* Posts by Alex Schlup

5 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007

Canonical and VMware team on mini-Ubuntu

Alex Schlup

Because ...

if you said "download an iso image and burn it on a disk" to the average desktop/laptop user they'd stare at you blankly and report you to the men in the white coats.

The whole point is that if Linux is ever to make it on the desk top it has to come pre-installed from the major hardware vendors.

The Mirror website cracked

Alex Schlup

No DNS Servers

A whois shows that their domain has not expired.

Their nameservers however appear to have disappeared. They don't respond to a ping. Even if they are there (but with ICMP blocked) they certainly aren't serving up domain information for themirror.co.uk

The servers are :

ns1.zales.co.uk.

ns2.zales.co.uk.

Anyone who can reach the site must be working on cached domain information.

Alex Schlup

Email

If they use email addresses in the themirror.co.uk domain, they will not have been working either.

Ryanair check-in site exposes data

Alex Schlup

How bad is this really?

I've always wondered just how serious a security issue this really is.

Compared to other problems such as bad session handling and general coding errors this is surely fairly trivial.

If I'm trying to get someone's personal details the the use of viruses and trojans seems to be a far better option. To intercept someone's traffic to a website I need to find somewhere along the route between their PC and the website in question where I can plug in my sniffer and then wait for them to connect. This is surely a very time consuming and difficult thing, and other methods would seem to be far easier.

If anything, the real value of SSL is to assure the user that the site they are connected to is what it claims to be.

The lack of SSL only marginally increases the user's risk of losing personal information compared to the multitude of much more likely ways these details will be exposed (not least HR people leaving their laptops lying on a tube train).

If Google kills penguins, is it doing evil?

Alex Schlup

Meaningless stats

We all agree with the principles of corporate transparency and social responsibility, but what on the warming Earth does this paragraph mean :

"The ad broker builds a ton of data centers – some of the biggest data centers in the world. According to a recent study, the power needed to run and cool all of the data centers in the US equals the amount of energy needed to keep our color televisions glowing. It takes about five 1000MW power plants to fuel those servers here and 14 similar plans to power servers worldwide."

Is that all of Google's data centers in the US or all data centers full stop? Whose color televisions? Whose servers does it take five 1000MW power plants to run? Does "here" mean the US and is the power consumption just for the US servers or does that cover the 14 similar plants, whoever they belong to and wherever they are?

A bit less wishy washiness would be nice.