Month: June 2004

dns tunnel

Compass Security hat in Zusammenarbeit mit der Fachhochschule Rapperswil (HSR) durch die Diplomanden Rene Herrmann und Christian Bernet eine Test-Suite für DNS Tunneling entwickelt. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Windows Client Programm, welches mit einem Compass DNS Server via DNS Pakete in Verbindung treten will. Gelingt dies, kann der DNS Tunnel Test gestartet werden. Andernfalls wird eine Info Box angezeigt, dass das Netzwerk gegenüber DNS Tunneling geschuetzt ist.

what do you know. my friend rene herrmann implemented a sneaky little dns tunnel. that kid needs a web site.

CMS specialists

The Certified Metrication Specialist (CMS) program is the only bona-fide metric certification program available. It is a carefully monitored program under the direction of some of the nation’s top metric-system experts who operate as the USMA Certified Metrication Specialist Board. The CMS program is designed to provide documentary evidence for individuals who can qualify as metric specialists because of their education and experience in the use of the modern metric system which is known as SI (the International System of Units).

Age of quacks

If you didn’t know Baltimore has a permanent Rumor Control hotline, you’re not alone. The municipal rumor-snuffing center is little promoted today. Rumor Control’s mission is squash misinformation, loose talk, and wild-haired stories that might affect the health and safety of the city. It was established in 1968 to ease tensions and provide information amid the riots that followed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Once its services were advertised on the sides of buses. Now about the only place you’ll find the number is buried in the phone book’s blue-paged government listings. “Most of the calls that come in today just want to know what Rumor Control is”.

i wonder if the panopticon singularity hedged with augmented social networks will be able to stem the tide of quacks?

Backward or forward?

joel spolsky wrote an excellent article how microsoft shifted from making sure all applications continue to run on new os releases to rewriting everything.

Raymond Chen writes, “I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.”

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle. The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product.

he goes on to suggest that microsoft is trying to save the rich client by all means necessary:

There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn.

caustic tech

the tech industry and the people involved in it have a made a mockery of themselves in so many ways, it’s kind of hard to pick some arbitrary starting point. i mean, there is j2ee vs. .net, open source vs. proprietary, richard stallman making sure that EVERYBODY knows the difference between the linux kernel and the gnu applications on top of it, which company makes the most flattering khakis for men 10 kg overweight…jesus, where do you start with all this shit???

so begins caustic tech. subscribed.