Diary of a Network Geek

Well, it’s about time!

According to this article on FT.com, there is legislation that is waiting George Bush’s signature which bans the outsourcing of federal work to low cost countries. Now, to me, this only seems right, but, of course, officials in India are up in arms about it. They site all sorts of reasons, including the harm to free trade, but what it comes down to is that they’re mad at the loss of revenue. It’s “unfair”, they claim, to keep them from that business. Of course, they think it’s perfectly fine to take the jobs away from American workers. Oh, sure, that’s just fine with them.

Look, I’m all for free trade, in theory, but I think the government is right to put some breaks on how fast those jobs leave the US. At least give American workers the chance to retrain. Don’t flood the market with thousands upon thousands of tech workers all competeing for the same few jobs. It’ll be just like what happened to Flint, Michigan all over again, but on a much larger scale. Okay, sure, we all benefited from over-seas production, eventually, but in the mean time, those poor people in Flint had the stuffing kicked out of them! The same thing happened in Houston during the oil industry bust. I think we should at least try to keep it from happening in the IT industry. For pity’s sake, the United States created the computer industry! The least we can do is protect our tech workers a little bit.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how the powers that be in India repsond to the tightening market. It’s all our fault, of course. We should stop picking on them and taking revenue away from them. Hmm, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Honeytokens are the latest “sweet security” tool to nab hackers, according to this article on SecurityFocus.

Okay, so here’s how it works. Say a hacker gets into your system. How are you to know? Well, let’s say you setup data of some kind that no one would have a real reason to access. So, if someone does access it, that read attempt serves as a red-flag.
Here’s an example. Say on a Human Resources directory you setup a file labeled “ProposedSalaryChanges.XLS”. Now, you know that no one in HR made the file. HR knows not to use the file. So, if you see a user accessing the file, you know they’re snooping for data.
Another example. Say you set up a false record in a payee database for “George Bush”. Obviously, unless your company does business with the Whitehouse or the Bush family, there’s no reason anyone would need to access this record. But, to a hacker, it might stand out and arouse some curiosity. So, if someon accesses the fake record again, you’ve got a red-flag.

Pretty clever, isn’t it? I hope a lot of hackers hear about it and get scared enough to not violate security. Not that I think it’ll really slow too many of them down, but still…

Well, based on these two news stories, Bush knew plenty and just in time!

Okay, so I’m sure it’s not a big suprise that I’m fairly conservative, basically Republican and a supporter of George Bush (both of them). Since the end of the Gulf War II, Bush has taken a lot of flack for not coming up with weapons of mass destruction. Well, guess what boys and girls? The weapons of mass destruction were always there and never left!
Thanks to this article on Slate, I was alerted to this state of events. Apparently, near the end of June, the Washington Post ran an article about how the lack of actual, viable chemical weapons is not significant. Iraq had the trained scientists, the production facilities and the delivery weapons required to make good on their threat of mass destruction. Chemical and biological weapons are viable for only a short period of time, roughly two weeks, then they might as well be poured out and a fresh batch whipped up. So, let’s think back, how long did the Gulf War II take? Longer than two weeks? Well, then, is it a real suprise that there were no viable biological or chemical weapons left? Not really. Were they there? Well, according to the two journalists who wrote the aforementioned articles, the sources they interviewed said “yes”, they were. What’s more, Saddam and his sons are well known for being brutal torturers and amoral killers. They butchered their own people and would have tried to take over the entire Middle Eastern oil-producing region, if not stopped. But, stop them we did. We stopped them from killing more Kurds with chemical weapons. We stopped them from burning oil wells. We stopped them from imprisoning and torturing children.
So, now, what’s the problem?