Tag: internet

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I had to reboot one of the Windows servers on Thursday, at which point the GDI+ checker installed by Tuesday’s security fix popped up a message explaining that there was still some software with the JPEG vulnerability. OK, fine, I’ll run it again and see what’s missing. So I clicked on, well, OK, and it pulled up Internet Explorer.

More to the point, it pulled up Internet Explorer 2.0.

You see, that machine has some leftover files from a previous OS, and somehow the GDI+ utility picked up on that copy of iexplore.exe. Of course, it could barely handle the vulnerability info page — no ActiveX of course, and it even displayed raw JavaScript code at the top of the page because it wasn’t hidden inside a comment! (Even Lynx can handle that now!)

But once I fired up IE6 to actually run the test, I figured as long as I had the old one running, why not check a few site layouts? Or some browser sniffers, and see what it claimed and what it could handle?

Almost nothing, as it turns out. It couldn’t even find any of the sites I tried. And from the way it couldn’t find them, I realized exactly what was missing: it couldn’t handle virtual hosts. Continue reading →

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When I worked at a computer lab in college, the main security focus was preventing lab visitors from screwing around too much with the computers. We just ran Windows NT and locked it down as hard as possible. The worst network-based threat I remember facing was WinNuke, and that was just as likely to be another lab tech. Some of the early email viruses started circulating while I was there, but since it was a public lab, we didn’t provide any email programs; people would telnet into the mail server and use Pine. (This was pre-Hotmail, too.)

In my wired-for-ethernet campus housing, however, all bets were off. I watched people remotely controlling each others’ computers as pranks, or discovering hackers had gotten onto their systems from halfway across the planet, and figured it was safer to use Linux most of the time. This actually got me in trouble with the network admin at one point, who decided I must be running a server and shut off my port. It did at least teach me to disable services that were turned on by default, though I saw no indication that anything on there was actually being abused.*

Firewalled

Then there were firewalled environments. Still back in college, we rigged up my parents’ house for a home network. My brother put together a Linux box to dial into the Internet and act as a gateway, and effectively everything inside the network was safe from direct attacks. No point in internal firewalls, and since everyone was savvy enough to avoid the really nasty stuff (which was easier at the time), virus scanners were only a precaution, rather than a necessity.

For the past few years I’ve mainly worked with Continue reading →

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I should’ve written this up when we bought it, but there are two main reasons I went with the Netgear WGT624 router over another brand with similar features.

First: familiarity. Since I hadn’t researched specific models, I wanted a brand I knew or had used before. This meant Netgear, Linksys, or Belkin.

Belkin was out of the question. In fact, I was muttering about how I’d never buy a Belkin router, when I was approached by a Belkin representative who proceeded to explain about how much better their product was than any of the others. The problem is that Belkin lost my trust last year when they set their routers to redirect web requests to their own advertisement page. (Basically one every eight hours until you bought the filtering service or clicked on an opt-out link on that web page). Aside from the annoyance factor, there’s a lot of web traffic that isn’t actually trying to load a web page. It could be your antivirus program trying to download new definitions, or your news reader updating an RSS or Atom feed. It could be Windows Update. Sure, they eventually disabled the “feature”, but come on!

So at that point it basically a toss-up between Netgear and Linksys. The Netgear packaging was more focused on the networking capabilities, and the Linksys packaging was more focused on the parental controls, so I went with the Netgear.