I’ve been putting off segmenting my network for a while now, but the recent IoT botnet powered DDoS has bumped the task up my list of priorities, and I finally got around to doing it. Generally, if your network is anything other than non-critical clients accessing the internet, that is to say if you have any sort of IoT devices or it you host any internet-facing services at home, it’s probably a smart thing to split up your network into segments. Doing so allows finer-grained control over which machines can talk to each other, thus enhancing security. A segmented network is usually also easier to survey and audit, because irregularities like “why the hell is there an Acer laptop in my server segment?” stand out more, and with the appropriate monitoring solutions you can more easily generate usage stats by just running queries for an entire segment.

Crowd-funding and the sharp drop in development costs for internet connected device has given us both an onslaught of useless gadgets, and the much overused buzzword “Internet of Things”, or IoT. The concept has been pushed way past the borders of absurdity, as highlighted by the likes of @InternetofShit. I’m only half surprised: personal computing has plateaued, with many of the “traditional” challenges posed by hardware such as transistor and storage density being more of less solved, what more is there to innovate in? To break the “sit down in front of a screen” paradigm of computing, the industry is shooting in all directions to find new ground. This spray-and-pray approach to innovation is surely finding new ways to do things, but in the frenzy of it, we are offered truly senseless gadgets, from cloud-connected candles to bluetooth kegel exercisers.

Il y a quelques semaines, une mystérieuse portion de la Commission jointe sur les actions de la communauté de renseignement avant et après les attaques terroristes du 11 septembre 2001 (en anglais, Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Actions Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of the September 11th, 2001), a été déclassifiée après deux ans de procédures de révision. Communément connues sous le nom de « 28 pages » (il y en a 29, mais le nom a resté), le document décrit les découvertes de la commission concernant des liens possible entre le Royaume de l’Arabie Saoudite et certains individus impliqués dans les attaques du 11 septembre.

Consultez l’article complet sur 45eNord.ca.

Late last week, a mysterious portion of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Actions Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of the September 11th, 2001, which had been classified since the report’s release, was declassified following a two-year long declassification review. Know colloquially as the “28 pages” (the count is wrong but the name stuck), the document describes what the inquiry found regarding possible links between officials from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and individuals known to be involved in 9/11.

Read the entire article at Observatory Media.

Whenever I have to interact with big telcos, I inevitably come to ask myself why they are still in business. It’s a wonder that companies that are so big and so dysfunctional on so many levels still have any customers at all. I’ve recently had to do an ISP switchover from dual Cogeco 100mbps over copper to a single Bell Fibe 250mbps line, and my experience was less than stellar. Apart from getting the usual “oh, we’re sorry, your line isn’t quite active yet on our end” not once, but twice after the install tech’s visit, their business technical support was entirely useless.