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LangaList 2002-03-07 Please visit our sponsors and help keep the LangaList S.E. free!
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 1) Arghhh!First: My apologies for the delayed issue this week. (Most of you got the Monday edition on Wednesday.) Here's what happened: Our list host (in Michigan) attempted to upgrade its servers late on Sunday, March 3rd, several hours before the March 4th issue should have been mailed. (The issue was already loaded onto the servers.) What started as a normal upgrade rapidly spun into tech-hell as the server's RAID drive system failed. It's not an off-the-shelf part, and had to be special-ordered first thing on Monday morning. The part arrived Tuesday, and was then installed and tested. Next, the server software was reinstalled and rolled back to the pre-update condition, and then the original server upgrade was repeated--- this time with success. The server came back to life Wednesday morning, and began delivering the issues that *should* have gone out Sunday night and Monday morning. Clearly, this was a major unexpected downtime. Although this wasn't caused by anything I did, I feel very bad about the service interruption, and sincerely apologize. I'd planned a normal full Thursday edition this week, but as you just got Monday's full issue, it seemed excessive to hit your mailbox twice in two days with long emails: Hence, this brief update. We'll resume normal full-length publication next Monday. Please note that the LangaList *web* servers are hosted in a different place by a different company: This is intentional, to provide redundancy--- if the email version is late, you always can get a copy from the web, and vice versa. In fact, Monday's issue was posted right on time on both web sites this week: The Standard edition is always available at: http://www.langa.com The Plus! edition is always available at: http://www.langalist.com/plus/ The InformationWeek.Com servers (which deliver a twice-a-month column from me, and also host a discussion area) also are entirely separate from all the above; see the next item. Again--- my apologies for the late mailing! Click to email this item to a
friend 2) Ethical Hacking?A recent Plus! issue's mention of a tool to generate a seemingly unlimited number of Product Activation codes brought a flood of mail, and introduced some readers to the seamier side of computing. I deliberately didn't provide a direct link to the cracking software because I can think of no legitimate use for the tool. The only thing it's good for is to violate the XP software license. I think WPA is a bad thing, but I don't advocate software piracy as a way to fight back--- piracy is wrong. But a number of readers went looking, and discovered that the world of software cracks is not pretty. There actually are a number of tools that offer WPA codes: One is simply a kind of database of known-good codes--- there's no generation of new numbers going on. As such, it's not only an unethical tool, it's also stupid, because everyone who uses it will draw on the same limited set of codes. Worse, malicious hackers--- crackers--- have posted at least one Trojan program that supposedly generates WPA codes, but which really diddles with your hard drive's boot record, rendering your machine unbootable. So there are many reasons not to violate your software license. It's wrong; some of the tools are very dumb and may actually increase your chances of getting caught; and other tools may actually do far more harm than WPA will ever do to you. In this case, I mentioned the WPA crack only because it validated a prediction I made to you six months ago--- that WPA would be no barrier to serious pirates. The existence of the crack proves definitively that WPA is a dumb idea on Microsoft's part. But please note I'm not against hacker tools per se: Some tools have totally legitimate uses that can let you get at parts of your system you otherwise just can't access. When a hacker tool has legitimate uses, I'll tell you about it and provide a download link. For example:
Thanks, Bob. But note that even those tools can get you into deep trouble, as another of your fellow readers found out when his innocent use of a password-revealer got him fired! That's the subject of the current InformationWeek.Com column, which could potentially help save your job or prevent an unnecessary disciplinary action. The full article is now posted over at http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020301S0004 . Please come check out the article and then join in the associated discussion: Does your company let you do more or less what you want with your PC, or are you bound to a rigid set of rules? If your company has an "acceptable use" policy, does it make sense? How does your company handle cases like Herb’s? Have you ever run afoul of a too-restrictive or too vague computer-use policy? Join in! Click to email this item to a
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