admin, dev, curmudgeon.
Residential ISP log data from the east coast US Mark: if you're reading this I need you to get right on this issue please. (Thanks!) # whois.ripe.net inetnum: 31.13.64.0 - 31.13.127.255 netname: IE-FACEBOOK-20110418 country: IE org: ORG-FIL7-RIPE admin-c: NE1880-RIPE tech-c: NE1880-RIPE status: ALLOCATED PA mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT mnt-by: meta-mnt mnt-routes: fb-neteng created:…
One of the sillier things I've done as an AWS/linux admin is provision an EBS disk as swap to an EC2 instance. I kept getting max allocate errors for a script I needed to run to execute a series of database queries. Reprovisioning to a new EC2 instance class with more RAM wasn't feasible at the time for some long-forgotten reason. I would never do this if I owned the disks - provisioning swap to…
This weekend I spent some time migrating a few low-traffic websites from Nginx to AWS S3's static web hosting service. In theory, this is a straightforward process: move content from the old webroot to an S3 bucket that shares the name of the domain, enable static web hosting for the bucket & set a security policy that enables anonymous web users to see that content. In practice, there's a bit…
There has been grumblings since July that some of the folks over at LHC may have discovered a new fundamental particle: the dicharm tetraquark . From Quanta Magazine: [Igor] Polyakov went away and double-checked his analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which the Syracuse group is part of. The evidence held. It showed that a particular set of four fundamental…
UPDATE: Microsoft has released a patch for CVE-2021-40444 as of 9-14 ... but that doesn't mean its been installed on your systems yet, so check! The KB varies by distro, but it should be around KB5005565-KB5005568 for recent Windows 10 x64 versions. CVE-2021-40444 is a new remote code execution vulnerability in Windows that involves embedded ActiveX controls in Office document files (.doc, .docx,…
Six years ago (sigh), I wrote but never published this blog post begging users to find an alternative to the PPTP VPN protocol. They were already years out of date at that time. Even today, however, well-known companies like ExpressVPN are still providing PPTP to clients despite the fundamentally insecure nature of these types of tunnels. Consider this an intervention. For years, the Virtual…
Below, I've included what would have been the first post in a series of posts I wrote about the badBIOS controversy in October 2013. I found the evidence in support of badBIOS to be unconvincing and I was concerned by how popular badBIOS became despite those obvious shortcomings. This wasn't a situation where an overexcitable press ran with a story that turned out to be inaccurate; the most early…
Lets say we have a form. The form is straight-forward: HTML radio buttons that posts to a PHP processing script that saves the results to a database. The radio buttons correspond to bindary responses to questions - Yes/No, True/False. These truth values are mapped to the integers '1' and '0', which are then stored in the database. When such a form is creating new records, this is about as…
This is the latest update of the list of windows license keys for key management service activation I publish every few years. Reference the KMS activation post I wrote for Windows 2012 for help installing one of the keys (` slmgr /ipk yourkeyhere` from a command prompt as an administrator) Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel versions Windows Server, version 1909, version 1903, and version 1809…
I can recall listening to a radio program some 10-15 years ago. The host of the show believed that it would soon be possible to build a faster-than-light communications system using quantum entangled particles, and interviewed several people from a company who were seeking funding to somehow make that happen. But why not? There would be tremendous value in some sort of "quantum phone" of entangled…
I watched Rob Eastaway's 2019 for the Royal Institute today. Everything from RI is great and worth checking out, but Eastaway delivered a statistic I hadn't come across before: 90% of all spreadsheets contain errors. Mr Eastaway himself had only come across the statistic from another source, the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (or EuSpRIG for short). This is not a trivial issue.…
I needed to setup a quick Cassandra environment in Windows today, but I ran into a problem when executing the quick start guide from Cassandra's (excellent) website . The quick start assumes a working Docker environment. Because this is in Windows, WSL 2 has been configured, and the Docker for Windows binary has been properly installed: docker pull cassandra:latest docker network create cassandra…
We tend to overestimate the reliability of authority figures, and this impacts how we should analyze data for public policy. Public data is an intrinsic appeal to authority The CDC's WONDER database keeps track of causes of death within the United States . When a death certificate is created for a person in the United States, the certificate includes a special code indicating the cause of death.…
Over the last month or so I've noticed that all of the ads and retail descriptions of low-end PCs I have been seeing have updated their description of the included version of Windows. Instead of promising that purchasing a new PC includes "Windows 10", "Windows 10 Home" or "Windows 10 Pro", the operating system was listed as "Windows 10 S", as shown in the screenshot below: Windows 10 "S-Mode"…
During the pandemic I've been spending my time in a somewhat rural area. There's a lake. There's bugs. There's lots of flora and fauna of all shapes and sizes. Every once in a while I spot something incredible. About a year ago I was enjoying my morning coffee when I happened upon this in my backyard: Just FYI - I'm not using some giant telephoto lens and zooming in from a mile away in those…
Oooo boy, I can't wait to browse discounted "Dog Supplies" on Amazon. Wait. What?
Microsoft fully ended support for their Windows 7 product in January of last year. The change is primarily administrative: Microsoft will no longer distribute security patches for free with Window 7 or guarantee its functionality. It is not a sudden move by Microsoft: the company has a well-documented support cycle for all versions of Windows, and Windows 7 customers were given plenty of…
Over in Europe, Irish Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon has just succeeded in her push to prevent Facebook from transferring data on European users back to the United States . At issue is a series of data transfer agreements between the EU and the US; it is the (reasonable) contention of Commissioner Dixon that the United State's regime of warrantless spying makes Facebook unable to comply…
The internet was a lot more fun in the 90s.
Full disclosure: I've been employed by several companies that were customers and/or vendors of SolarWinds. However, I have never been employed by SolarWinds and I was not compensated for this post. On December 13th, digital security firm FireEye published a post to their blog with the comprehensive title " Highly Evasive Attacker Leverages SolarWinds Supply Chain to Compromise Multiple Global…
Yesterday, on December 14th, all services associated with Google Workspace (AKA GSuite - or for those who aren't familiar with it, what is essentially Google's paid "business" services) went offline for roughly an hour from 7AM to 8AM Eastern time. Users typically first encountered the error when attempting to send email or after receiving an error indicating that their account could "not be…
Over the last few weeks, a botnet has been mass-uploading a specific package of what appears to be malware (I haven't had time to look at the payload itself yet). Cleverly, the person(s) behind this effort have appeared to scrape filenames from titles that have already been pirated by popular uploaders. Stupidly, each download uses an obviously fraudulent filesize of 8.04MB. Videogames have not…
Three years ago I wrote a blog post demonstrating how the International Business Times appeared to be associated with some extremely shady online advertising networks , resulting in International Business Times article links being advertised on places like malware-filled mirrors of The Pirate Bay. The presence of IB Times on a Pirate Bay clone site was particularly ironic as the online news outlet…
For over a year I assisted the Palm Beach Post with an in-depth investigation on the State of Florida's involvement with sparking the current heroin epidemic. That investigation has just been published . Among other things, I assisted the Post by creating a custom player to support a carousel-style multimedia presentation with full-screen video encoded using Azure Media Services and distributed…
Earlier this week a young government contractor named Reality Winner was accused by police of leaking an internal NSA document to news outlet The Intercept. The documents outline the intelligence community's take on Russian efforts to hack a variety of companies responsible for facilitating US election voting. You can read the documents here . Despite what anyone might have to say about the issue…