My view of the world

Toshiba is developing “quantum encryption,” this is based on a single photon of light and will enable the sender and receiver to detect any interception or even observation of the data stream. They expect to have this technology on the market fairly soon.
I foresee bunches of problems, but that’s where we’re headed.
A couple of months back I was discussing the with a friend, and wound up looking up what I could find on the technology and decided I don’t quite get it. But this is where we’ll all be in a very few years.

A friend has a program he’s written and now he thinks he’s going to be a millionaire, he even told one of the people he works with that he’ll be there in a just few months.
He plans on charging his customers $25 per month for unlimited access.

At $25 the math is simple.
4×25=$100
40×25=1000
400×25=10,000
4000×25=100,000
40,000×25=$1,000,000

To bring in $1,000,000 a year, you divide 40,000 $25 checks by 12 months, giving you the required number of, 3,333 paying customers every month.

This means the equipment, and the fiber coming in, have to be able to deal with the potential of 3k simultainious hits. This is assuming that none of the customers have an office with more than one user.
Can you say bandwidth?
He currently has access to a T1, (1.5 up/down, on copper) that’s in use by an existing company, that should handle 3,000 concurrent connections. No,….really, I mean it, would I lie?

Oh yeah, he wants to run his proggy off an M$ access database, you know, that wonderfully robust freeby, that comes with Office.
And they say programmers? have no sense of humor.

According to ABC:
The FBI(Federal Bureau of Incompetence) admits to losing 3 to 4 laptops a month, including one that contained the software to create FBI identification cards.
At least 10 of the 160 laptop computers reported lost or stolen contained sensitive or classified information

This is the same outfit that created a computer network that was totally useless for catching terrorists, they knew this about the same time the network was started and they went ahead anyway.
Now they are building a whole new system.

They scrapped carnivore, which was a monitoring program that would search traffic from your ISP, with filtering based on specific data, now they have a new program that uses a vacuum cleaner approach, it just sucks up everything and then filters are applied.
Oh, by the way, we’re supposed to trust them not to keep and sort the other data.

These folks are the ones that admitted that they liked the NSLs (National Security Letters) because they allowed the Bureau to collect data on citizens that they knew had committed no crime.
Now the NSL process goes through a secret court, with no oversight and no way to challange any of the evidence, and if you get one, you still have to give them anything they ask for without question and without being able to check the authenticity of the letter, and you still can’t tell anyone you got one without committing a felony.

These are the same bureaucratic buffoons who, while chasing what they called the most damaging spy since the Rosenbergs, refused to seriously look at their own, and instead spent 3 years or so, ruining the life and career os an analyst who worked for the CIA. They chased this guy relentlessly, while he did everything by the book, they had him under constant Surveillance and the spying went on anyway. They said he was a genius.
When they were finally forced to do something, they threw $25k in the general direction of a known fink working for the KGB, and he handed them Robert Hanssen’s file. To which they exclaimed:
“We were manipulated by a genius.”

They still say they did nothing wrong, everybody got their promotions and raises, except the analyst, who will probably never get any of the above ever again.

Immunity Inc. has built a $3600 device the size of a large PDA that scans for open Wi-Fi connections and is capable of running a man in the middle attack, a simple port scan or any number of preloaded exploits.
I’ll bet the bad guys have one before the good guys, or even more likely, the bad guys will find a way to modify a Palm Pilot.

At RSA conference 2007 it took forever for people to connect to the wireless lan using a generic username and password.
The person writing about this suggested that RADIUS authentication servers be listed in a company’s DNS. This not only alows for easier logins, it provides encryption between the user and server.
While this would help, I’d like to point out that the people who had trouble connecting were attending a computer security conference and therefore should have been at least somewhat computer literate.
The average employee, not only doesn’t understand the most basic of functions in regard to their computer, they have no clue about security.
They are far too busy finishing their reports, finishing up a contract, completing a sale, surfing for porn and playing collapse online, to worry about security. That’s S.E.P.
They click yes or install when presented with a pop-up, they go places they should never have even considered going, and they give their username and password to friends and family.
And then they swear they didn’t touch it, didn’t do it and didn’t even turn their machine on.
Let’s face it….YOU CAN’T FIX STUPID.

With any network, all you can do is nail everything down, and have a functional recovery plan in place for when the worst happens, and it will happen.
Admin passwords should be hard, not convenient, the admin user name should be the first thing changed, guest accounts should be disabled, and Microsofts, support_xxxxx users should be removed, wi-fi ssid should be changed, everything should be fully patched, and on and on and on.
Network security is an ongoing process and your biggest enemy is not some rogue hacker, or disgruntled employee, it’s everyone who is legitimately accessing your servers.

Here’s an interesting article:
google slaps caldwell county around. In a series of stories and forums, it was said the Google was buying realestate in NC but is playing hardball with lawmakers.
This is from the News & Observer:
The company demanded that legislators never speak its name, and had them scolded when word of its interest in North Carolina leaked out, according to records made public this week.
As work proceeded on the bill to remove much of its tax burden, Google threatened to end negotiations because legislative staff didn’t write exactly what it wanted. Commerce Secretary Jim Fain was asked to “prevail upon” the bill writer.
This does make one wonder what they’re up to, besides threatening to take their toys and go home if they don’t get record breaking tax breaks. If Toyota was coming to town, they’ed be holding press conferences.
Of course Google seems to be a major government resource, so maybe they really are a branch of the NSA, this ought to do wonders for the sale of trenchcoats.
Must be nice to be big enough to bully an entire state.

A woman will be sentenced on March 2, for exposing as many as 10 7th graders to porn pop-ups, she could get as much as 40 years.
The story starts here.
The prosecuters say she was surfing for porn while in the classroom, but the defense says that this stuff was already in place.
The school admits that there was no anti-virus or spyware blocker in place, but it couldn’t have been their fault and of course no seventh grader would click on a seemingly harmless pop-up.
When she saw what was going on, the teacher tried to shield the students and eventually turned off the computer.
Cue Monte Python:
She’s a witch, Burn her, Burn her.
She turned me into a newt.
…..I got better.

From the NYT:
A confessed murderer who slipped out of prison with the deputy warden’s wife and hid for more than 10 years before being recaptured was sentenced Thursday to the maximum seven years for escaping.
They left together, but he says he can’t remember if he kidnapped her or if she came willingly.
The escapee Mr. Dial, aged 62, was described as a sculptor, writer and spinner of tales, claims he left when he thought there was a plot to kill him.
The husband, Randy Parker, to whom Ms. Parker returned after she and Mr. Dial were found, dismissed the account as a fabrication. Mr. Parker said he believed his wife’s account that she had been abducted and held against her will in fear of Mr. Dial’s underworld connections.

OK, let’s review:
They were found living in a trailer on a chicken farm in Texas. ..A chicken farm?? He really needs to up his status with the mob.
When he had a heart attack, she called 911 and rode in the ambulance with him. This couldn’t have been because she cared, it must have been to find a way to smother him and make it look like suicide, so Guido “the cluck” would never suspect.

In “Jolly Old,” the government website has a place for e-petitions. Over a million people have signed petitions online, with one petition having 600,000 signers, and not a single item has been enacted or even brought before Parlament.
This steamlines the process and gives the powers that be a way too more effectively ignore the public.
But I think they should seriously consider the petition that says they should ban broccoli as an edible foodstuff and reclassify it as a toxic substance.