As a follow-up to a previous post, I’d like to note that Buffet has now supported Obama officially. It was done in the vein of supporting the presumptive nominee, but still.

I just got my first new computer in around three years - a top of the line 24″ iMac with four gigabytes of RAM. Plus it has an nVidia 8800 with 512MB of video memory. The display makes all the difference, let me tell you.

Unfortunately I’m feeling a bit like crap tonight. So I’m going to take more medicine and try to sleep it off. I’ll start the data migration and application refresh tomorrow after work.

A slightly subdued W00t.

Go waste 30 seconds looking at this. It’ll be worth it.

[ Creepy Fake Chick ]

Thanks to Rick for the link. He seems to have a pretty decent blog over there. I’m currently doing a trial subscription myself.

ibm.com

We all know generalizations don’t address individuals (hence the name), but damn. I’d love to hear someone explain the North/South difference in IQ shown here. That’s just crazy.

I mean, what’s the historical reason for this? What’s the cultural phenomenon responsible? Was it the Civil War? If so, how so? And look at West Virginia. LOL. I’d appreciate someone familiar with the history letting us know what the deal is here.

Oh, and before you ask, the numbers came from the National Center for Education Statistics.

[ Average IQ By State ]

I say “can’t”, but what I really mean is that it’d be hard to read them given my current priorities. So it’s my fault, really.

I really wish I could be an old college professor, with a bike with a horn on it. I’d teach at a small college with smart students who wanted to learn. Class would take little time and with the surplus I would read, write and travel.

Spending that life with the woman I love is my ideal existence.

Anyway, here’s the booklist. I’ve read probably 20%. So sad.

[ 100 Essential Books ]

• Anti-virus
• Anti-spyware
• Anti-rootkit
• IDS
• IPS
• Deep Packet Inspection

What do all these things do?

1. Find something
2. Do something with it

…kind of like…

find / | grep mal | xargs rm -rf

or…

find / | grep mal | xargs ls -lah

Ah, but they see different protocols and have GUIs with options for HOW to search and HOW to delete or show the malware. And a management console. And someone to go to for training. And someone to complain to when they don’t work. And a price-tag.

Meh.

Glorified Grep.

Meh, stupid post. Everything can be abstracted out to a point of equality. Brain surgeons work in support; that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable.:

My buddy Jason just launched his new site — toolsforexpression.com. From his own description it’s about:

Learning, education, technology, constructionism, psychology, and lifestyles built on these things.

If any of these topics are of interest to you I would check it out.

[ Toolsforexpression.com ]

Seems a bit unnecessary, doesn’t it?

My buddy and co-worker Steve Crapo (pronounced CRAY-poe) recently told me about an idea he had a while back about how to keep malware on your network from talking to the Internet. The idea is so simple and beautiful I just had to share it.

As we all know, malware does bad things; that’s why it’s not called benware. And one of the most important aspects of malware functionality is communication back to home base. So, whatever it’s doing, e.g. capturing passwords, harvesting data from your network, etc — malware has to get its loot back to whomever’s controlling it.

That’s where Steve’s idea comes in.

Lower the TTL of your corporate machines (except your content-inspecting proxy) to the depth of your internal network. So any traffic leaving your network that is destined for the Internet simply gets dropped by your border router — unless it uses (and therefore gets inspected by) your proxy.

You could also supplement the system by dropping all outgoing traffic at the firewall that doesn’t have a TTL of less than 1 and/or dropping all Internet-based traffic not coming from the proxy itself. This would help catch the stragglers that are running off of default installs and don’t have the reduced TTL setting in place.

There are ways around this technique, of course, but this fact doesn’t take away from its elegance. In an environment where information security has the pull to both change the default TTL of corporate assets and require them to use the corporate proxy, this solution is almost too elegant to pass up.: