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* Posts by Craig Small

4 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2007

Open source's ardent admirers take but don't give

Craig Small
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Happy

FOSS is FS and OS

That sounds more like an Open Source project rather than a Free Software one. The difference is often not that big and its more around the drivers of the people rather than anything tangible. What you're seeing there is the difference. It doesn't mean all OS projects would do the same, but any FS developers probably would do that.

Contributions, as a lot of others have said, are often difficult to track. Who says there isn't more contributions that whoever they asked didn't know their company did? It wouldn't be the first time management isn't fully up on what their techs are doing.

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Bug exposes eight years of Linux kernel

Craig Small
Linux

Priv escalation

Privilege escalation usually means that you are logged into a computer as a normal bog-standard user and using this trick you suddenly have root access, or at least some sort of access that you should not have.

If you have some valid remote way of getting in as a standard user, for example ssh or telnet then you don't need physical access. The real worry is if there is a two-step attack, where the first step is to get a normal user account through some other nefarious means and then use that account to get extra privileges.

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DNS gaffe leaves spy agency totally under cover

Craig Small
Black Helicopters

DNS and HTTP servers

You try to run them on different machines so an attack on one doesn't impact the other.

Imagine the webserver (because that is the most likely) has a problem and hackers get into the machine. With them both on the same machine you can now change the DNS records (and let's up the TTL while your at it) to point www.nsa.gov to somewhere else; perhaps a website using a christmas island domain and pictures of goats, or.. whatever.

Even when the do fix it the large TTL would mean it would point to the wrong server for a long time.

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ISPs turn blind eye to million-machine malware monster

Craig Small

Port 25 blocking can work

My ISP blocks port 25 outbound and it works rather well. I run my own mailserver but forward all outbound mail to the ISP's server.

Alternatively, if I wanted to, I could go to the ISP's toolbox page and remove the filtering. It's on by default, but you can remove it if you want.

This means, say, 90% of the users it just works and it protects the Internet from some overtaken PC. The ISP also tracks the outbound email and if it thinks you are sending spam will warn you, either on a website or part of the download counter on your desktop.

It seems like a pretty easy and sensible approach to me. For the great majority of ISP's customers they wouldn't even know it was there, until they got infected and the little user thing pops-up and says "hey you have a problem".

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