Keep Up El Reg

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/psn-was-running-on-unpatched-apache-server-with-no-firewall-2011055/

With their past record Sony calling in security experts will achieve sweet FA

Security Experts in stating the bleeding obvious shocker

The findings of that university report could have been knocked up in five minutes if they'd downloaded the (freely available) souce code of the LOIC. But then going to all the extra effort of packet sniffing and setting up test networks probably sucks more cash into your research budget.

There's a lot of other silliness talked about the LOIC by 'security experts'

"security expert Peter Wood said that in practice it would be very difficult to track down the people involved because the attacks used "anonymising software" to hid their tracks online." [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11968605]

Eh? Did Peter even bother to look into the LOIC before expressing an opinion so authoritatively? And, as he'd have seen *if he'd bothered to check his facts* incorrectly? I note that the BBC doesn't name his organisation or give his credentials. Which is shame as I for one would like to know who to avoid them when buying in pen-testing.

OO is too slow...

...on a 5 year old g4 iBook.

Office 2008 for MAC OTOH just works, and at a usable speed.

Really, Who cares about the underlying OS?

For email and browsing and anything your granny needs to do on a PC Linux, and especially Ubuntu, is a far better choice these days than Windows, and that UI from the 90s looks far better than the interface designed by a 6 year old after a day of E numbers playing Simon* that Windows 7 comes with.

As for Macs? If they were crap why does a 5 year old iBook G4 still fetch as much on ebay as a new Windows laptop? They're only expensive ion the short term. Over a lifetime I would suggest that they turn out cheaper, especially as so much software and functionality that costs extra on Windows is built into a Mac. And Linux for that matter.

* For anyone under twenty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)

Static Identifier privacy concerns

Interesting that the use of 32bit static identifiers "raises privacy concerns as vehicles can be tracked through these identifiers." when you need to be tracking the vehicle within "40 metres" in the first place.

At which distance you can see that rather larger static identifier the number plate.

Point well and truly missed.

But this data would have remained private

Google may have taken the data but it wasn't viewed or used. It was only when various government watchdogs all insisted on viewing the data that it was actually exposed.

Kind of like Google taking letters off peoples doormats, but the governments insisting on opening the letters for a good read.

Fetch me my tin foil hat because I'm not sure the governments didn't have another agenda here.

Ha ha ha ha ha

<i>In the UK a fairly comprehensive system exists to allow police to extract data from network operators, with some judicial oversight and budgetary considerations that prevent fishing expeditions.</i>

Does the authour actually believe that?

@Jason Fossen

@Jason Fossen

> And even the old die-hard Linux advocates don't run Linux anymore, they all have Mac

Probably running Linux in a VM.

@ Nuno

> CentOs is a server OS

What's this running as my desktop then?

Macs Expensive?

I use Linux (CentOS and Red hat flavours), Windows XP, Solaris 10, and Mac OSX at work - I have 5 screens _and_ still need a KVM! - and each have their advantages/failings. Based on my experience with them all four years ago when I had to pay out _my_ money for a laptop I ditched Windows and bought a G4 Mac.

It was the best choice I made.That was OS X 10.3, and since then it's performed faultlessly and reliably, and the upgrades to later OS versions - it's now on 10.5 - have actually made it run faster. You can't say that about a PC, especuially if you're doing video work. At the same time it has a better UI than linux (OK, subjective statement, YMMV), but still has the BSD underpinnings that made setting it up and running it as a XAMP server a piece of piss. Plus it gets all the command line tools linux developers take for granted.

Cost to buy might have been more than a Windows PC, but for TCO I think my Mac has nothing to prove.

Careful

A colleague of mine got in serious trouble when one of his Pratchett-esque error messages flashed up on a customer screen:

"Out of cheese error"

Though there is at least one system out there that suggests that people "Eat More Lard".