Not a really an exciting week in security, except for some new MyDoom variants, Firefox vulnerabilities, and Checkpoint buffer overflows.  There's also some moronic ssh brute force activity going on.  I've seen some failed logins for guest, test, admin, and root from hosts such as 195.182.228.9, 211.68.120.41, 134.21.2.227, 61.193.179.162, 211.224.128.142.  Not to single them out, or anything.  It's just pretty stupid.

I recently saw The Bourne Supremacy and I, Robot.  The former was quite good, but the shaky camera motion made me sick; the latter had impressive computer-generated models and breathtaking camera angles, yet included almost no plot or storyline.  I probably should have read the book before seeing The Bourne Supremacy, though, oh well.

My second week of work was good.  I'm slowly becoming more comfortable with the environment and operating procedures at igxglobal.  I have some long-term projects now, which will undoubtedly test the strength of my organizational skills, as well as problem-solving skills.  The commute has not improved, though.  The trip home (Hackensack -> North Brunswick) still can take anywhere from fifty minutes to two hours, depending on the idiocy of the commuters.

I'm happy to announce that I got through my first week of work at igxglobal, alive!  It's pretty fun so far, but obvious that I have a bit to learn.  I also need to get used to getting up at 06:15 in the morning, compared to the 10:00 that I've been used to.  Figuring out an alternate route back from Hackensack might be useful, too.  The NJ Turnpike gets quite congested around 17:30.

Since I will have a somewhat steady income now, I've purchased a dedicated server from Sagonet.  The new server, nonce.prolixium.com, is currently handling primary DNS and mail.  If you're wondering, nonce is a term used in security engineering; it is a pseudo-random number used in authentication protocols.

I'll be starting work at igxglobal on Monday.  If all this free time has taught me anything, it's that retirement is going to be quite boring!  That's a long way down the road, though, so I won't worry about it.

In other news, I've added an RSS feed for my site news.  It's available by the little orange XML icon at the bottom of the page.  It currently conforms to RSS 1.0, and can be viewed with my pre-alpha RSS news grabber.  RSS feeds can be viewed with something like Feedreader for Windows or Straw for UNIX-based systems.

I've been trying to clean up the site, and redo some of the old images that don't include an alpha channel.  The Gimp has been a great help in this matter.  I've certainly warmed up to version 2.0.  I recently replaced the logo for the photos page.

And with that, have a great weekend!

I've recently licensed all the original content, excluding code, on this site under the Creative Commons License.  This will make it easier for 3rd parties to use any original content in their own works.

In other news, I recently hacked Firefox to refrain from looking up the PTR records for every IP which it connects.  I commented out the AI_CANONNAME flag in the hints that were passed to getaddrinfo() in the nspr resolver library.  If you want to hack this yourself, look at line 2085 of nsprpub/pr/src/misc/prnetdb.c in the source tree.

I went to Niagara Falls over the long weekend.  Here are a couple of photos that were taken during the trip.

I hope everybody had a great 4th of July.

This site, as well as other vhosts served off starfire will be down ALL of Saturday, due to a power substation replacement.  The outage will be from 06:00 -> 22:00 on 2004/06/26.  A copy of the announcement may be found here.

For those of you not following along, email sucks.  RBLs, open-relays, blocking of dynamic pools, etc. are making it even more difficult for email that is *not* spam to be delivered correctly.  For example, I just noticed that Optimum Online is now blocking connections to port 25/tcp on *their* MX hosts from (blink) their own dynamic pools.  Yes, I must now relay through mail-hub.optonline.net just to send mail to optonline.net accounts.  Is this spammer until proven innocent court?  The spammers have won, email is dead, we should all give up and go home.  ARGH!</rant>

In other news, I've recently accepted a position at igxglobal, a network security provider for small to large-sized companies.  I haven't started yet, but I look forward to putting some of my networking knowledge to use, and learning a bit in the process.

I'm pleased to announce that prolixium.com (note, *not* www.prolixium.com) is now available via SSL.  I self-signed the cert., so you'll get that warning message.  Don't worry, it's good.

(If this was an e-commerce site, I wouldn't just tell you to trust me)