Erik Novales

Two unrelated stories:

We’ve both recently been the target of hacking attempts originating from China. Of course, the attack they suffered was much more serious and alarming than mine, which appeared to be a bot trying to log into my wireless router (running Tomato) and was mindlessly trying every entry in a password dictionary. I turned [...]

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I decided to try running Windows 7 Ultimate on my netbook (an Asus EEE PC), since I had heard that it was nearly as fast as XP (and much more modern). I installed it by burning the ISO (acquired by virtue of being an MSDN subscriber) and then booting the netbook from an external DVD [...]

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I recently picked up an ASUS Eee PC 900HA, after having seen and used one of the earlier EEEs when I visited my sister in September. I was pretty taken with the idea of having an inexpensive, lightweight PC. I’m actually writing this entry on it — touch typing on its smaller keyboard requires a [...]

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Sandy recently got an iPhone 3G, and I’ve been fairly impressed with the web browsing experience (through Safari) on it. While the JavaScript support is somewhat flaky, the mobile browsing experience on it is close enough to the desktop experience to be acceptable. The responsiveness of the browser is also quite good, at least on [...]

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A few months ago I wrote about getting rid of old hard drives safely, by destroying the data contained on them. I was going through some more old stuff recently, and came across some relics — 3 1/2″ floppy disks. None of them really contain anything sensitive or that I’d want to keep, but at [...]

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In an effort to reduce clutter at home, we’re trying to get rid of things that we no longer need, or don’t want anymore. For many types of things, this isn’t a problem — box it up and fire it off to Goodwill, the library, e-waste, or other charities. However, certain types of junk require [...]

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I noticed that, at some point last night, my ISP’s DNS servers went down. Sure enough, I tested today for the DNS vulnerability that has set the Internet abuzz, and it appears to be patched now. Now Parallels just needs to get their act together, and I’ll be all set.
This whole thing is starting to [...]

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The other day a security bulletin was published and patches released for a vulnerability in DNS — essentially the switchboard protocol of the Internet. This is an interesting case because the exact details of the vulnerability have not yet been released (but are scheduled to be in about a month or so). There’s an article [...]

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It’s been awhile since I last posted — I’ve been pretty busy in the interim but I’ll try to get back to a more regular posting schedule.
I realized the other day that the reason USB memory stick transfers were so slow on my machine was because my keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Pro, was probably a [...]

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My recent experiences in setting up another server and site have served as a reminder that, on the net, it seems like nothing is secure by default. FTP sends your credentials over the wire in plain text. Telnet, of course, isn’t secure for the same reasons. Most ISP mail providers don’t use SSL or secure [...]

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