Sarah Palin’s Email Hack
One of the big stories going around now is about VP candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account being “hacked”. As it turns out though her email account wasn’t really hacked. The person who broke into her account used social engineering to reset her password so they could access it.
This is a perfect example of the problem I blogged about back in January with using real information for your security questions. If Sarah Palin had not used real information when answering the Yahoo email security questions her email would not have been compromised by someone guessing her security questions. Also keep in mind, Yahoo gives the same secuirty question challenges to everyone. So if I want to social engineer my way into your email account I already know which security questions to start researching.
Back from Vacation - I guess
We just got back from a week at the lake recently so I am now starting to get back in the swing of things. As you can see in the picture, coming back to work wasn’t high on my priority list.
Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat. We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat. You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food. It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.
Define Irony
My free Gmail account allows me to have a 64 bit password. If you can crack it, you deserve to be able to read my email.
Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts? My banking account you say, funny you should ask. My bank limits my password to 20 characters.
The Work Commute
One of the smartest things I have done was to decide to try and listen to books on CD during my commute back and forth from work. I absolutely love it. I love it for several reasons and I am about to tell you why.
The first reason is taking the pressure and stress off traffic. I live south of Atlanta, the asshole of the world, and I have to commute into the city every day. Atlanta traffic is horrid and you would do better to ask a homeless man to cure cancer than ask everyone using the interstates heading into or out of Atlanta to pay attention and JUST DRIVE STRAIGHT! There is however, no better feeling than being stuck in traffic and not giving caring because you are so wrapped up in a book you can’t wait to hear what happens.
Another reason is it allows you to listen to books that improve you. You can listen to books that help your career, make you a better parent, or any number of topics you would like to improve. Anything is better than listening to absolute crap ( IE The regular FM stations that pollute the radio dial. If you are in Atlanta fire up star 94 for a taste of the biggest idiots to ever pollute the airwaves. Those people make Howard Stern seem like a good counselor). Cut the FM cord. It is worthless and will never help you.
Just sit back and look closely at the amount of time you spend in a car. An hour a day is a lot of time that could be better spent either entertaining yourself or improving yourself.
Canceling My XBox Live Gold Membership
It came time to cancel my Xbox 360 Live Gold Membership tonight. I have no problems with the service or the cost of it, but I just don’t use it. I haven’t played my Xbox 360 in months much less logged on to play someone else.
So, I log into my game console and look around for the cancel button. I went through every screen on the account management tab but nothing. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Me being a naive Internet user ( 16 years and counting) I assumed Microsoft would make canceling the service as easy as it was to start. I mean it took me 2 minutes and a credit card to start my account right on my Xbox 360. Why should canceling be so hard? We know why they make it so hard, but damnit I am ranting here.
So anyway, I hit Google with “how do i cancel my xbox live subscription” and about the second one down was the number I had to call to cancel my membership. So I dialed it up and after 4 Indians, 3 Holds, and 2 reference numbers I finally got it canceled. If I gave out a weekly you suck ass award, Microsoft would get this weeks.
Design Update aka Just saying hello
In the middle of my redesign, I decided to go in a new direction. I came across WP Remix and decided to buy it. It is really more of a content management theme than specifically for a blog. The versatility of it is why I purchased it. It is a great base to build upon and includes several different homepage options. The design you see here is completely stock for the blog. I haven’t gotten around to customizing it yet. The profitable projects get priority.
The funny part is, after finding and buying WP Remix, I found WP Premium which is a free theme offered by the same author. I downloaded it and have it running on my music blog. After some customization, I am really pleased with the way it looks. It is exactly what I wanted, 1 main column and 2 sidebars together on the right. Excellent theme and you can get WP Premium here.
New Home and New Design Coming
I am very pleased to announce jasonpoteet.com and a few other websites are running on a fresh dedicated Linux web server. It was completely built from from the terminal window by yours truly. Of course if it winds up getting hacked because I did something silly like chmod 777 my config files, you’ll know why.
My main hosting experience has come from Windows Servers NT 4 through Windows 2003. I like Windows but I also wanted to expand my Linux abilities. Linux is easy to figure out from the GUI so I decided that wouldn’t really teach me the proper way. I also wanted to make a server that was blazing fast and as secure as possible. Common sense tells you the less you have installed the faster and more secure your server will be. With that thought in mind, I decided to go with a minimal install that only has what I need installed.
Working from the terminal window was certainly an exercise in patience for me. It was pretty frustrating at times to know what I wanted to do, but have no idea where the file I needed to change was located. That is where the wonder of the Internet came in. The wealth of information on the Internet is just incredible these days. It was very satifisfying though when I finally got the hang of everything and got the website up and running. I am also very please at the improved load times versus the old server. The hardware this is running on isn’t that impressive so it is certainly an improvement.
When I finish up a few loose ends, the next phase will be redoing the design. The old design went south when I updated Wordpress, so I decided to simple start over. The current look is a blank wordpress template from refueled.com. It looks good for a blank template, but it does need some livening up. That will be the next around here.
My Satelite TV Woes
I have two HD TV’s in my house and currently get my HD channels from my cable company. The provide around 15 channels which include some of the main ones I would want. I get the locals and the main ones from the big 5 movie channels. It hasn’t been a bad service, but it is also a long way away from the 84 HD channels DirectTV offers.
With that in mind, I was all set to make the switch to DirectTV. I called up AT&T and picked out my programming, selected my hardware, and picked an install date. I went ahead and took a day off from work to stay at home and wait on the installer to show. It certainly felt like the day before Christmas. The day progressed and about 30 minutes early the installer showed up at the house. He started looking around the house and took out his compass to try and find a location he could put the dish.
My house is really unique to be in a subdivision because the back of it actually faces some woods. The house has some very large trees in the back yard including some pines and an oak that are easily 100′ high. We can be sitting at our kitchen table and actually see deer or wild turkeys behind the house. This has always been something we loved about our house. It really is the perfect house to be in a subdivision. You couldn’t ask for a better location.
So the installer climbs up on the roof and continues his measurements looking for a spot he can mount the dish. He gets to the very top of the roof and the heads back down. He then proceeds to tell me he can’t get enough clearance to put the dish anywhere on the house. My tree line is about 5 degrees too much. It seems the only place he can put the dish is right in the middle of my front yard. Needless to say, the HOA would and my wife and I did veto that idea. It would just be way too tacky. I did however start thinking about a way to run one up a 100′ pole in the backyard. I haven’t given up that idea just yet.
DirectTV was also very nice and apologetic and of course they refunded my hardware purchase. It is just one of those things.
Time Warner Tests Charging Broadband Users Based on Usage
According to a article on Yahoo News, Time Warner Cable will roll out a beta test of a new pricing structure later this year that will charge broadband users based on their monthly bandwidth usage.
This was only a matter of time. Downloading music is one thing, but as home users start downloading more and more videos the ISP’s see their chance to up monthly subscription rates. I suspect you can also count on not getting a lower rate if you don’t use a lot of bandwidth.
The cable companies are already suffering from oversold bandwidth and they are losing the new High Def customers to the satellite TV providers because they can’t compete. Bandwidth is the reason your cable company offers you 10 HD channels and as of this post, DirectTV offers 84 HD channels. If you have an HD TV, it is a no brainer who your HD channel provider will be.
One interesting aspect to this will be the millions of unsecured networks out there. I can’t drive one mile from my house without stumbling across at least 3 unsecured wireless networks named Linksys. Charging by the amount of bandwidth used will simply encourage people do their downloading on their neighbors wireless network.
It definitely isn’t a good time to be running a cable company. You are losing customers based on your old infrastructure and your only real prospect of growth is increasing billings on your current customer base.
Maybe they can lease some of that dark fiber from Google.
Protecting Yourself From Identity Theft - Outsmarting The Challenge Question
I have really been focusing a considerable amount of energy on security lately. I have been looking at some of our conventional wisdom and trying to decide how it fits in with our current world. Is it still relevant or does it needs some to be updated.
That brings me to the topic of tonight’s post, the secret question. The secret question is the one that many of your more important services will ask you to supply an answer to so they can verify who you are. The most common question is what your mother’s maiden name is. They will also ask things like, where were you born, what is your dad’s middle name, what was your high school mascot, and many more just like that. The problem with these types of questions is they are easy for someone to socially engineer out of you.
My philosophy is this. Questions that have real answers are easier to answer than questions that don’t have real answers. When you are asked for your mother’s maiden name, pick a word or name or even a series of alphanumeric characters to supply as your answer. Don’t use your mother’s real maiden name. It is easy for someone to find out your mother’s maiden name. Hell, she might even tell them if they ask nice enough. They won’t be able to find out her maiden name is $fop()5tHg.
