So That's What That Sounds Like!

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:36 pm

Good morning everyone and welcome to another installment of what craziness Tycho is doing this week. Well as I type today's news I am listening to Alice in Chains Unplugged on my newly purchased Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value. I find myself having mixed feelings, I mean on one hand I am leary of all of the driver issues I had in the early Nineties with Creative and on the other I am amazed at being able to hear the small vibrations of the accoustic guitar. I know I will have to tweak it to my liking so I can't fully judge it yet. I will definitely throw up a review in a couple of weeks once I put it through it's paces.

Speaking of putting things through their paces, USA Today has a disturbing articles on just how fast unprotected PCs can be hacked now. Several things are scary about this article. I was suprised at how many attacks Apple computers get. They were not all that far behind the Windows based PCs.

It goes to show you that Microsoft is moving in the right step (security wise) with Service Pack 2. While I don't agree we have to go as far as former CIA Director George Tenet suggests, I do think that we have to stop the 'dumming down' of the Internet and make it a more safe and secure place.

On to the news...

Guest

Okay, so with regards to the Macinotosh they set up, for some reason they chose to set it up with Windows File Sharing and a bunch of other services enabled. This is *not* the default install settings unlike the other computers in the test (from my understanding), and is the reason that it got almost the same number of attacks as the SP1 PC. All the net beasties thought they were attacking a Windows box running file sharing. Grrrr. By default, OS X comes with no services enabled and would likely have gotten a similar number of attacks to the Linux box. On the other hand, none of the attacks on the Mac suceeded either. Smile

One other FYI, they started out with a very weak password on each ('password' in fact). The object was to see how fast that would get dictionary hacked. Oddly, the Mac didn't ever sucumb to that either, but that was why the Windows Server shows one hack--it was a weak password guess. Once each hack was detected, they fixed/patched the issue that caused the hack. So when the SP1 box got hacked nine times, that is nine separate viruses boarding it--not the same virus nine times.

Hope this helps clarify some stuff... there's a pretty good (and long) discussion of this on slashdot.org last Thursday or Friday.

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 12:32 am

Thanks for the headsup. Do you have a link to that article on /.?

Guest

Here's the link to the discussion this caused on slashdot.org:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/1932245&tid=220&tid=172&tid=201

And the discussion on Ars Technica just for good measure: Very Happy

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=dl&s=50009562&f=174096756&x_id=1101851462&x_subject=From+honeypot+to+bot+in+minutes&x_link=http://arstechnica.com&x_ddp=Y

Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 3:03 am

Cool. I will do a follow up to this article on Monday.

Guest

Good choise with Alice in Chains unplugged. How is that Audigy 2 Value review coming on? I just ordered one as well the other day Smile

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:56 pm

I will have some time to work on it later this weekend. I have only had it for 5 days now. Smile