Chad's News

Chad’s News previously mentioned the DNS security hole now known as the Kaminsky Bug. The linked article has more information about the discovery and revelation of the bug.

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Slashdot)

The internet was designed to be decentralized, error-tolerant, and highly variable in how it could route packets from one computer to another. According to Wikipedia, the “internet backbone” is “made up of a large collection of interconnected commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity data routes and core routers that carry data across the countries, continents and oceans of the world.” The internet doesn’t have a backbone in the traditional sense; rather, it’s more like a spider web. Many of the connections referenced in the Wikipedia definition are between major service providers who have cooperative agreements (I’ll carry your traffic if you’ll carry mine). The linked article explains what happens when one of those agreements breaks down, and gives insight into just how fragile the internet can be.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/…
(via digg)

And I always thought it was because they were too out of touch with technology.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Update: Turns out that he may be keeping his Blackberry after all.

Update #2: Yes he can.

This 60 Minutes segment discusses how there are little or no consequences for those caught cheating at online gambling. To make matters worse, there’s also the possibility of encountering a computerized opponent designed to rake in the money from poker novices.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

The linked article addresses the question of how to remove embarrassing or career-impacting personal information from the internet. It turns out there are a lot of things that seemed like good ideas at the time but later turn negative—I think the most obvious are drunken/risqué pictures. The short answer is that it’s really difficult to remove things from the internet, and the best way is to make sure they never get there in the first place.

I’m at the point where I think carefully about what I write in website comments, to the point of the Digg comments on which I click the “thumbs up” icon. That information is stored somewhere, and even though some of it isn’t currently available for general viewing, it may not remain that way. Here on Chad’s News I have total control and can change anything. Yet there’s The WayBackMachine, the Google cache, The Coral Content Distribution Network, and other caching or archiving services. Those are much more difficult to modify.

My previous employer checked me out on the web before hiring me, as did a woman I met on match.com. Fortunately I “passed” whatever tests they were giving me. This shows, however, how much my online presence can affect my life.

Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Ever wondered about the success rate of spam? Researchers hijacked a botnet and used it to distribute millions of spam email messages. The response rate was 1 per 12,500,000 emails sent. (By the way, what they did was illegal, even though it was in the name of research.)

Link: http://www.techradar.com/…
(via digg)

We’re all familiar with CAPTCHAs, those weird pictures with distorted numbers and letters that you have to copy when submitting an online form. They’re designed to ensure that a human, rather than a computer, is the one doing the submitting. So what’s honest spammer to do? Simple, just hire cheap labor.

Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Cloud storage is “a way for enterprises to rely on a third party for their storage needs without having to build and manage their own data storage infrastructure.” Some businesses and individuals have turned to it as a cost-saving measure, or as a way to make data available from any location. The downfall of cloud storage, however, is that you’re totally reliant on someone else to protect your data. There are many ways to minimize the risk of data loss, the simplest of which is redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, but it looks like people in the linked article didn’t take those steps.

Link: http://www.networkworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

All that time in medical school wasted…

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via digg)

Should you ever get into trouble with the MPAA or RIAA for illegally downloading copyrighted movies/music, the linked article will be very helpful.

Link: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Yesterday (May 3rd) was the 30th anniversary of the first internet spam message. The linked article has the exact text of the message. Interestingly, an interview with the message’s author reveals that it was very successful.

Link: http://tech.yahoo.com/…
(via Neatorama)

You’ve seen CAPTCHAs, even if you’re not familiar with the word. They’re those pictures with distorted words that you have to enter when registering or posting on some sites. It’s supposed to ensure that it’s a real, live human performing the input, instead of some sort of ‘bot. Well, the ‘bots are getting good at reading CAPTCHAs—so good that they can average one valid guess per minute on Windows Live Hotmail. This makes CAPTCHAs fairly useless, and I expect to see them get phased out for something better (whatever that may be). Chad’s News uses an arithmetic entry for anonymous comment submission, but even this has not stopped some spammers.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…