Fixing everything, really slowly

Had some fun today!

I’m now writing about technology, but not showing it on the main web page or in my existing feed. If you want to read this new, exciting, extra-geeky content you need to:

• Subscribe to the technical-only feed (an ignore the occasional cross posting).

or

• Subscribe to the everything feed (and unsubscribe from this feed)

The technical content looks like this.

If you are interested in why I’ve done this then read on, otherwise, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy/ignore the new content!

Background

One of the reasons I blogged so intermittently in the past is I was never clear what my audience was. I didn’t want to aliente the few readers I had by suddenly writing about geeky stuff like programming, operating systems, IT security and mobile phones when previously I’d been writing about the environment, sustainability, music and things that make me laugh. I always ended up thinking that people wouldn’t be interested in some topics and, having no where to write them, I would just never bother to post.

Some people have multiple blogs to solve this problem but I feel that sometimes an overlap between the things that interest me and I want to easily cross post to one blog. Maybe I’ll live to regret this change, but as of now I have two categories of posting on this site, Technical and General.

The technical content is intended for technology professionals and geeks. It’s mainly a new audience and I’m looking forward to writing about another area of interest. Technical articles won’t shown on the front page and aren’t included in the existing feed that I’ve had for many years. I hope this works out.

General articles includes everything I’ve previously written. Hopefully this content will appeal to a wider audience of non-geeks and I’ll feel freer to write about more general subjects. My key requirement is to be able to write about environmental stories on the front page and not have them lost in a load of geeky stuff.

Absolutely fascinating reading on the state of IT security and corporate espionage.

At this point, [the hackers] move laterally through the network, compromising systems as they go and using other exploits to attack additional vulnerabilities. The systems being compromised are Windows systems.

Stolen e-mail messages and documents are collected and stored on a staging server inside the company’s network before being encrypted with custom algorithms and compressed into an .rar file. The files are then siphoned out in small random bursts generally via normal protocols with spoofed headers to disguise the activity. In the case of the Google hack, the attackers used an SSL port but a custom protocol.

From: Report Details Hacks Targeting Google, Others | Wired.com.

I’m guessing sales of statefull packet inspecting firewalls will increase this year! It’s sad reading about exploits caused by organisations not following common sense security best practices.

In a funny way these compromises actually validate Google security approach. For example they are:

• Openly encouraging people to move to more up to date browsers
• Making there own open source browser (chrome) which focuses on security thus publicly demonstrating how to solve the very problems being exploited.
• Making web based applications which they can manage and apply security best practices to, thus partially outsourcing the challenges of maintaing secure applications for businesses (I really like their new browser based pdf viewer).

I’m guessing they are cracking down on internal IE usage right now. If I were maintaing an IT department I think I’d configure the proxies and firewalls to forward all outbound traffic from old browsers to a page outlining internal browser policy and offering download links for new ones (after having provided and promoted official alternatives and provided workarrounds for web developers).

Anyone know of a good neutral third party website you can point people to to learn about browsers?

Thanks for trying to access the microsite for Sigh No More – Mumford & Sons

Unfortunately due to contractual restrictions, access to this promotion is not available to residents of Finland.

From Push Entertainment (if you are in finland).

Yet another case of legal nonsense stopping fans listening to music. This is particularly stupid since I was trying to access “bonus content” for those that “own a copy of sigh no more”.

Before signing to a major label (Island) Mumford and sons did a good job of promoting themselves using sites like myspace and rawrip. The latter lets them give away tracks to fans or sell them and take 100% of the money. I was hoping they might get big without a major label to help.

I’d downloaded their first two singles and listened to the tracks tons (as well as the tracks on myspace) all for free. When the album came out I bought it straight away. I’ve paid to see the band at least 5 times. I’m a fan that wants to support some musicians trying to earn a living.

Its sad to see large corporations continue to screw it up like this.

Island records: The internet is global and so is your market. Adapt or die.

BTW: Sigh no more is an amazing album!