Technology Made Simple

Procrastination is a plague that effects almost everyone at one time or another. Whether you put off taking out the trash (I hope not), gift shopping for the holidays, or working on personal projects, there are ways to deal with and/or cure yourself of this plague. As much as I love web development, getting into "the flow" can sometimes become a daunting task that's usually caused by playing Counter-Strike Source, surfing Digg, or socializing (bleh). This list was compiled to provide a constant reminder for myself - hopefully fellow web developers will benefit from it as well.

Continue reading Ten Highly Effective Techniques To Defeat Procastination

For those of you with a cable service provider, the first item on the tech's script involves "power cycling" your cable modem. Even if you've power cycled your modem three times prior to calling, the technician will ask you to shutdown your computer (which serves no purpose), power off everything relavent to the network, wait two or three minutes, and finally turn everything back on. Most user's won't mind, but for some people, having to restart your entire network can cost you some money, especially if you have people/other networks that depend on your uptime.

Continue reading Comcast For The Win – Power Cycling Your Cable Modem Is Useless

Author: |sid| (efnet)

In late November, security reports indicated a new worm was spreading through our network, taking advantage of a vulnerability in Symantec’s anti-virus/computer security products. The vulnerability, which effected a variety of Symantec's products, was discovered or made public in May, 2006. The weakness allowed an attacker to execute code remotely on fully patched Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines. A lead security specialist from eEYE reported malicious individuals were actively exploiting the weakness to gain control of machines for use in botnets. Once a machine was infected, the Trojan called home to IP address, 38.118.143.201. The first compromised machine immediately began scanning other machines on the same subnet. We had already observed an instance of the scanning on the [removed] campus via a wireless DHCP host. The IP was quickly blocked, however, quite a few machines had already been infected.

Continue reading Defeating A Botnet Trust Him, It’s Easy

Google's Webmaster Tools has awesome potential, and I've been pleased with the intermittent service, sort of. The site works when it wants to, or just when I'm not using it I guess. Here's some of the problems I've ran into or noticed while using the service, which may eventually be required to use if you'd like your site to be included in Google's index.

Continue reading Google Webmaster Tools Fails To Provide Accurate Information, Sometimes

To prevent an immature audience from experiencing such devilish things, software has been developed to block or disable these obscenities from being displayed. These programs limit a person’s ability to enjoy and search or browse the Internet. Attempting to write a school research paper can be difficult when using words such as: minor, 18, racism, and breast cancer.

Continue reading Netnanny And The Like Actually Pervert The Minds of Children

Just think about it - Google's already developed an internet drive, online document editors, advertising campaign managers, calandars, online WYSIWYG editors, an instant messaging client, and so much more. The recent aquisition of millions, if not billions of IPv6 IP's, the dark fiber they've been purchasing, and the official statement, "we're not going to provide internet connectivity." hhmm - well what the hell do you plan on doing? My guess, "Google operating system." I've also read or been told that Google plans on being within three hops of every home in the US by the end of 2010. The only explanation I can think of as to why a company is so concerned about network latency is an online operating system, much like YouOS.com. If you haven't already, create an account - it's amazing. There's an entire operating system with a start menu, in your browser window.

Continue reading Web Based Operating System The Furture Of Computing

First up, google search. Before you move to the next section, you may learn a few things so stay with me. Google allows you to use "special operators" that can narrow down or make search results more accurate.

Google has a habit of excluding common words (where, are, and, or, 1, I, etc..). But what if one or more of these excluded words is necessary to obtain the desired results? Simple! Add a + in front of the word(s) being excluded. For example...

pepsi +and coke or... +how +and why

You can also wrap your search terms in quotation marks...

"pepsi and coke" or... "how and why"

You may seek results for two different terms, but google removes "or" from your searches. To overcome this, simply replace "or" with "OR" - too easy!

Continue reading Learn Howto Use Advanced Search Operators And Take Full Advantage of Google

/* 

How Large Servers are Owned via DDoS 

written by perator 

*/

Every time you dial up to your ISP, your box is assigned an IP address. An IP address is a number (eg. 199.44.2.1) that identifies you on the internet. Every online computer has its own unless it's on a LAN (Local Area Network) in which case it might share an IP address with several computers linked to a HUB (A network device that links computers together to form a network).

By sending "fragmented" packets to someone's IP address, you can knock them offline, freeze, "blue screen" or even reboot someone's computer, depending on the packet header and the remote computer's tcp/ip stack's buffer. This is called a DoS Attack (Denial of Service attack). We are not going to do this, as little buffer overflows like those only work on windows based operating systems. Since we're usually dealing with Sun Sparc servers, routers, nodes, and Unix based systems, we're going to use utilities which turn 200gbps of bandwidth into 0kbps.

Continue reading Old School DDoS Attacks – How Large Servers Got Pwned