ze blog of simon » Security

What the Amish are Teaching America?

simonm — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:57:26 +0000

I read this on Saturday night, it was also covered in Church this morning, by Pastor Benji, here’s an excerpt:

The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that okay? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts’ family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don’t automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.

You can read the full article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1006-33.htm

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

simonm — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:34:15 +0000

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It’s just one of those tools you can’t live with out.

Reasons not to use IE

simonm — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 22:04:17 +0000

Bruce Schnier spotted this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/internet_explor.html
IE was unsafe for 98% of 2004. Firefox on Windows was unsafe for 7% of 2004.

dshield.org

simonm — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:02:18 +0000

I’m a regular reader of the Internet Storm Center Handlers Diary, there have been some recent mentions of the DShield project, where you can upload your router/firewall logs to there central monitoring system, so that they can gather stats & produce reports on the ebb & flow of certain attacks and probes. They also a scheme called FightBack:

DShield.org is now helping users to fight back against attackers. We will analyze submitted log reports and pick a number of strong cases to forward them to the ISP from which the attack originated. A copy of the abuse report will be forwarded to the user.

So after reporting an abuse IP to the ISP, they ISP admins can do something about the user, as well as update you with how they responded:

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:25:43 -0500

This user has been locked in the trunk of a 1980 Cadillac along with his PC and has been driven up and down a very bumpy road for several hrs and we believe that the problem is now resolved.

Thank you for the report

You can see more of the results from the FightBack here. See, us admin types aren’t all dried up crusty types…