Updated: 8/1/2002; 12:41:31 AM.
Ham Journalism
Do... not... seek... the... treasure!
        

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Warchalking the University of Minnesota

As soon as my laptop comes, I plan on warchalking the kiosks here on campus. I'm actually going to print up some nice signs and make them look official to reduce the probability of them getting taken down.

Why mark them? Of the approximately 100 kiosks on campus, about half of them are actually wireless access points. They are not marked in any way. If I'm out and about on campus, I could either look the information up online, or visually check to see if a kiosk is an access point. Besides, it'll give me something to do, and possibly even inform other people of the availability of wireless access in the area.

The only problem is that the access points are closed, and you have to register your MAC with the University network people, so all of the access points would be the circle-w sign. Still, useful for those in the know.


5:54:25 PM    comment []

As seen on Slashdot and elsewhere: A Linux user goes back:

This will make it much easier for home users to know what applications they have installed on their PC, and to easily uninstall them if necessary, without knowing some arcane commands and weird package names.

Hmm, FreeBSD maintains a clean separation between system-level stuff and third party packages. All third-party inessential things get installed under /usr/local, and the Ports tree makes it not only fun and easy to compile software (e.g. cd /usr/ports/www/mozilla; make install clean), but it maintains a database of what is and is not installed. Packages are kept hierarchically, so it is easy to find what you want.

Alternatively, one could always switch to a Mac. You get your user interface, and you will not lose the power of the Unix command line. Yum.


4:12:00 PM    comment []

NTBugTraq: RCS public file sharing vulnerability

Looks like this has been sitting around for a while, and Dave doesn't think it's worth fixing, as noted in the very last sentence in this report.

Intruders can publish public files on a server without any special user permission over a network. - You don't need a user account or anything else on the target machine to make this work.

Update: Oops, that quote did not reflect the statement above it. The statement I probably should have put in there was:

The vendor has been contacted but does not agree with our vulnerability analysis.

Which is something I would expect to hear from the "vendor" in question :) RCS probably should ship with the option set to "off" with documentation explaining the consequences of turning it on.


11:58:13 AM    comment []

Content Management is software that gets developed when everyone gets bored of doing E-Commerce.


11:17:54 AM    comment []


© Copyright 2002 Tony Collen.
 
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