Vista has had some pretty bad press this year, some people blame Microsoft for initially overhyping but eventually poorly marketing the OS, some blame the “I’m a Mac” commercials, and some blame the security features. As for me, I just find it to be too rough around the edges.

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I was recently playing around with web proxies at my data center lab and got an idea to open up a couple anonymous proxies to see how long it would take for someone to start exploiting them. I fired up two anonymous proxies–using 3APA3A’s very cool and very tiny 3proxy tool–on adjacent IP addresses, each listening on port 8080. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I was looking at a post at cryptome.org that shows all the IP addresses controlled by or somehow affiliated with the NSA. I had seen previous versions of this post and at first glance it seemed like someone did a lot of work to gather all of that detailed info. So today I was browsing through the latest update of this list and started to get suspicious of the content.

Seeing the sheer number of addresses and that there was no apparent basis for selecting which IP addresses made the list, I set out to prove that this guy was either just some conspiracy nut or this whole list was nothing more than a hoax. I extracted all the IP address ranges from the document, sorted them, and compared them to the list of IANA’s IPv4 assignments. It turns out that NSA list includes most of the allocated IPv4 address space with the exception of 15 or so class A and a few dozen class B networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after my last post on CAPTCHAs, some of you may have noticed MustLive’s CAPTCHA bypass tests in the comments below the article. Although I moderate all comments to my blog, I allowed those through because I thought they were a good follow-up to what I myself had written about CAPTCHAs.

In reality, the only function that CAPTCHA on my blog serves is to reduce the number of spam comments I have to sift through to find the real comments. Along with a couple other plugins, it does a good job with keeping the spam out. Read the rest of this entry »