Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, January 27, 2003

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MS SQL worm's mayhem trail includes bank ATMs and airlines: "Well, speaking of network theory: "SQL Slammer" -- that hellacious MS SQL worm that severely slowed 'Net traffic worldwide last night -- caused service outages at tens of thousands of Bank of America ATMs and wreaked havoc at Continental Airlines. Apparently, customers at most of the #3 American bank's 13,000 automatic teller machines were unable to process transactions for a period of time. BofA's system is expected to be fully online again by late today." (Link to Reuters story, Link to Infoworld story) [Boing Boing Blog]

Palladium is now "next-generation secure computing base" -- Comment()
Palladium changes name, but not stripes: 'Palladium -- Microsoft's "trusted computing" program that may be used to protect users from getting hacked but is more likely to be used to undermine competition -- is changing names. [...] Microsoft is adopting a new name to replace the code name Palladium. Effective today, we will use "next-generation secure computing base" to describe the technology and the related development efforts that have until now been done under the Palladium banner. [...] As Dan sez: "You can put makeup on a pig. It's still a pig." Seems to me that the principle "advantage" of calling Palladium "next-generation secure computing base" is that no one will be able to remember the new name.' [Boing Boing Blog]

The Beauty of the Worm -- Comment()
The Beauty of the Worm: "It's a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. [...] It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it's connected to..." [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

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Comic relief of sorts, at Microsoft's expense: "The laugh's on Microsoft, but we are all losing due to their domination of networks and the nuts and bolts of the Internet." [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

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Editing Radio Weblogs: "This page describes how to configure NetNewsWire and Radio UserLand so you can use NetNewsWire to edit your Radio weblog. (There will be similar pages for other weblog systems too, of course.)" [ranchero.com]

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The document Apple X11 Public Beta FAQ contains a lot of helpful questions and answers. [ranchero.com]

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Internet slowed by suspected denial-of-service attack: "A large-scale denial-of-service attack hit the Internet Saturday, causing varying degrees of trouble to computer users and server operators around the world, according to security experts. [...] The problems began at around 5:30 am GMT (12:30 am EST), and initial reports suggest the cause was a worm that exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server. [...] One of the countries worst affected was South Korea, where most of the nation's fixed-line and mobile Internet users were unable to access Web sites for nearly half of the day. [MacCentral]