InetDaemon
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I’m paranoid about the web, and with good reason.
The #1 way hackers get into computers today is through your web browser from an infected website. The battle for control of your computer has spread from e-mail and attachments. Another battlefront has opened up on your web browser. A large number of big-name sites have been hacked recently and nobody is completely sure just what the hackers made off with. Hackers use DNS spoofing to trick computers into coming to an infected website, so you can’t completely be sure that you ended up on the website you intended to visit. They also buy up common misspellings of big sites to catch anyone that makes a typo.
Hackers have been using SQL injection vulnerabilities to break into websites for years (it is in fact one of the primary ways hackers get into a server), and these vulnerabilities still go unpatched. Now they are infecting websites in order to set up complex computer/browser/plugin fingerprinting engines that detect vulnerable versions. These engines deliver attacks custom-tailored to infect the visitor’s computer with slimy botware. Take out the cookies, pop-ups, plugins and JavaScript and you’ve stripped your attack surface these engines can attack, down to just your web browser. But this makes browsing less user friendly and a lot more frustrating in the short term, and confusing for people who aren’t technical.
Of course, whenever someone starts talking about a really secure platform, the Mac fanboys jump right in to tell me how secure Apple MacOS is–never mind that the MacOS/Safari combo gets hacked every year (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010,2011) during PWN2OWN at CANSECWEST. Never mind that the hackers have now developed a crimeware kit for the Mac, which means Mac users will need to be on the lookout for a deluge of malware from now on.
With so much dangerous malware and so many threats, how do I stay secure online?
READ MORE: Browser inSecurity – How I Stay Protected Online
The term computer appliance is a generic term for a class of computer devices that come pre-packaged and pre-wired from the factory with special features and functionality pre-configured and ready to use with only minimal setup. There are several types of devices that fall into this category such as storage appliances, network appliances, security appliances, anti-virus appliances and so forth. You can find this new tutorial I’ve written in my Tutorials section, under Computers as computer appliances.
Thought your Mac was secure? Did you know it is possible to turn the battery into a dead brick, or worse, possibly make it overcharge? How about permanently infect your computer (at least until the battery is replaced)?
So you thought Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” was secure, and rushed right out and bought it? Passware discovered that the logon password can be extracted from a Mac running OS X 10.7 Lion, even when the system is locked or asleep.
Updated the Client-Server Model tutorial–just one of over 800 Tutorials in the tutorials section of InetDaemon.Com. The updates clarify some of the common uses of the term including web thin clients, thick client applications and more.
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), the first commercially successful computer performed a public demonstration in Philadelphia, PA. USA on this date in 1951. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly spent five years designing and building UNIVAC. Built from 5,600 vacuum tubes, 300 relays, 18,000 crystal diodes, miles of wire and a mercury acoustic delay loop for program storage, the system’s physical dimensions are 14.5 feet long by 7.5 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and required 120 kva to power it–basically a small electric power plant. It could store about 12,000 characters in main memory.
Compare those specifications to your Kindle, iPad or Android smartphone computing devices, which are thousands of times smaller and exponentially more powerful and run on mere milliwatts. Still, UNIVAC was able to successfully predict the result of the 1952 Presidential election which Walter Cronkite added to his election coverage for CBS.
UNIVAC was built on ones compliment logic and could process not just numeric data, but character data as well. However, ones compliment logic produces the possibility of minus zero (-0) as a result, something that had to be accounted for when writing programs for the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC also separated input, output and computational functions from each other which is industry standard practice today. Other firsts in this computer were the ten magnetic tape readers used for information storage and retrieval, buffer memory
UNIVAC was purchased by the U.S. Government Census Bureau to process demographic data at 120 facts per second. There were 46 UNIVAC computers built and delivered between 1951 to 1958.
The UNIVAC also has the distinction of being tied to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the Grande Dame of computing, creator of the first compiler, the COBOL language, both developed on the UNIVAC, and the term ‘debugging’.
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