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Mar. 22nd, 2005
Quote of the Day
Mar. 22nd, 2005 07:47 pmI’m creating a game called Elfy Elferston in which the players are all half-elves. Chargen consists of deciding if your other half is dragon, faerie, demon, or raccoon
- from here.
Meanwhile, I spent most of today hacking my carefully written error-handling code into little bits because it wasn't flexible enough. That's what I get for following the Microsoft standards... This iteration's testing phase just started, so I won't get to refactor my code into something more aesthetic until April.
Tonight was supposed to be gaming, but due to the GM having a boiler emergency, my venture into the Nightmare of Future Past will have to be postponed for another week. Instead I shall be, once more, trying to wrap my head around asynchronous calls in C#.
Or watching The West Wing, whichever one sounds like more fun :->
A study was released today which shows that 25% of all zombie drone PCs on the internet are based in the UK.
This is quite obviously because people _don't look after their PCs_ (and, of course, insist on using vulnerable Operating Systems). The answer, it seems to me, is to prevent these people from inadvertently spewing email to the four corners of the earth. The answer, it seems to me, is remarkably obvious.
Firewalls.
And not the firewalls you install on your PC, get in the way of things and are so much trouble that they frequently get turned off by frustrated users (although I recommend those too) - I mean a _managed_ firewall. This sits at the ISP end and blocks all incoming traffic that you haven't specifically asked for. So if you're confident that you want port 80 open, then you use a webform to open that port up - and if you're not technical to manage that much, then you're perfectly safe from incoming nastiness.
It's not a perfect solution, but it'd save an awful lot of heartache, solve the problems that vast numbers of people have with their PCs being insta-hacked and make the internet that much safer for mankind.
The only problem is that it would undoubtably break some people's applications when it was first switched on, which would mean that more helpdesk calls occurred. And nobody wants to pay for that, especially if their competitors aren't. Which means the only way to make it happen is through regulation - imposing a minimum level of service on broadband in the same way that we do for any other utility we want to make safe for the public good.
This is quite obviously because people _don't look after their PCs_ (and, of course, insist on using vulnerable Operating Systems). The answer, it seems to me, is to prevent these people from inadvertently spewing email to the four corners of the earth. The answer, it seems to me, is remarkably obvious.
Firewalls.
And not the firewalls you install on your PC, get in the way of things and are so much trouble that they frequently get turned off by frustrated users (although I recommend those too) - I mean a _managed_ firewall. This sits at the ISP end and blocks all incoming traffic that you haven't specifically asked for. So if you're confident that you want port 80 open, then you use a webform to open that port up - and if you're not technical to manage that much, then you're perfectly safe from incoming nastiness.
It's not a perfect solution, but it'd save an awful lot of heartache, solve the problems that vast numbers of people have with their PCs being insta-hacked and make the internet that much safer for mankind.
The only problem is that it would undoubtably break some people's applications when it was first switched on, which would mean that more helpdesk calls occurred. And nobody wants to pay for that, especially if their competitors aren't. Which means the only way to make it happen is through regulation - imposing a minimum level of service on broadband in the same way that we do for any other utility we want to make safe for the public good.
Best news I've heard in weeks
Mar. 22nd, 2005 09:03 pmWe're in the concluding stages of talks to bring the Alan Moore Miracleman stories and the stories I wrote and Mark Buckingham drew back into print. (The stories are copyright Alan and me, the art is copyright by the artists who did it.)
says Neil Gaiman