by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 4, 2004 | Usefull Things
I came across Furl via blog.org. Furl is a fantastic tool for storing bookmarks on-line, you simply drag a bookmarklet onto your browser and any site you come across you just hit the “Furl It” button, this creates a popup window that lets you file the url into your bookmarks list.
The bookmarks list can be shared in many ways, people can view it directly on the Furl servers via the web, you can send e-mail updates and you can even subscribe to a RSS feed of someone else’s links. Excellent, I am hooked!
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 3, 2004 | Front Page
A new security advisory has been released by the FreeBSD team that affects all versions of the operating system.
I. Background
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) of the TCP/IP protocol suite
provides a connection-oriented, reliable, sequence-preserving data
stream service. When network packets making up a TCP stream (“TCP
segments”) are received out-of-sequence, they are maintained in a
reassembly queue by the destination system until they can be re-ordered
and re-assembled.
II. Problem Description
FreeBSD does not limit the number of TCP segments that may be held in a
reassembly queue.
III. Impact
A remote attacker may conduct a low-bandwidth denial-of-service attack
against a machine providing services based on TCP (there are many such
services, including HTTP, SMTP, and FTP). By sending many
out-of-sequence TCP segments, the attacker can cause the target machine
to consume all available memory buffers (“mbufs”), likely leading to
a system crash.
They supply patches for FreeBSD 4.8, 4.9 and 5.2 and you can either apply those and rebuild just the kernel or upgrade your world to recent releases.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 25, 2004 | Usefull Things
I noticed this on voidstar.com, a document containing instructions for turning off HTML email sending in about a zillion mail clients, excellent!
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 25, 2004 | Photography Equipment
There is a interesting look inside the Nikon D70 factory in Thailand that is set to produce 800 000 D70’s in 2004, interesting pictures etc.
The projected production run for 2004 is 800,000 units of the D70 camera body from the Nikon Thailand factory. The D70 has been eagerly awaited world wide by photographers because it is the first Digital SLR camera body to challenge the immensely popular Canon 300D (Digital Rebel).
Nikon has gone Canon better this time and produced a camera that has capabilities so far not available at this camera’s price point and some capabilities not available before at any price point. Although prices may vary in different regions, the current battle between Canon and Nikon is for the US $999. digital SLR camera market.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 24, 2004 | Front Page
I noticed on Boing Boing Blog a story about the FBI shutting down a whole ISP, shifting its servers to their HQ for data mining purposes in order to investigate a single suspected attack launched from their IRC servers.
This is a truly shocking example of the kind of freedom that Americans really enjoy, the privacy of citizens is non existent if the FBI can just pitch up and copy terabytes of data not belonging to the individual they are pursuing. Read all about it on the poor ISP’s News Page. This is the kind of story that a few decades ago would be shoved in your faces as an example of the atrocities of Communism by these very same self righteous Americans.
The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host. According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.
After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.
UPDATE: This is covered here as well, link via slashdot.org
