Sunday, February 25, 2007

Weekend Reading

Weak links in your security chain

You've spent the time to make sure your server is hardened and locked down. You've audited your web apps and feel they are as solid as concrete. Your passwords are strong, your patches are applied, and your IT staff is confident that they are on top of their security game. So what could go wrong? A lot.

Take a look HERE.


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RAID Data Recovery Is Possible!

Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).

Take a look HERE.

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Internet Weather Forecast Accuracy

Weather forecasting is a secure and popular online presence, which is understandable. The weather affects most everyone's life, and the Internet can provide information on just about any location at any hour of the day or night. But how accurate is this information? How much can we trust it?

Read the article HERE.

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DRM Is Causing Piracy

Bank robbers do indeed rob banks. But here's what they don't do, or do very, very rarely:


They don't illegally siphon gas from a neighbor's car to fuel the getaway vehicle. Instead, they buy the gasoline. They might steal the gun they're planning to use to rob the banks, because guns are expensive. But they're not likely to steal the ammunition—much less try to make the ammunition themselves. Why bother? They're not planning to fight a war, they simply need enough ammunition to load a gun. So they buy the ammunition.

I would think the point is obvious. Pirates rob bullion ships, they don't rob grain ships. Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

1) The product they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

And . . .
Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

Take a look HERE.

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