Catch q!Bang Solutions’ very own High Mobley as he was featured in the InfoWorld LIVE radio show broadcast on January 23, 2007. Co-Hosts of the show were Scott Draughon and Oliver Rist. The show was hosted by mytechnologylawyer.com Radio Shows, which host a variety of programs on technology, business and policy. Oliver Rist is a fellow colleague who is a Senior Contributing Editor and frequent blogger of InfoWorld. Another program guest was good friend, Brian Chee, who is also a Senior Contributing Editor of InfoWorld.
Listen to the archived show.
Cisco Systems Inc. security has announced 3 remotely exploitable flaws for the Cisco IOS software:
- Crafted TCP Packet Can Cause Denial of Service
- Crafted IP Option Vulnerability
- IPv6 Routing Header Vulnerability
When will the first exploit code be released? Will anybody admit to being compromised by the exploit? How will a common user realize they have a problem? The small business customers who think owning Cisco is the way to go need to address the total cost of keeping those systems up to date. Many times a customer won’t upgrade a core router or switch because they don’t know how or don’t know they have a problem. How many service providers will contact their customers warning them about these flaws? Most small businesses don’t have a clue if they are vulnerable or not. How does Cisco fix this issue? What means does a small company have to keep all their systems up to date? Most end users barely can keep up with Windows, virus, adware and spyware updates little alone keeping up with all their network equipment. How many people have updated the software on your home router?
I believe the next great worm will be targeted towards networking equipment. How about taking over all the Linksys routers/access points and making them spam bots or open relays? What about using a Cisco vulnerability to create tunnels to specific locations to monitor all traffic through a router. More to come …
Cheesy title, I know. But this is one of the two features I was waiting for in Vim 7.0 (the other is tabs): go back in time. Everyone (especially programmers) has run into this situation at some point: you know you want to uncover the version you have that doesn’t cause the segmentation fault, and you know that’s the version from 45 minutes ago. I can already hear some people whisper “version control”, but not everyone has SVK, and not everyone commits regularly. Well, now you can travel back in time easily with Vim, just issue this command and you’re back to the version from 45 minutes ago:
:earlier 45m
And to go forward in time, just do this:
:later 30s
You can manipulate time in Vim like Super Hiro, and you don’t even have to make the funny face!
In this article EC: ‘Open source almost always cheaper option’, about findings of a study done by the European Commission, Europe is really pushing for the long-term endorsement of open source solutions as opposed to proprietary ones. This is in the wake of Microsoft UK’s ad campaign called “Get the Facts” which persuades readers to choose Windows over Linux for server solutions. The article goes on to praise Open Office as a comparable substitute over proprietary office suites since it’s free and just as stable. The study also noted something fairly interesting:
But the report issued two notes of caution. Firstly, it said that short term costs would be higher for organizations migrating, even partially, to open source, largely because of the initial cost of training. Secondly it said some workers may feel undervalued if they are required to work with free software.
This has a bite of reality to it. It isn’t always cheap switching to something free, once the price of adjusting or training is factored in. I like that second point the most, because although it may go against logic and the bottom-line, I have witnessed this stigma first-hand. Despite these two initial hesitations, we’re going to see an increasing number of start-ups and big-business choose or incorporate open source solutions to surpass their long term goals.
Although this announcement was made last year, I did not catch it until today on darknet. This is sad news, and in my opinion, a big blow to PHP’s developer’s community. There are other efforts out there trying to improve PHP’s inherently weaker security model, such as the new PHPSec.org and the hardened-php folks. For those of you who know me well, you know that although I use PHP, I am not a huge fan of it. For some reason, some people argue that this is an easy language to pick up for beginners. I can only guess that it is because PHP is very “graphical” and users can generate web pages with ease. But as far as a language goes, I would think that python is a much easier language to pick up for beginners.