Category: Technology

I guess it makes me feel a little better on my last day of being able to claim being 34 that there are some of my fellow bloggers out there who still remember programming on punch cards.  The first computer I ever used was one of these.  No punch cards, but it did have a BASIC interpreter, and you had to load and save programs through a MODEM like device onto an audio cassette.  Next machine was this one.  We were lucky to have one with an expansion slot and a high resolution color monitor.  But hey, it had a screaming fast 1MHz 6502 in it, and a whopping 64K of RAM.  It was an aircraft carrier compared to the 16MHz of RAM in the TI.  Of course, the TI’s 3MHz TMS9900 was faster than the Apple, but it never felt it.

By the time I hit college, I was using this machine, which I still have up in my attic, and as of a few months ago, still boots MacOS Version 7.5 just fine.  Most obscure system I ever had the pleasure of working with was one made by this company, and I have more than passing familiarity with Unisys’ line of A-Series mainframes, and its MCP/CANDE operating system.  Not many people left to know what a CS Bus is.  A-Series was an interesting beast.  Did most of it’s I/O through dedicated I/O processors.  The machines were basically designed to move large quantities of data, which is why so many large banks and airlines liked them.  Fault tolerance out the wazoo.  The entire machine could be paused, and the state of every flip flop and register in the system shifted out through a JTAG interface, then shifted back in if corrections could be made.  All the while users would be unaware this was happening.  I worked on those systems back in the days when I was a real computer engineer, rather than an IT monkey.

All it takes is a few foreign policy gaffes and the Russians are attacking Bitter’s hosting site, and from there mounted attacks on the Blog Bash site, and our PA Gun Rights site.  Pretty clearly they have been emboldened by Obama’s overtures, and are attacking on all fronts.

Took an hour or so to track down how they got in, and remove all the offending code.  I can’t stress enough the importance of hardening your WordPress installation in order to frustrate hackers.  Many hosting providers’s default WordPress installations are awful from a security standpoint.

Best advice is to make as little as possible writable, and if possible, make all files owned by root.  There are only a few places WordPress really needs write access to.  Don’t make your themes writable by default.  If you need to change them, remove write access once you’re done.  When I say write access, I really mean it ought to be owned by someone other than the web server account, with the web server account having no write access.  Get rid of any plugins you’re not using, they are trouble.  Keep everything, WordPress, PHP, Apache, and all your plugins up to date.  If you do all those things, you should keep the Russkie hoards at bay.

The more I look around a the tech leaders of today, the more disappointed I am. When I joined the tech field back in the mid 90s, you could not find a more cantankerous, individualist, and anti-authoritarian gathering of minds this side of a militia group.

But today tech leaders are  hosting flashy, celebrity studded, inaugural parties for Obama.  They are being hired by the campaigns of prominent progressive Democrats.  Over the past decade we’ve gone from Geeks with Guns, to Americans for Gun Safety.  Where we once hoisted the Jolly Roger to do battle with the man, now it seems that the man is increasingly us.  The tech field seems to have most decidedly joined the establishment, rather than standing apart from it. This is not the tech I knew.

My own personal anecdotal evidence bears this out as well.  Tech workers, particularly younger ones, are becoming increasingly progressive and pro-establishment, and less libertarian and individualistic.  Is this a natural progression of the industry?  Is it a generational difference?  I think a bit of both.  Perhaps paradigm shifting technological breakthroughs will always be the realm of out-of-the-box thinking non-conformists, which begs the question of which new breakthrough will attract the next generation of individualist malcontents.

As an IT manager, one thing that’s always driven me nuts is the fact that the password policy generally regarded by folks in the industry as “best practices” is actually pretty far from it.

Via Instapundit, this article about Sarbanes-Oxley compliant password policies being pushed by auditors is a breath of fresh air.  My preferred policy would be infrequent password changes, combined with regular password cracking to root weak passwords out of the network.  You do have to impose some degree of complexity in the password, otherwise people will pick ridiculously stupid passwords.  But some IT people go to ridiculous lengths, and frequent password changes only compound the problem.  The writing down or saving of passwords on the network is a far greater risk than the risk that someone will crack or guess your passwords.  All this “security theater” about complexity and duration of passwords might make auditors feel good, but it does you no good if everyone is tacking their passwords under their keyboards.  If I feel pretty good that a user has picked a good password he or she remembers, I don’t have a problem letting them keep it for a while.  If you’re an IT manager responsible for network security, you should be trying to crack your users passwords on a regular basis.

It was 25 years ago today that the Macintosh was introduced as a commercial product.  A quarter century later, I’m still using one to type this post.  It’s interesting in the videos shown in the link above to see much younger versions of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.  Also interesting that in their Macintosh promotional video, they felt the need to explain how a mouse works.  They were a completely unknown technology to most people at the time.

Apple is donating 100 grand to a group opposing the anti-gay-marriage initiative, Proposition 8, on the ballot in California this election.  On this particular issue, I happen to agree with Apple, but I would be wary of a company that donates money to causes.  What happens when Apple donates 100 grand to oppose a ballot measure, say, recognizing the right to keep and bear arms in the California Constitution?  I would never buy another Apple product again, to be honest.

Smart corporations stay out of politics for a reason: it alienates people.  Apple should stick to making great products, and stay out of political fights.