I miss attrition.org's web defacement archive at times like this. This one works, but it was better to be able to view source, etc. By the way, if I'd known "This is what the fuck I think I'm doing" was going to be this boring looking I would have offered my design services :-p
I only got three Sircam emails so I guess this article won't offend many people I know or who visit my site (y'all are so smart it makes me smile) but Wired has a pretty bitter little piece on clueless people that click on file attachments from strangers. Now I just wish there was a smiliarly nasty article about the 350,000 sysadmins who were too lazy to patch their systems for the vulnerability exploited by the Red Worm. I know a couple of those guys… sorry fellas.
ZDNET is running a story on the inherent crappiness of IIS, Microsoft's piece of garbage web server. A quote from the article to whet your appetite- "some security administrators joke that IIS stands for 'It Isn't Secure.'" True enough…
ZDNet is running an article about an insurance company charging five to fifteen percent more for their "hacker" insurance if a company uses Windows NT in their internet operations. Now, as anyone that knows me knows, I think NT sucks. Especially when the subject is serving up soem web pages. But the reality is, even though the default NT installation is about as secure as a pair of wet noodle hand cuffs, someone who knows what they're doing can turn an NT box a mighty secure machine. The inverse is also true- someone who doesn't know what they're doing can set up a Linux/ Solaris/ Whateverix machine that could be taken down quick, fast, in a hurry (Flavor vision ain't blurry.) So, as much as it pains me philosophically to say it, the real onus is on the quality of the people running the operation and not the flavor of the software.
One of the most continually interesting sites on the Internet, Attrition.org, announce that they were discontinuing their website defacement mirror. For all the work it took (pro bono of course) and all the garbage that they had to deal with from folks on both side of the fence, I'm actually amazed they held out as long as they did.
I was walking into a 7-11 here in downtown Boston and noticed that there was a height chart on the door. For a second thoughts of amusement park rides flashed through my mind, then I realized what its real purpose was. If you robbed the place, they could use the camera footage of your entrance and the height chart to get an accurate guage of how tall you are. Which takes some of the heavy lifting away from the the clerk who just had a gun in his/her face ("He was about 5′4″… no make that 6′4″…") As Boston locals are wont to say that's wicked smart.