Friday, September 12, 2003

Seeing-Eye Tongue. Clive Thompson finds the damndest things.  Who woulda thunk it?  I can't see any particular need for a yucky thing in your mouth, though -- why not just have a headband that divides the space around you into quadrants (or finer).  Tingle the appropriate quadrant of the with a strength roughly approximating distance (via ultrasonic bounce) from obstacles in that direction. That way we can have blind people who will have "eyes" in the back of their head. 4:20:23 PM

Takedown. One of our clients had a good chunk of their network taken down by one of the trojan emails today -- probably blaster or something like that.  Let's look at the simple equation: C + Unrestricted Access + Buffer Overflow = You Will Never Be Secure. Windows machines are fundamentally flawed, at the core.  It can never be fixed.  You either need a VM (which provides a relatively secure environment), or an operating system that uses a variety of techniques to prevent a process from doing anything it's not supposed to do. COM and ActiveX were built on the notion that by certifying something, you assure that it is secure.  Today's additional DCOM patch, and the worms that are out there, show us otherwise.  This isn't the last one.  There will never be a "last one", because new code keeps landing on machines, and it's all vulnerable. It's time for a do-over, people. My weekend reading: Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear.  I hope to come out educated. 12:08:14 AM