While reading Quicksilver I was looking for some on-line information about certain sections of the book and came across a wiki set-up by Neal Stephenson as a collection of annotations by page number as well as a sizable collection of other usefull resources to people who are reading this book.
I am currently around page 150 and so far I am loving this book.
I guess the big news today is that Verisign has suspended its controversial sitefinder services after pressure from ICANN.
ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate nonregistry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community, we will temporarily suspend Site Finder.
This sounds to me like they are taking it down for now, but will be back once their legal types went through the fine print of their contracts. Maybe the ICANN board has been smoking the same stuff that SCO has been smoking.
I noticed via Bugtraq and NT Bugtraq release from Data Security Software of a free Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003 Stack Guard for personal use, it essentially makes the stack on various services non-executable and thereby prevents from unknown vulnerabilities taking you out especially in IE and Outlook.
OverflowGuard 1.0 is now released. Buffer overflows are an easy way for hackers to gain access into a system. Traditionally the only way to protect your Windows system against buffer overflows was to install a patch from the vendor after the vulnerability was known. This left a period of time when hackers could break into your system regardless of how quickly you installed vendor patches. OverflowGuard has changed this. It protects almost every service on a Windows NT 4 / 2000 / XP / 2003 computer against buffer overflow exploit attempts. In the Unix world buffer overflow protection programs have existed for years. Unfortunately, due to the complexities of implementing such a program in Windows, no reliable buffer overflow protection has been available until now.
This sounds great, the download link is a simple no-frills download without any personal details being collected, kudos to them for that – all you have to do is agree to some fairly generic License Agreement.
UPDATE: They have now removed the Free one from their site and instead offers a 30 day edition. Silly Buggers.
I saw via Neal Stephenson’s page a link to a very good article on Introverts called Caring for Your Introvert, well worth reading if you are a extrovert trying to understand the people in your life who doesn’t say much and like to do their own thing.
2 weekends ago we went to the HMV in Canary Wharf after going to see the new – hugely disappointing – extension they made to Canary Wharf. HMV had a 3-for-20 special on CDs and for once they had something worth buying.
My SO chose her 3 CD’s and went to the till to pay where we were informed that one of the CD’s were not part of the promotion even though it a) were in the specials rack b) had the sticker on it showing it is.
