the latest from El RegOct 03 2009
I bought another new toy last week – a D-Link DNS 313 NAS. Actually, this was a mistake because what I really wanted was the DNS-323. I just wasn’t careful enough at the time. Quite apart from having space for two 3.5″ SATA hard drives instead of just one, the 323 is a very different …
Aug 02 2009
I recently moved one of my domains between two registrars. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but on reflection it was both foolish and unnecessary. Unnecessary because my main requirement for moving it (greater control of my DNS records for that domain) could have been met simply by my redelegating the NS …
Jul 05 2009
I value my privacy – and I dislike the increasing tendency of every commercial website under the sun to attempt to track and/or profile me. Yes, I know all the arguments in favour of advertising, and well targeted advertising at that, but I get tired of the Amazon style approach which assumes that just because …
Mar 01 2009
My ever growing DVD collection has been taking its toll on my disk storage. Despite the fact that ripping a DVD to PSP format typically shrinks it to between 300 and 500 MB, that still means that I have over 300 GB of videos on my PC. Add to that the OGG vorbis audio collection …
Dec 24 2008
A company called Unified Root is offering to register new top level domains in advance of the proposed ICANN changes. The company describes itself in the following terms: “UnifiedRoot (Unified Root) is an independent, privately owned company, based in Amsterdam, which makes corporate and public top-level domains (TLDs) available worldwide. Through our own efforts and …
Dec 24 2008
I came across an interesting post on Avert labs site recently. That post pointed to an earlier SANS posting, which in turn, referenced a Symantec discussion of a new Trojan called Trojan.Flush.M. This trojan is an interesting variant of a class of trojans which hijack local DNS settings to force the compromised machine to use …
Aug 20 2008
Have you ever wondered what was eating your network? Would you like to be able to check exactly which application was responsible for that sudden spike in outbound traffic? NetHogs might help. This neat little utility calls itself a “small ‘net top’ tool”, and that is exactly what it is. NetHogs groups bandwidth usage by …
Aug 10 2008
Dan Kaminsky has (quite rightly) been hitting the press a lot in the weeks since 8 July when he announced the work done to fix a flaw he had discovered in DNS. The vulnerability itself was new, but its impact (cache poisoning) was not. Indeed, we’ve known about the dangers of poisoned DNS caches for …
Mar 01 2008
On a mail list I subscribe to I have recently been involved in a discussion about the restrictions sometimes placed on users of WiFi hotspots or hotel networks (to say nothing of the restrictions placed on corporate networks). Some of the suggested solutions involve tunnelling ssh connections over http(s). Other solutions assume that the network …
Jan 19 2008
The guys at gnucitizen have posted details of another vulnerability in the BT home hub (and related Thomson routers). This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to reconfigure the router using the UPnP functionality which is turned on by default. UPnP is an authenticationless protocol designed to allow local devices to reconfigure the router – typically …
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