The Wonderful (or not so wonderful) life of Greg

These pranksters took the words “Portable Computing” to a new level today invading their local Starbucks for a Grande Latte with their Grande Portable Computers

Cheers,

G

Morning all from the Qantas Club lounge at Melbourne Airport, where the coffee is flowing, the toast is burning and the planes are running F**KING LATE! Bloody Jetstar!

Oh well, thank god for Qantas Club, kick back and drink coffee and relax while your dodgy plane gets fixed!

Now I haven’t really done much blogging on the music front of late, but I have been watching a great series that ABC2 are running at the moment. ABC2 is channel 22 on Digital (yes, you will need a set top box or a new big arse tv, sorry!).

Filmed at Womadelaide over the last few years, this series runs on a Tuesday night at 10.30pm on ABC2 and is just under 2 hours of great live music featuring some great local and international acts that you may not normally see unless you actually went along.

So far, I’ve been pretty impressed, so make sure if you’re into some great live music to check it out!

Cheers,

G

Well with the release of Leopard (OS X 10.5.2) being released during the week, I was really looking forward to the rumor of having native support for 3rd party Network Attached Storage devices for Time Machine, but alas, no, we didn’t get it.

So you still have to use:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

to get Time Machine to backup to your own NAS device.

What we did get in 10.5.2 are some things that were certainly shitting me.

• Transparent Menus - Finally they got the idea the seeing your desktop under every menu bar was REALLY REALLY annoying! Especially for people like me who has a few hundred images in a folder that changes my background randomly every minute.
• Time Machine now has a little icon up in the menu bar so that you can force a backup now, browse your backup or access the prefs quickly.
• and the other main thing is Stacks.In 10.5.1 we had the ability to view Stacks as Grid or Fan view, Grid was good Fan was just annoying, but the staff in down town Cupertino (Apple Headquarters) have listened to their beloved users and in 10.5.2 we now have the 10.4 List view back again!

What else is happening in the Mac world?

Skype has release v2.7.0.057 which sees some stability and security issues addressed and a long list of bug fixes. See the release notes here!

Speed Download 5, a popular download manager for the Mac was released earlier this week to version 5. I must say that previous versions of this software have been fantastic, so it will certainly be interesting to see what the team over at Yazsoft have done this time.

Microsoft Office Mac 2004 has received a pretty big update this patch Tuesday addressing some fairly major vulnerabilities and bug fixes. You can read more about that here.

And probably one of the biggest to hit this week is the release of Apple TV Take 2. A free download for anyone who currently has an Apple TV and now shipping as standard on any new Apple TV’s. To find out the differences, I suggest you check out the blog entry I wrote on the MacWorld Keynote which has a lot of the information, or look here for some info on TUAW.

Well that’s about all I can think of in the Mac World for this week.

Have a good weekend

G

Well, nearly another week down, and I can’t believe that we’re already half way through February. Time just seems to be flying. Is it just me? Next thing you know you wake up and it’s December. Crazy I tells ya!

What’s been happening in my world? It’s certainly been busy. Just trying to keep my mind active and keep occupied. Lots of work, have a fair bit of St John stuff happening which has been interesting, something different, something new, and a whole new lot of political bullshit to learn.

On the work front, lots happening at the moment, every day seems to keep me busy which is good. Off to the Gold Coast in a few weeks to do a couple of days of work which should be fun and games. Looking forward to a change of scenery for a few days actually. I sure as hell need it at the moment.

Well it’s been an interesting Valentines day. Got a valentines SMS from someone who I have absolutely no idea who they are, sent them one back asking who the hell they were and nothing, so I either have a stalker on my hands, a secret admirer, or just a wrong number. Hrmm, a stalker… that could be fun…. hrmmm I think… LOL

After all the hoo haa in the media about Underbelly, I went and downloaded it this morning and watched it this evening, WOW, what a show, an amazing cast and it really captures some amazing stuff that goes on. Let’s just hope that they lift the ban on it in Victoria so that I don’t have to download future episodes.

What’s on for the rest of the week?
Well tomorrow will have a fairly full on day, try knock over as much work as I can in the morning, then will duck out to Werribee to see Nic riding at Barastoc and take some photos for her.
Saturday, nothing planned at this stage, relax maybe, who knows, Sunday doing a St John job at the Maroondah festival and then back to the saltmine on Monday.

Well, I’ve had enough for one day, time to catch some sleep and get ready for another day in paradise tomorrow.

G

While I’m Tech.Blogging, I may as well write about some things that I have come across in the last few weeks.

Fingerprint Readers, cool huh? You swipe your finger, and you can see a picture of your finger on the screen. Neato!

Now, are Fingerprint Readers a replacement for Passwords? NO!

Authentication should always be made up of two things:

1. Something you know - Your Password
2. Something you have - Finger, Iris, Token, Certificate etc etc

Now, I have been selling Fujitsu laptops of late, and they come with Fingerprint readers, once again, give the laptop to Mr Client, “Neato, this has a fingerprint reader, can you set it up for me?” sure thing I say.

Explain to the client that the fingerprint is not there to replace the password, and the client happily listens to me, and agrees with my madness, OK, so this is all good, over come hurdle number 1.

Now, let’s go and set up the fingerprint reader.

Ok, Swipe Finger. Swipe Finger again. OK, Swipe Alternate Finger, Swipe finger again.

Right, two fingers now registered. Now where do I turn on the Multi factor authentication? Remember, Multi factor, two stages, something I know, my password, and something I have, in this case my clients finger.

*BUZZ*
THIS SOFTWARE (OMNI PASS) DOES NOT SUPPORT MULTI FACTOR AUTHENTICATION!!!!! UNINSTALL IT AND DISABLE THE FINGER PRINT READER!!!

Wow, this has to be the security faux pas of the year!

So, as much as I love the new range of Fujitsu laptops, I HATE the fingerprint reader and Omni Pass software.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at some other multi factor authentication that you can use today, to secure something that most of us love and use, PayPal and Ebay.

PayPal and Ebay (both the same parent company) have recognised that security is really important, and that lots of people are using PayPal, a financial tool such as a bank account, to conduct online ecommerce transactions on Ebay.

A perfect attack surface, money and product

Right, so what have they done you ask? PayPal and Ebay have released the PayPal security key, fob, dongle, football, thingimabob.

Now, how does this protect you. Well PayPal/Ebay have the serial number of the Security Key, this is syncronised with their servers, so that the server and the security key know the number displayed now, the number before and the next number.

Every 30 seconds, the 6 digit number changes, and gives you a new one.

OK, so now that you’ve got the Security Key, you register this against your PayPal and Ebay accounts. Now every time you log into your PayPal or Ebay account not only will you have to put in your Password (Something you know), you will also have to put in the current 6 Digit number that is displayed on your Security Key (Something you have). Cool Huh!

Don’t follow?

Ok, crook hacks your email, or you click a phishing link and give some one in Nigeria your Ebay or PayPal username and password, what can they do? Purchase on your account, use your credit card to purchase, clean you out etc etc etc.

So, now, let’s say you’re using a Security Key, you happily give your email to someone in Nigeria, can they get in? NO!

Why? Because they only have 1 piece of the 2 piece puzzle. They have the something you know, but you still have the something you have, the Security Key.

Now, you are a hell of a lot more secure! And what does this cost me? A whole $7.50AUD! Chicken feed in the broad scheme of things!

This sort of two factor or multi factor authentication is becoming more and more common for exactly this reason, reducing the surface area that can be attacked.

Banks are using the Security Keys, some are using an SMS based technology, where you register a mobile phone with them, they send you a key, you validate that with them as it’s something you have, and then every time you log on, they text you a new key so that you can log on.

Be security conscious, think about who you’re giving information to. Your name, your Visa card, Drivers License number, and passwords.

Change your passwords regularly, make them more complex than your dogs name. Passwords shouldn’t be WORDS anymore. Think of passwords as pass PHRASES. Why use “abc123″ when you can use “My PayPal Password$$”?

Using passPHRASES rather than passWORDS is a lot more secure, and will be a lot harder to brute force, or in most cases, easily guessed.

Hopefully, that hasn’t numbed your brain too much and has been a nice insight into some basic security that you can use right now to protect yourself.

Greg

Steve Riley works for Microsoft as a security analyst. Every year, Steve travels the world speaking at Microsoft conferences, and consults as part of the Microsoft Consulting team.

Steve again has posted some of his security seminars from various Tech.Ed’s and they are well worth a watch for those interested in a different perspective on Technology Security.

Steve is a funny, comical and inspiration speaker, and two things that will never go together are Steve and one of my favourite sayings, “Death By Powerpoint”.

Steve Blog’s about security on a regular basis, make sure you check him out and comment on his views.

Steve’s Video’s
Exert below taken from Steve’s Blog.

TechNet Spotlight features videos of many presentations from our TechEd conferences. Here are some of mine.

• It’s 11:00 PM, do you know where your data is?
  IT Forum: TechEd Europe, November 2007

• The fortified data center in your future
  TechEd US, June 2007

• Windows Mobile 6 security in depth
  TechEd US, June 2007

• Making the tradeoff: be secure or get work done
  TechEd US, June 2007

• Defending layer 8: how to recognize and combat social engineering
• Windows Vista firewall and IPsec enhancements
  IT Forum: TechEd Europe, November 2006

  All of my videos on TechNet Spotlight
  There are older videos, too, including a four-part security basics series with Jesper Johansson.

Tell me what you think of all this Tech.Blog that I’ve been doing. Am I wasting my time? (*mumbles* yeah probably!)

Cheers,

G