It started with a set of slides by a friend:
My first thought was to wonder wonder how heartbleed, shellshock, cve-2015-7547 and the like fit into this story. He answered “rebuild the world and redeploy”. Which I felt missed the problem.
You also need a level of control around what goes into containers, who can build containers, where they get deployed.
We have decades of history of knowing that self-run machines are badly patched and badly maintained; if the bug isn’t in the application code then it’s mostly invisible to the developer.
My old site was nicely hand crafted HTML. Each bit loving created. It worked… but it did smell a little 90’s. Which doesn’t surprise me; the last time I did any web development was the 90s!
So I thought I’d try something a little more modern.
Unfortunately most CMS systems (eg WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) appear to want to use a database of some form. The content is displayed dynamically based on the user request and the database content.
I was reminded of a backblaze article about SMART numbers. This nudged me to look up the stats on my drives to see if any numbers had budged.
Let’s collect the data for processing:
for a in /dev/sd? do smartctl -a $a > $a done Spot the error.
I ran the code. Did an “ls”… and didn’t see any output. I started to panic a little… I didn’t just do what I think I just did… did I?
Coworker: i’ve found that networking/factime can pay dividends
CW: *face time
Me: “factime” - that was the early name for “bullet time”, but they realised “fast and circular” didn’t sound as cool.
CW: stephen you ever play trivial pursuit and if so how’d you do?
CW: or maybe jeopardy
Me: Umm, you really shouldn’t believe everything I write :-)
CW: lol
CW2: Stephen, have you ever played balderdash? And if so, how’d you do?
So it looks like those scans were coming from NCATS.
This is only meant to scan networks associated with the Federal government. I’m guessing there was a misconfiguration, somewhere, ‘cos Panix tell me they never requested any scans of their network :-)
Through a friend I contacted their SOC. I saw another scan yesterday and escalated. They just replied and told me that they’ve removed the IP ranges from their config.
Either the DHS is attacking me, or else they’ve got compromised computers…
In my logs I see 1147 attempts from 64.69.57.20 to my web server; e.g.
64.69.57.20 - - [03/Jul/2015:00:40:32 -0400] "\x16\x03\x01" 501 295 "-" "-" 64.69.57.20 - - [03/Jul/2015:00:40:40 -0400] "GNUTELLA CONNECT/0.6" 400 306 "-" "-" 64.69.57.20 - - [03/Jul/2015:00:40:41 -0400] "GET http://rfi.nessus.org/check_proxy.html HTTP/1.0" 404 293 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)" 64.69.57.20 - - [03/Jul/2015:00:40:42 -0400] "ABKJFC / HTTP/1.
When I was 10 my teacher told us this joke.
So in the old Wild West… General Custer was chasing Sitting Bull. He had his cavalry and supply wagons and soldiers. They’d been chasing Sitting Bull for days and the weather was starting to go bad. A lieutentant came to Custer and told him “Sir, the men are tired, the weather is bad, we need to rest.” Custer thought about it and replied “OK, I’ve been here before; a couple of miles ahead is a valley where we can make camp”.
So I wrote that Voyager was the worst ST ever.
I still agree with that, because of the overall structure.
This doesn’t deny that some episodes were good though.
Viewing Voyager as a “old school story telling” structure allows you to see each episode as an individual story.
One really good one is “Child’s Play” (season 6). This is a “7 of 9 episode” (one of the downsides of Voyager was “harry episode”, “tom episode”, “tuvok episode” etc etc), but it was one of the better standalone episodes, talking to what it means to be an individual, to have self-agency.
“Voyager” has a reputation for being awful. And I agree with this. But maybe not for the reason commonly cited.
It’s an article of faith amongst some people that Voyager is panned simply because it had a woman in the captain’s chair. I have no doubt that there are plenty of Neanderthals out there who do have this stupid knee jerk reaction. I remember some of the media speculation around having a female captain, and how the audience would take it.
I hit a web page which, naturally, refused to work properly. So I looked at the NoScript report. This one page ws pulling in scripts from (hand-typed so maybe tpyos)
adobedtm.com cdna-assets.com chartbeat.com cloudfront.net criteo.com disqus.com disquscdn.com doubleclick.net dunhilltraveldeals.com effectivemeasure.net facebook.com gigya.com google.com googlesyndication.com googletagservices.com imrworldwide.com inksinmedia.com krxd.net mediavoice.com mmcdn.us ooyala.com optimizely.com outbrain.com parsly.com quantserve.com qubitproducts.com revsci.net scorecardresearch.com skimresources.com visualrevenue.com whistleout.com Boggle!