Friday, March 9, 2001

Ars on The Big Crack -- 6:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ars Technica has an excellent article on the problems that lead to 40+ e-commerce/banking sites in the U.S. and countless others world-wide having their databases compromised by crackers (story). It is believed that these crackers were funded by Russian organized crime. The sad thing is that none of this had to happen. It all could have been prevented if the IS departments involved had their act together. If you rely on e-banking or e-commerce in general, you want to read this story.

The Master comments: My take on this article: Arian is right . . . and wrong. Microsoft is not necessarily directly at fault for the attacks being done on businesses. They ARE at fault for the flaws in IIS and NT that hackers use to exploit their servers. People don't properly secure their servers, and don't patch them. Why? Because Microsoft releases roughly a patch a week. And every patch requires a system reboot. There is NO SINGLE TOOL to audit an NT server. So, guess what? You get to walk through their stupid KB articles, and compare version numbers to check updates. That is exquisite BS. Microsoft needs to tighten up their code review. Patches should be easy to install, and NOT require reboots. An audit tool would be a good thing.

After that is done, administrators MUST treat ANY publicly accessable server as hacker heaven. Lock it down. Run the security tools. Firewall the servers. And always be paranoid. You can't do anything less and expect to be safe.

Shogo for Linux Box -- 4:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just in case anyone cares, I scanned in the box of my copy of Shogo for Linux. I found it somewhat interesting that Hyperion (the ones who did the port) are not mentioned on the front, top, bottom, or sides of the box. Click on the picture for a larger version.



For some reason, I get a kick out of reading the instructions for Shogo in German.

I've been playing a lot of Shogo in Linux the past couple of days. For a HUGE framerate boost, disable music in the launcher. Otherwise it plays music from the CD. My framerate at the menu (with just the Shogo banner waving in the background) went from ~35 fps to ~125 fps when I disabled music. The change is just as pronounced in-game.

Thursday, March 8, 2001

A Blast from the Past -- 11:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

OK, now I feel even older. I found this this old ad for my first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. Ahh, the days of 6502 assembler. As if that ad weren't enough, they also have this one with an endorsement from none other that William "Captain Kirk" Shatner himself! That one also shows you how hairpiece technology has advanced in the past 20 years.

I had a Commodore Datassette (it's amazing how long it takes to save 3K of data to a tape drive), a VICModem, the Super Expander, and the 8K Memory Expander. Later, I upgraded to a Commodore 128. Boy, that makes me think about all the hours I blew playing M.U.L.E. and Archon on my roommate's Atari 800 in high school.

Shogo Map Pack -- 10:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The good folks at PlanetShogo and I are working on a Haus of Shogo/PlanetShogo map pack. We're trying to get the very best third-party deathmatch maps together to make it easier for server ops and clients. Check out the list I submitted, and give any suggestions on this page at PlanetShogo.

Old NT Holes == Lots of Lost $$ -- 9:40 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

SANS is reporting a ring of Eastern European crackers have been using known exploits in Windows NT to steal more than a million credit card numbers. While I'd love to go off on an anti-MS tirade, these exploits have been known and have had fixes freely available since as early as 1998! What are these sysadmins doing? Thanks Slashdot.

When Will It End? -- 2:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I played Shogo for Linux for awhile this morning and even played online for a bit. I made mention that I was using the new Linux version and someone asked me to post an ISO in a newsgroup. Yeah, right. Why people seem to think that I spent money so they could have a free copy is beyond me.

J.t.Qbe comments: C'mon A.T., you know human nature better than most people do. It's that desire to get everything for free, regardless of what it costs someone else. So, what was your response to their request?

The Master comments: Heck, that's just par for the course. Our two most popular search engine keywords for the Haus are DeCSS and crack. Good grief.

J.t.Qbe comments: Har har, two things you probably WON'T find on the site! That's pretty choice!

A.T. Hun comments: I said, "First of all, no. Secondly you need a unique serial number anyway." I was going to use more choice words but I felt I would just be wasting keystrokes. What The Master says is right. Everytime we mention the DeCSS trial, our hits shoot up.

Past Two Days' News

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