Liberty Systems & Software

Whirlpool are running their yearly broadband survey for the month of January 2010.  If you're a broadband user, please participate in their survey - all broadband users in Australia benefit from Whirlpool's great efforts in this area.

I've just been asked to deploy some HP ProCurve 1810G-8 switches (J9449A) into a network environment containing a large number of managed and unmanaged ProCurve switches. This network has an existing ProCurve Manager installation which controls all policies for existing managed ProCurve switches. Whilst on paper the switch looks pretty good, it is not really an appropriate product for medium-sized business networks. Some of my basic complaints about the product (based on the shipped firmware version, P1.6):

• Uses a two-piece plug-pack power supply
  ...

Project Honeypot just published a report of their experience in processing 1 billion spam messages.  Highlights for the impatient:

• For the past 5 years, spam "bots have grown at a compound annual growth rate of more than 378%. In other words, the number of bots has nearly quadrupled ever year."
• The top 5 countries which host bots are: China (11.4%), Brazil (9.2%), United States (7.5%), Turkey (6.3%), and Germany (6.0%).
  ...

Novell's SMT (Subscription Management Tool) is a software update tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE.  I've had the dubious honour of working with it over the last few months on a customer site.  These notes were compiled as a result of installing SMT on three different servers, and interacting with various people in the Novell forums, especially the novell.support.sles.updates forum.

What's wrong with SMT?

...

For a long time, i've told my clients and friends that the best way to make a password is to write a short sentence or phrase. A recent study linked from Slashdot IT reinforces this....

Richard Bliss recently blogged at Novell and on his personal blog with some great advice: don't click on e-cards from your friends, and think about asking them not to send them at all, since the risks of clicking on e-cards vastly outweigh the benefits....

Dave Rosenberg at cnet has pointed out that Apple junkies don't have a monopoly on crack-head fanboyism: Microsoft's video on how to host your Windows 7 launch party breaks new ground in this area. This makes us Linux fans seem positively normal in comparison! :-)

cnet has a really interesting article about a clever trojan horse application which steals money from online banking accounts while the user is logged into them, and displays false balance details to the user so they don't know what's going on. Currently it only affects Windows users. Check your balances regularly from multiple different platforms (including your bank's ATMs).

Network world and SANS are reporting a new attack on wireless encryption, specifically, WPA with TKIP. The attack takes 60 seconds, and renders this combination almost as useless as WEP has been for some time. It's time to check your security settings, and if necessary, upgrade or replace your wireless routers.

ABC's Four Corners has an interesting episode about cybercrime and how it can affect ordinary people. Check it out on iView: http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/419222. (The program's victims were a little unsympathetic in my opinion, but they remain good examples of people who have been victimised by cybercriminals.)

...