Topic Flood

OK... As I go about my daily business, I track things that are noteworthy. Some things are things that I want to mention here, some warrant further consideration. Many of the things just seem to pile up because I don't have time to put something coherent together or because they require further exploration. Again, I am limited by available time.

In an attempt to "get stuff out there and shorten the list", I am going to try posting short blurbs where I can. I may do a few things at a time (probably in multiple postings). Because of the short-ish nature of these things, I expect that there will be an increase in the number of postings that have multiple "parts" to them.

We'll see how this works.

Helping Bill Gates out of Debt?

Rather humorous comment by Bill Gates in 2003 about SPAM:

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick.

Hehehe... The full article "Why I Hate Spam" is on Microsoft's site.

More quotes from Gates can be found in this ZDNet article.

"Rod Memory"

Another morsel from the Institute of Druidic Technology - Rod Memory.

Unlike the bit, rods only have one state, as they are used to represent digits of the unary number system.

It is believed that rods which were broken, knobby or covered with moss or lichen aided in the eventual development of fuzzy logic.

The unary number system is covered at another Institute page, here.

The 'R' Programming Language

From The Institute of Druidic Technology:

The programming language used "Teutonic" runes (which, contrary to popular belief, were invented by the Druids for this purpose) for the elements of the language.

This is great stuff. I wonder if they ever did an ++...

New TCPIP.SYS = Repatch with LvlLord's TCPIP.SYS Patcher Program

The patch introduced to address the vulnerability described by Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-032 (Vulnerability in TCP/IP Could Allow Remote Code Execution (917953)) drops a new TCPIP.SYS.

If you're using LvlLord's patch to change the half-open TCP limit from 10 connections to 50, you'll need to reapply.

Interesting Social Engineering Tactic

Social Engineering, the USB Way describes an interesting social engineering tactic - leaving trojan-laced USB drives is easy to find places. The trojan would auto-run when plugged in to the computer, and "would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back". The article describes this type of thing taking place at a credit union, but I would think the results would be similar almost anywhere.

27.6 MB is -3% of 3.12 GB

If you believe IE6's download progress indicator (and everyone does, right?), 27.6 MB is -3% of 3.12 GB. I was downloading Vista Beta 2 and, of course, was experiencing problems - the download servers were flooded. I didn't want to use the Akamai Download Manager, so I tried the "plain" method a few times and got this:

I finally resorted to the Akamai Download Manager. The results were much better. No, I didn't get a successful download for another 24 hours. But not having a negative progress indicator is an improvement...

Beam me up, Scotty!

Altiris "is a worldwide company that has expanded its technology to provide affordable IT lifecycle management solutions for organizations of any size". (http://www.altiris.com/Company.aspx)

I recently had a chance to interact with a system that had Altiris software installed on it. I was digging through the system and I noticed a driver that didn't have a version resource associated with it. The name was "ALKERNEL.SYS". I did some more digging and found an interesting string in the binary: "ScottWroteThis!".

Scott, whoever you are, at least one person has acknowledged your efforts. Next time, toss a version resource in the driver along with some company info, and sign it while you're at it.

Oddly enough, the "Modified" timestamp on ALKERNEL.SYS seems to be updated with relative frequency... I think I'm going to have to see about doing some monitoring on this system, just to try and figure out what on earth is "updating" this file.

Neglect, and other famous excuses...

Been a while since I've had a chance to get anything posted. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been collecting oodles of stuff that's just waiting for some attention... I've got a laundry list of things I'd like to blog about, and no time to really collect my thoughts and put together a coherent piece. In fact, some topics have been on the list so long they may not even be relevant, or I may not be able to recall what specifically I wanted to say. Senility++.