18 Mar
2013
18 Mar
'13
6:29 p.m.
On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:03:15 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Monday 18 March 2013 09:35:42 Louigi Verona did
opine:
"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.
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. 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.