Toblog

BBC Article on ‘No Plan, No Peace’ documentary
... Garry Smith’s take on it

Huge crabs

Blu-ray copy protection reportedly cracked

Waterboarding is Torture… Period

NBC admits: Hulu is designed to gouge cash from viewers

UK.gov plans more active-traffic motorway ANPR cams

Schneier rubbishes the quantum cryptographically encrypted voting

‘They are advertising vibrating cock rings on Channel Four.’

Network Monitoring Appliance Looks Below 1 Microsecond

A fun new Quirkology video: The Prediction

Viacom puts Eight Year Daily Show archive online

Law Firm Claims Copyright on View of HTML Source

IFPI loses domain name

London’s 10,000 security cameras don’t reduce crime

comp.risks 24.87

Ahem, please excuse the awful pun…

All taken on the k800i walking to work one morning.

I’m used to seeing ssh dictionary attacks from single IPs, hitting my servers in a short amount of time. For the first time today, however, I have had entries like the following:

Oct 22 15:05:54 [sshd] error: PAM: Authentication failure for root from <hostname>

...fairly regularly spaced throughout the day, all from different hosts. The natural assumption is that the dictionary attacks are now being run from botnets.

Anyone else seeing these? In the past when noticing dictionary attacks I’ve blocked the source IP; that now seems a little harsh for hosts that are being used without their owners’ consent. If a lot of people did that it may encourage the owners to take more notice of their security, but such a draconian measure would require a large amount of people to take part in order for it to be effective.

A DNSBL for firewalls would be a possible solution, although there would have to be a way of notifying people the reason they can’t connect to a particular host.

‘Taking Liberties’ out on DVD

...as is ‘Helvetica’

Society of Homeopaths pulls an Usmanov

Bloodspell: a feature-length Machinima animated film
... based on the Neverwinter Nights graphics engine

‘Family Guy Season Six’ on pre-order at Amazon

‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ too

...and finally, ‘The Brightonomicon’ as well

MC Xander warming up, segueing into The White Stripes

Henry Porter now has his own website

Matthew Norman on the fading away of the BBC

Ron Deibert: ‘By-Passing Internet Censorship’...: Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide

Five Sentences: A personal policy for emails

A graph that describes outbreaks of Clostridium difficile

Bride sues over flowers that were ‘wrong shade’

NHS Blog Doctor is back and blogging about the Clostridium difficile deaths in Maidstone

Bystander points us at a recent Prison Reform Trust report

[updated to correct the spelling]