February 02, 2007

Bill Gates, confused or deluded?

I was reading a Newsweek interview with Bill Gates this morning, and was was of course expecting a bit of spin. But I wasn't expecting Bill to be living in his own Reality Distortion Field (no longer a Jobs-only superpower, apparently). On the second page of the interview, in a question about feature comparisons between OS X and Windows, and how they both borrow features from each other, Bill had this to say:
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."

Now, I understand that Gates is pushing hard to convince folks to upgrade to Vista, but this is such a classic example of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that Microsoft is famous for.

The interviewer should have followed up asking if Bill could cite one example of a Mac exploit allowing a machine takeover. And how can he claim that Windows isn't vulnerable to such attacks?

Posted by Kevin Railsback at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 31, 2006

Stupid IT Tricks: Myspace.com

Managing your company's public DNS is serious business - a small typo or mistake can have serious consequences to your website, email, and other services.

For example, someone made what can only be assumed as a clueless mistake when updating their DNS - they added 127.0.0.1 to their records for the myspace.com. For those with weak network-fu, that is a special address which is only used for 'localhost' (your own computer). Since they had 5 hosts listed total, one out of five requests for their domain were going nowhere while this problem existed.


$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying "myspace.com"
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1

Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms


I'm not sure why they're still using round-robin DNS load balancing for their site with good ServerIron, Cisco, and F5 load balancers doing a much better job overall. We moved InfoWorld.com away from RRDNS years ago.

Fortunately either someone at MySpace noticed the issue quickly, or they saw the post at OpenDNS.com or on Digg and remedied the issue. But having such high TTLs in their DNS settings I'm sure the problem took a while to finally clear up completely.

Posted by Kevin Railsback at 08:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2004

"Free iPod" stupidity

Will the madness never cease? I mean... we work so hard to come up with technology to avoid spam and TV ads, and then submit ourselves to viral marketing tricks like this? WTF?

From Engadget:

Posted by Kevin Railsback at 09:17 PM | TrackBack

July 21, 2004

Cases are for wimps....

I've been wrestling with my one remaining Windows XP system (3GHz P4, GeForce Ti4900, SATA, etc gaming PC) for the past few days due to a looping reboot problem. Basically, it tries to start Windows then flashes a bluescreen for half a second and reboots. Over and over again.

Doing a Safe Mode with Command Prompt leads one to believe it's a problem with AGP440.SYS but that's just the last thing that loads during bootup. The actual problem ended up being hardware, not software. Specifically, a failing power supply in an old ATX case.

Anyhoo, after much wrestling with it I found a temporary solution:

As you can see from the temperature monitor / fan controller sitting on top of the hard drive, it's running at about 82 degrees. The temperature probe is stuck inside the heatsink, so that's a good temp for a p4. Being in the open air helps a lot of course... this system normally ran about 100-105 in the case.

Found a nice (quiet) case to replace this with, the Antec Sonata. It's designed as a very quiet enclosure, while still being able to handle the heat output of a 3GHz P4. Not too bad looking either, but not sexy like the G5 or PowerBook. =) Antec are well known for their solid designs, and especially for their high quality power supplies, so hopefully this will fix my issues.

Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:32 PM | TrackBack

June 14, 2004

Catholic Church outsourcing prayers to India???

This is pretty bizarre. I'm not a religious person, but some things just shouldn't be outsourced.


Catholic Church outsourcing prayers to India
Holy outsourcing! With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the US, priests in India are now picking up some of the work of saying special-purpose Mass for North American churches.

American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India. About 2 percent of India's more than one billion people are Christians, most of them Catholics.

In Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast with one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India, churches often receive intentions from overseas. The Masses are conducted in Malayalam, the native language. The intention - often a prayer for the repose of the soul of a deceased relative, or for a sick family member, thanksgiving for a favor received, or a prayer offering for a newborn - is announced at Mass.

Link (Thanks, Zed) [Boing Boing]

Posted by Kevin Railsback at 09:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack