[LAU] LightWorks for Linux Demo

[John Murphy]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:03:15 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Monday 18 March 2013 09:35:42 Louigi Verona did opine:
> 
> > Security from who?
> > My laptop sits on a table in my house. Unless a thief breaks in, I doubt
> > there is
> > any danger.
> > 
> > Also, I am not against security. I am for making it easier to work with
> > the system.
> > Having a clear option to turn auto login on or off has nothing to do
> > with security per se.
> > 
> Your laptop connects to the internet, right?  Its been said many times that 
> the average life of a winblows machine connected directly to the net via 
> the wifi port on your modem, is between 5 to 20 minutes until its been 
> hacked and 'powned' as they say.

"Winblows" and "powned" lol. Not sure if it was by design, or a lucky
accident, but hardly anyone accidentally connects directly to the WAN
any more. Network Address Translation only provides IP addresses which
are un-routable and I expect all wireless routers have it enabled by
default these days.

> I get enough spam that if it were edible, my family would all weigh 350 lbs 
> each.  The more obnoxious stuff gets a kill at my isp based on the 1st 3 
> octets of the source address.  That means I never again see the output of 
> that particular xx.xx.xx.256 again.

Better to use one of the dnsbl's, I would have thought, although
they aren't so useful today due to 'scraping the bottom of the barrel'
for IPv4 blocks. Also IP addresses are dynamically assigned from large
pools at most ISPs outside the USA and I think I've heard that it's
becoming less likely to get a fixed IP there too. So blocking /24s
may not be much use.

> So go ahead, bypass anything that looks like a hard to guess password, but 
> when 30 minutes later your machine is blasting the world with assorted spam 
> and phishing emails that I will eventually consign to the black hole of my 
> ISP's equivalent to /dev/null, don't say you weren't advised.
> 
> Today, java has been hacked so many times its recommended that your browser 
> disables any knowledge that there is even a java installed.  Some folks are 
> removing it completely.

Some even remove 'javascript' and then complain about pages not working
properly...

> Its been said that the universe has unlimited quantities of both hydrogen 
> and stupidity.  But I think hydrogen may not be unlimited.
> 
> Today, passwords of less than 15 characters are crackable in an hour or so.
> Think about that...

correcthorsebatterystaple? :) http://xkcd.com/936/

-- 
John.