Jaunted down to a security conference in Denver and finally started hearing the things from a security provider that I
have been thinking for a long time should be pretty standard. Trouble is, it just isn't. Or hasn't been if you don't
have the manpower and money to monitor it 24/7, and let's face it, even the government can't keep people out, so if you
get a really dedicated hacker, they will weasel in.
But what if we could actually tweak the open source option
and see what we could come up with for the small business that just wants to KNOW that all is well? Sounds like a rabbit
trail we might go hopping down here pretty soon. My own linux guru and I might just see what we can see and then how and
if it would port over to Windows. Keep ya posted!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Firefox
Recent events have reiterated to me the
greatness of Firefox. What is Firefox, you ask? Well, I am sure out
there is some sort of track of the lifeline but I can't really find it
anywhere. Not that I really looked all that hard, mind you. But anyway, a
long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, there was an operating
system that didn't build in a web browser. Yeah, I know, hard to
believe, but it happened. And there were little programs like Pine that
took care of email if you could do without the graphical interface.
Then
we only had 2400 baud modems, Compuserve and AOL. 3 miles to school,
uphill both ways, you know the story. One day, this guy Marc Andreeson
decided there needed to be a web browser for the people, a VW for the
internet. He developed and released Netscape. I actually paid for
Netscape Gold many moons ago, and I'm sure lots of others did, too, 'cause old Marc (I say old, he was a kid) became the wealthy prince.
Well,
the king of Computerland didn't like that so much so he made Internet
Explorer, and it never worked as well as Netscape, but more important,
was less popular. Internet users already had a VW, they didn't need a
Corvair. The justice department hauled the king into court for antitrust
over the way the king had tried to force IE into all the machines in
Computerland. The prince won and the king had to make substantial
changes in his plans to rule the world. The prince sold Netscape and
went off to another land, a wealthy young man.
About the time it
was sold, Netscape spawned Mozilla, another train of thought about how
web browsers ought to work. Mozilla allowed email to be a separate
function for several reasons, security and overhead being chief
concerns, and Mozilla morphed into Firebird which was renamed Firefox.
Fast forward to now. (sound effect, the little whirring VCR noise, ready . . . ?)
Web attacks . . . that was really the point all along.
Did you know that you don't have to do anything these days to end up
infected? Browse the wrong web site, that's it, go on I dare ya'. But
only if you have Firefox. It is doing something against that kind of
thing, building a safebrowsing system that will warn you if a site is
known to have been hacked. In researching problems, infections, and the
like, I inadvertently run into lurkers but I have not yet become a
victim. Bottom line, even if you have only heard of it recently, don't
let that fool you, it's been out there longer than IE in some form or
another. And I'm really glad.
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