed it "the world's first 65W desktop processor". But you may be getting more than what you bargained for and AMD took some dubious and buggy shortcuts to make this power envelop possible.
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By Justin James on
5/22/2008 9:58 AM
For a change, I think that someone from Cisco is making sense:
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-202297.html?tag=nl.e622
He's sadly right. The only way I'd work with a blacklist anti-virus system is if it did not use signatures, but worked very similar to UAC on Vista or sudo on *Nix. In other words, certain behaviors were blacklisted. And even that is risky, because the bad guys are always finding new ways to abuse even relatively innocent system commands. Malware is a war that we're losing, and losing badly. The only answer are systems that are either thin clients (or effectively thin clients) that the IT department can lock down on the server side, or clients that are so limited in their usage that they can't do much other than the basics.&l ...
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By Justin James on
5/20/2008 10:46 PM
A few months ago, I discovered a neat little toy/edu-game/app called "Phun". I have to say, it really lives up to it's name! The gentleman who put this together is named Emil Ernerfeldt as a Master's Thesis. I'll tell you, give this guy his MA today, he's earned it. The shop that picks him up post-graduation will get someone who not only knows how to code, but someone who knows how to put a piece of software together that is enjoyable to use, has an intuitive interface, is practical, and at the same time, provides a sandbox for educational exploration.
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By George Ou on
5/20/2008 4:48 PM
I never liked the design of the original OLPC XO laptop, but the design of the XO-2 looks fantastic and very futuristic. It looks like two oversized iPhones connected in a clamshell design and it's using a soft touch-screen keyboard. It can be used in vertical book mode or in laptop mode with a virtual keyboard.
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By George Ou on
5/20/2008 1:40 AM
My former colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pondered whether it was feasible to rip (to digitally archive) his entire DVD collection in to a computer. Adrian estimates that he has at least 600 DVDs and that each would take 30 minutes to rip which works out to 12.5 days of non-stop ripping. So I popped Adrian an instant message telling him that it's actually nowhere near as bad and that it could be done 6 DVDs at a time and each batch would probably take no more than 15 minutes which works out to 25 hours of solid ripping time.
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By Justin James on
5/19/2008 11:04 PM
This weekend, I had the chance to try to install a wide variety of OS's on my server here. Now that I got the last paying customer off, I decided to see if the problems were OS/driver specific, or hardware specific. Unfortunately, I only got to actually install 2 OS's. What went wrong? Linux still has lousy driver support.
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By George Ou on
5/19/2008 7:37 PM
The whole Comcast issue is being kicked around in the press in recent days because the Max Planck Institute released a study showing the rates of TCP resets happening throughout the world. But this whole issue is being mischaracterized as the "blocking" of BitTorrent and it's being portrayed as a free speech issue when it is nothing of a sort. Richard Bennett explained why this shouldn’t be considered blocking and Andrew Orlowski wrote a pretty good editorial raising the concern that this is trivializing real free spe
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By Justin James on
5/17/2008 8:29 AM
I started using Go Daddy as my registrator ages ago, because they had domain names super cheap. If I recall, Network Solutions was still using "management by email" at the time, and I hated that as well. Over the years, I only had to call Go Daddy once, and it was to get the information I needed to set up some DNS stuff on my end. Even from that one call, I was pretty impressed with their support and service people.
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By George Ou on
5/17/2008 3:53 AM
Here's a video clip showing Windows XP on the OLPC XO.
To get Windows XP on the OLPC XO, an additional SD flash card slot had to be added to supply enough storage for Windows. A fully functional version of Microsoft Office is also included and I'm sure that is a huge incentive for buyers of these notebooks to choose Windows.
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By George Ou on
5/16/2008 4:31 PM
My former colleagues Larry Dignan and Christopher Dawson have voiced their concerns about the OLPC foundation's decision to offer a choice between Windows XP or Linux plus Sugar interface on the XO laptop. Both of them point out that it will be Governments and purchasing agencies that will most likely make the decision to go with Windows XP and that children won't have a say in the decision when may instead pick the Linux plus Sugar interface.
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By George Ou on
5/15/2008 7:00 AM
One day after the Debian Linux project announced a massive flaw where its implementation of OpenSSL key generators only used 15 bits of entropy (32,768 combinations), HD Moore (creator of Metasploit) has released a tool to exploit it. Nate McFeters has a good write up here on this matter.
This means that any asymmetric crypto keys generated between September 2006 and 5/13/2008 a
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By Justin James on
5/15/2008 12:12 AM
I can't wait until JMJ 2.0 (my son's name is Jarrett Marshall James, aka JMJ 2.0) is old enough for me to sit him down and write his first program. To give him an idea of what it was like "back in Daddy's era", I will give him some completely crippled language that is missing useful features like eval() (yes, I am hung up on dynamic languages), with libraries that are poorly documented (you know, where the "DoRoutine() method is described as, "Does the routine" without explaining what the routine is...), and having to follow someone else's spaghetti code to get anywhere.
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By Justin James on
5/13/2008 12:24 PM
I like to do things right. Sadly, sometimes doing things "right" gets in the way of doing them well, or doing them at all. In my most recent case, I needed to stop trying to set my network up "right", and do it "wrong". Now, instead of looking like an enterprise network like I wanted, it resembles a residential network on steroids. In reality, it actually makes sense... it is founded on residential technology (Verizon FiOS), after all, which just does not support the networking schemes that enterprise networks use. All in all, the question really is, "does it meet our needs?" And in this case, I'll take the 30/5 service for a few hudred dollars and a residential-style networking scheme over 1.5/1.5 and an enterprise-style networking scheme any day of the week.
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
5/12/2008 11:32 PM
During the last few years, I've found a number of people who are consistently thought provoking through the forums at TechRepublic. George and I discussed a few times the idea that we wanted this site to be able to give a voice to people who might not have a venue. Sure, anyone can get a LiveJournal or WordPress blog somewhere, but that does not mean that it will get read, even if it is worthwhile. In an effort to give a good airing to some of these people, I will, from time-to-time, run a "guest blog" post. Today's guest blogger is Jaqui Greenlees.
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 11:39 PM
The dirty little secret in information security is that anyone or company using FTP to transfer files is probably violating every security compliance requirement under the sun and most companies are guilty of it. The authentication and payload transmission system in the FTP protocol is completely unencrypted and in the clear. If those authentication credentials are shared by other access controls in the organization, then a lot more than the FTP server is at stake and a sniffed FTP password can lead to a much larger security compromise.
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 8:03 PM
It looks like Microsoft's warning that you can't uninstall IE7 after you install Windows XP SP3 may apply conversely as well. If you do a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, the IE7 installer will fail. I'm still trying to see if I can force an IE7 install right now.
Update 9:25PM - Finally got IE7 installed. The first botched installation left some instructions on the desktop to reset some permission on some file and I cut-paste it in to the CMD console. Then I downloaded the installer manually and installed it but it still gave me a failure notice and to reboot. After I rebooted, it appears that IE7 did get installed. Weird.
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 4:57 PM
I'm trying to do a fresh install of Microsoft Windows XP and I thought it would be great to upgrade it directly to Windows XP SP3. So I download the network-install version of Windows XP3 (filename WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe) and start installing it and get the disapointing news. It appears that Windows XP Sp3 will not install on any machine that doesn't at least have SP1 installed.
I guess I'll have to see if it's possible to slipstream it in to Windows XP using nLite.
Update 7:00PM - nLite worked well and got the slipstreamed installer working. I did have some Read More »
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By George Ou on
5/10/2008 2:02 AM
I did another guest appearance on Computer America last night with Carey Holzman last night who I met two years ago at DEFCON. Carey's a great guy who does solo shows on Friday nights and I've probably been on the show with him half a dozen times or more. You can hear the podcast here in their archives from the second hour of May 9th 2008.
Here we are pictured below at
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By Justin James on
5/9/2008 12:23 PM
Over the years, I've periodically touched based with Scott Abel from Spiceworks. I did one of the first reviews of their initial release, and was quite impressed. Scott and I also collaborated on a trio of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about starting a tech company. And I've talked to Scott before about their development process. Toda
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By George Ou on
5/9/2008 4:39 AM
Congressman John Conyers and Zoe Lofgren have reintroduced a Net Neutrality Bill that prohibits charges for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service" in the name of stopping discrimination. Unfortunately, it stops a lot more than discrimination; it flat out bans tiered pricing for different levels of QoS (Quality of Service) which cripples the Internet under the justification of banning "discrimination". Here's the text of the bill from the first time this bill was introduced that Richard Bennett dug up.
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By George Ou on
5/8/2008 5:44 PM
According to polls, most of you know by now that over-the-air Analog TV will cease to exist after February 2009. I applied for two coupons for my home and I received them in the mail last week. This week I went out and got my converter box at Circuit City. While the coupon covered $40 of the price, my Zenith DTT900 (pictured above left) cost $60 and the Philips SDV2270/17 antenna (pictured above on the right) cost $20. That meant with taxes, I had to spend $46 to convert my analog TV to a digital TV.
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By Justin James on
5/6/2008 8:54 PM
I cannot imagine any other IT vendor offering to ship, for free, a server (even pay the shipping & handling both ways!), provide support on it, and let me hold onto it for 60 days. And after all of that, give me a 25% discount if/when I decide to keep it.
Sun is.
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