Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

Ok here is a cool idea, although it will take a bit longer to work out how it might integrate fully into the Website If I decide to use it. It is a geographic locator for a blog and I would like to see how it fits into the idlemind website.

Look for the Blogmap in the sidebar. Let me know it you think it is cool in the comments.

Edit: I kinda like the idea of this tool so I have moved it across from this post to the sidebar.

Relates to article from Silicon.com

While I was working on anti spam projects this was a question that came up all the time. The challenge of spam is that the definition of it is a kind of continuum, with email that you want and value at one end and crappy porno, and scam related junk mail at the other end. In between though there is a grey are that generates a lot of passion from people. (more…)

As part of my job and as a point of historical interest, I have been watching the sudden rise of the Mozilla browser, in the form of Firefox. This is one of the fear occasions where the open source world has developed a product and marketed it to non-technical users as a secure alternative to Internet Explorer.

I have embraced the new browser, and I am just getting used to the tabbed browsing features. Netscape have jumped onboard as well, releasing Version 8 of their browser based on the Firefox browser. In fact I have been using Netscape lately and like some of the added features. Unfortunately I have just discovered that it does not support the tablet PC’s pen entry function doesn’t work. This means that I have to go back to IE to write this up. Arghh!

This is something that I should feedback to Netscape or Firefox. I’ll update this post when I get some feedback (if I get a response).

I have just posted the comment below in response to this article

Bruce Schneier’s article http://www.schneier.com/essay-083.html implies that two-factor authentication is too out dated to be of any real use.

I believe that this is a very dangerous argument to be promoting, particularly since the existing username and password security that every service currently uses is not enough and criminals are easily compromising this fact already. In my experience the biggest hurdle is the get organisations to spend any money on any more advanced security solution.

Although second factor authentication using one-use changing passwords from a token device or from an SMS, can be compromised by some increasingly sophisticated attacks, they do stop most of the common existing ones. Key stroke loggers, standard phishing and other methods of just stealing static passwords can currently be used to passively generate databases of stolen login details. They become obsolete with the implementation of second factor authentication.

I also believe that online businesses are at the threshold of a new phase of development where the old username and password combination will be complemented with increasingly sophisticated levels of security solutions. These businesses must invest in these solutions and their customers must be given a choice over the usage of them. The penalty for choosing not to use them may be limited functionality or increased costs elsewhere.

Second factor authentication will not be the final solution for online security but it is the most mature solution for the next phase of security developments.

Well nearly a year ago Bill Gates announced that he was going to stop spam in it’s track within just a few year. Big words I though at the time. I was also nervous about what the solution may entail, ie Microsoft making changes to it’s software ensure that only email from Microsoft system to Microsoft system would be authenticated and therefore anything else would be treated as suspect.

I looks like Bill has discovered bigger phish to phry. In an interview in Germany regarding security Bill Gates has lost some of his optimism about defeating spam although still believes that there will be a spam free future. His attentions have turned to the promotion of the newer security threats like phishing. This time he is talking a lot about collaboration, which I agree, had to be the case.

In Australia I have seen different industries (ie ISP and financial) all scrambling collaborating amongst themselves but not engaging each other. This should be a great way of getting messages about security out to customers (again both ISP and Financial services). The banks could identify the messages that they need their customers to hear and then work with ISP’s to help distribute these messages. After email and general browsing, the use of online banking is the biggest driver of online take up so there should be a shared interest in getting customers online and feeling safe about using online banking services.

For myself, I have also had to back track from my earlier bravado. My old email account nick@bigpond.com is dead and gone, swallowed by the deluge of spam that it received. Even though I had a multi-layered defence to wipe out the worst of it, too much time was wasted in the fight.