Paul’s esoteric meanderings

My first SSD, a 60Gb OCZ Vertex II ceased to be last week. I didn’t take “no moving parts” to mean “no pulse”. This wasn’t the vague threat of “SSD wearing” – but simple undetectable dead drive.

Luckily, I sync most of my data to the cloud, so the interruption was inconvenient, but not catastrophic.

SSD’s – great new tools, but they still fail. I mustn’t get complacent.

Unfortunately everything on my desktop was gone. The most commonly used “workspace” – but it doesn’t sync readily to the cloud. There goes quite a few hours work. I’ve since made a simple script to copy the desktop to the cloud folder each night – at least that will reduce the future impact to just a day’s work.  Read more... (262 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

Jesper has been doing some brilliant digging and shown that you need to be very careful before you bag out the opposition for their failures….

Hey, Mozilla- Quotes Are Not Legal in a URL

It’s been 15 years or more since Microsoft launched Windows NT. No one has used a Windows 3.11 Server in production since Windows 2000 was around.

So why oh why do we still have share permissions in W2K3 and Longhorn? All they do is confuse Administrators and allow for weird security configurations and the problems that come with them. I frequently see mismatched configurations, confusion over remote and local access or confusion over other sharing methods such as HTTP.

There is a small supportive argument or them that goes along the lines of “but what if the NTFS permissions are wrong”. Well, lets look at the failure mechanisms.  Read more... (225 words, estimated 54 secs reading time)

I firmly believe one of the reasons MS holds the position they do is due to their control of the Directory, and their integration with it. MS thought so once too, and tried to extend it to the Internet with Passport.

So why oh why then does this MS product NOT support any of the normal UI’s for authentication.

MS Project 2003 Professional connecting to a MS Project Server 2003.

It gives the option of connecting with your domain account, or using a “Project Server Account”. Here comes the crunch. NEITHER of these options works on a PC that is not a domain member. There is no popup UI to ask for a password.  Read more... (156 words, 2 images, estimated 37 secs reading time)

http://attrition.org/security/rant/z/keysigning.html

Reminds me of Schneier’s pizza’s at the NSA

2 Factor Auth

http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2006/04/20/425824.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

MS even let me present on this exact topic and make the same statements.