Since it’s related to the web, I’ll post it here. According to The Times Online (UK), tens of websites linked to Al-Qaeda have abruptly vanished from the web. Apparently, it’s suspected that British Intelligence has had something to do with the closing of the sites which, among other things provided information on building and using biological weapons and “how to strike a european city”.
Category: Computers
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User agent spoofing
According to this article, the Opera web browser has been reporting itself to web sites with a user-agent that includes Internet explorer. As of the next release it appears that will be dropped by default *(although the capability of changing the user-agent will still be there.)
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Data Security
One of the things that apparently is commonly overlooked in the area of computer security is what happens to the data on your hard drive when you get a new computer.
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TCP/IP networking strange problem
This is a weird one and I’m posting this mostly for my own reference so I can recall this when I run across it again. About 6-10 months ago a client of mine was having problems accessing web login pages like yahoo and ebay. I tested from various Windows machines on their network and verified and pulled my hair out for a bit before coming across a tip to check into the MTU setting for the firewall. (more…)
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The biggest computer security vulnerability ever
I talk quite a bit about computer viruses and computer security on this site. It’s probably one of the bigger problems that I grapple with for my customers. Today I’m going to talk about the biggest computer security vulnerability there is. (more…)
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Preventing web crawlers from indexing everything
Ok, so we’ve seen how to password protect directories to keep the web crawlers out, but I don’t want to go through that. I want to keep the page open, but I don’t want it spidered and indexed by the bots. (more…)
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KDE 3.4.2 release (Linux desktop environment)
Along about the time I mentioned a beta review of KDE 3.5 it looks as though the latest in the stable line, KDE 3.4.2 was released. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, KDE is one of many graphical user interface environments (desktop environments) in the Linux and *nix family of operating systems. It’s essentially a bugfix release, what really caught my attention in the announcement was (more…)
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There aren’t THAT many phish in the sea, more on phighting phishing
The last post, I got sidetracked into another idea as I was doing a google search. Not uncommon. OK, what I was curious about is how many phishing sites are estimated to be “in the wild” at any given moment threatening to defraud viewers? Well, my search did turn up an interesting report. (more…)
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More phishing phighting
I mentioned that I had gone after another two phishing sites the other day. One was down within 24 hours. I was impressed with the responsiveness, but it’s possible I wasn’t the first to complain. Still it was good to see it gone. I’m still working on the second. It’s hosted at an xo.com ip address. Along the lines of the phishing battle, (more…)
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Custom Error Pages with .htaccess
Ok, we’ve looked at controlling access to directories with .htaccess, but there are other neat tricks we can do that can add a bit of polish to your site. (more…)