December 2006 Archives

I was just thinking that there's lots of little advances in technology that you don't really think about but that add up to make a real difference to what you can do..

This time it's a combo of SSL VPN's and free broadband Internet in hotels that's letting me sit here and listen to any music from my home music collection without having to tote around player with me (that I always forget to charge!)

And the great thing is... it's all free.

The SSL VPN is courtesy of the excellent sslexplorer. the community edition is stored on my CentOS server at home which has a port forward from my little ipcop firewall..

The next piece of the puzzle is slimserver which is designed to support Slim devices squeeze boxes , but which they release as a free download whether you use their product or not... This lets me set up a stream over HTTP of any music I like, that I can connect to with any media player (windows media etc)

Actually what occurs to me is that the common piece of all this is Open source software. Without that all this would cost me a fortune and very likely I wouldn't have it at all...! Yay open source.

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System

This post on the sans handlers log has some really useful information about the use of netstat to detect connection information on windows boxes, with some features that I wasn't aware of.

Also put me on to something else that I've been woefully ignorant of . wmic

This looks like a really handy command-line tool for getting information out of windows boxes. from what I can see so far, there's a load of interesting information that you can get from it. To get started just type "wmic" from a command prompt then type /? for a list of "aliases" that wmic uses for information retrieval.

Some of the commands I've found so far which seem handy "process list brief" and nicconfig list brief" but you can use the /? switch after anything to get some useful help about options...

It occurs to me that I promised the odd cat when I set up this blog, and I've not really had any... so without further ado, here's some picture of our two that Marion captioned...

A post over on White Hat Security makes a great run at bursting the bubble of all the people saying that AJAX is some kind of terrible security risk.

I won't reiterate the arguments in the article, 'cause they do a pretty good job of laying out what the problems and non-problems of AJAX security are. I'd just say that I agree this has been a really overhyped area of security.