Time To Dump Antivirus As Endpoint Protection?

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1. Abandon antivirus
Businesses could remove host-based security from their desktops and trust that their perimeter will keep out the malware.

via Time To Dump Antivirus As Endpoint Protection? — Dark Reading.

There are some other useful tips in this article as well.  I like the above quoted idea because AV software can be a pretty heavy load on an endpoint requiring constant maintenance and upgrade.  These upgrade cycles in and of themselves pose a security hazard.  The more complex a system becomes, the more that can go wrong.

Terrible advice from a great scientist

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Darwin is Wilson’s Bill Gates, his outlier from which he draws general conclusions. However, even Darwin himself wrote:

I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics;  for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

It is this extra sense that makes math such a powerful asset to biological thinking. Indeed “thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence.” requires math to chart and define these “processes” as processes in the first place

via Terrible advice from a great scientist | Byte Size Biology.

The Eternal Mainframe

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The Internet and web applications have been enablers for these server farms, for these mainracks, if you will. People use these web apps on smartphones, on notebooks, on tablets, and on the fading desktop. The client paints pixels while the server farm — the mainrack — does the backend work. More than a dozen iterations of Moore’s Law later, and the Wheel of Reincarnation has returned us to terminals connected to Big Iron.

And there’s the rub. The movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented not only the mainframe, but also the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place.

via The Eternal Mainframe – Throwww.com.

Superstorm Sandy Shook the Earth

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Storm-induced seismic vibes aren’t a newly recognized phenomenon. In 2005, ground motions triggered by Hurricane Katrina were picked up by seismometers in California. And even storms that remain far from land can trigger ground motions, Sufri and Koper note.

Because the strongest ground motions are typically created at or near a storm, researchers can track its progress using seismic data alone. That offers opportunities for scientists to delve through old data sets—especially those from the presatellite era—to look for signs of storms that might have been missed by earthbound observers, or to better estimate their paths and intensities, Sufri says.

via Superstorm Sandy Shook the Earth – ScienceNOW.

It amazes me how sensitive those seisometers must be.

World’s largest OTEC power plant planned for China

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OTEC uses the natural difference in temperatures between the cool deep water and warm surface water to produce electricity. There are different cycle types of OTEC systems, but the prototype plant is likely to be a closed-cycle system. This sees warm surface seawater pumped through a heat exchanger to vaporize a fluid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia. This expanding vapor is used to drive a turbine to generate electricity with cold seawater then used to condense the vapor so it can be recycled through the system.

via World’s largest OTEC power plant planned for China.

Creating a Centralized Syslog Server

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For this article, I’ll be focusing on syslog-ng as this is more up to date, and if the reader wishes, can be ‘supported’ via the company that owns the syslog-ng software by going with their enterprise edition version at a later date.

via Creating a Centralized Syslog Server | Linux Journal.

This is a good tutorial to get going with syslog-ng.  Monitoring events being logged into syslog can provide ample warning when a server is about to die.

Facebook vs. Salesforce: An Identity Smackdown?

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If an alternative did take root, his money would be on Salesforce to prevail. “There’s credibility for Salesforce being an enterprise identity provider,” Shaw says. “They have a legitimate claim for being an identity provider because so many people use salesforce.com. It’s hard not to run into an enterprise that’s not using Salesforce to some degree. Even small companies.

via Facebook vs. Salesforce: An Identity Smackdown? — Dark Reading.

“Killer Joe” Sues VPN-Using BitTorrent Pirates

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The film in question grossed disappointing box office earnings, but these fresh lawsuits offer new revenue potential.

via “Killer Joe” Sues VPN-Using BitTorrent Pirates | TorrentFreak.

TorrentFreak asked both Leaseweb and SpotFlux what kind of information they will be able to share when the subpoena comes in, but we have yet to receive a response. In its privacy policy Spotflux explains that it will comply with court orders, but that the company keeps logs to a minimum.

This might be the first attempt to go after a VPN provider.  If they rotated their logs properly there shouldn’t be any information to give or hide.