Thursday, July 10, 2003

Securing PyDoc Server and CGIHTTPServer PyDoc's author Ka-Ping Yee has suggested that PyDoc be patched to prevent access from unauthorized IP addresses (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&;atid=305470&aid=672656&group_id=5470), and that without such a patch, its not " suitable for running on boxes that aren't behind firewalls" It's hard to know how much to worry about such things (Comments?).   However, even with the patch IP addresses can be spoofed.  Here is an additional security tactic that might be adopted.  The port number used by pydoc is currently set by the user at the command line.  Many people probably use the example given in the python module documentation : "python -p 1234"    However, if the port were chosen at random and printed out, then only pydoc and the user would know how to access the pydoc server. I'm considering a similar strategy for a server based on the CGIHTTPServer module, so comments would be welcome.     comments? [] 9:30:34 AM     Wireless Frontier at Supernova   Here is my impressionistic transcript of the (very good) wireless session at Supernova. Unfortunately, I missed the first 10 minutes. MSFT is very interested in mesh wireless. It's a major area of research at MSFT Research, which isn't product development, it's basic R&D. Why wireless mesh? We believe in decentralization, power at the edge. Bob Metcalfe says that 1-2% of the chips produced every year are part of the Internet. The other 98% are not networked. As they come online, you get a Metcalfe's Law effect. In order to get billions of chips to talk to each other, we need to invent a new way. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] comments? [] 8:06:29 AM

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