Network Administrators play a delicate game of balancing uptime and security. Increased security often comes at the sacrifice of accessibility and/or performance. Steps to increase accessibility and uptime often create security issues. Thus, measures that can potentially bolster performance, uptime, and security are sought out as holy relics in network administration. The Pareto principle suggests [...]
I have a total success kid moment every time I switch one of our Apache HTTP servers to NGINX. Without any significant tweaking to NGINX, we take a highly configured and pageview hardened Apache server and increase its capacity ten fold with a switch to NGINX. It comes by no surprise to me, then, that [...]
With all the awe and wonder of the Internet, one of the most amazing things about its basic function is the speed at which great ideas are shared. Many people use the term “viral” to describe how quickly a great piece of content or information is rapidly spread across the Internet. However, viral content can [...]
Sure, your 120 year old Grandpa might utter incoherent nonsense 90% of the time, but pay attention when that ten-percent of conversation actually makes sense. It seems that many values of the past have gotten lost in translation, or more likely, in laziness. Do the job right the first time and other work ethic idioms [...]
If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. My high school football coach used to consistently remind us that by failing to improve, we were actually getting worse. In the land of competition, there is no treading water. As soon as you think you no longer need to improve, your competition catches up, or worse, [...]
We covered the recent release of FireSheep, a Firefox plugin that easily allowed the hijacking of user sessions for popular websites such as Facebook. Although this plugin was intended to raise awareness of a vulnerability in the authentication system used by a large percentage of websites, it has widely been seen as a nuisance and [...]
It was very common to see unsecured and open wireless networks when the technology was first emerging. As wireless networks and devices became more popular, awareness of how unsafe these open wireless networks really are also grew. Secure wireless technologies quickly became the norm, and now it often seems difficult to find an open/unsecured network. [...]
Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently published an article on ZDNet entitled You must be at least this secure to ride on the Internet. It is Steven’s position that there should be denial of access to the Internet for those users/computers found to have malware, bots, or other malicious code. This denial would continue until the aforementioned user [...]
Perhaps the old cliche is true: less is more. Details from a recent study by Beyond Trust has found that over 90% of the Windows 7 vulnerabilities from the past year can be guarded against by simply restricting user access. Removing administrative rights from a Windows workstation adds an additional level of security.
This past week, Google and Verizon introduced a joint legislative proposal. Shortly thereafter, blogs and forums filled with buzz and chatter over this two-page document. Many of those blogs and posts were targeted at Google, claiming that they are proposing things in violation of net neutrality. What exactly is net neutrality, and why is Google [...]