For a while now I have been planning on giving the home desktop PC a re-bore. There is a lot of crud that has built up over time with tried and rejected software dregs, neglected games, layers of system build-up and so on.
Well last night it decided to lend me a hand in my decision making. After being prompted for the 5th time to upgrade the antivirus software that I had been using, I decided to load up a newer version that I was no longer using from a different PC. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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.