I'm going to be presenting at the Iowa Association for Communication Technology annual conference on April 1 in Cedar Rapids. It's a joint conference with the Iowa Distance Learning Association. My co-worker Aaron Howard and I will be covering the evolution of our campus wireless network over the last 5 years, as well as the security and usability implications of various wireless security methods in the chaotic campus network environment.
My yearly subscription for my Red Hat workstation was due, but I no longer hold the card that I used to set it up, so the auto-renewal didn’t go through. That’s all fine, and expected, but here’s what Red Hat wants me to do:
The credit card information is not going through. Please fax the following to XXX-XXX-XXXX so we can verify the credit card details:
- Cardholder
- Credit card number
- Expiration date
- Billing address (this must match the one on file with the credit card company)Please reply if you have any questions and have a good day!
Uh, in the age of phishing, I’m not faxing(!) my credit card info to a random phone number that I got in my e-mail. This message isn’t even PGP signed. I replied back and told them I’d be happy to re-enter my info in an SSL-secured form available via their site, if they provide one, but there’s no way I’m faxing my credit card info anywhere.
This article from George Ou is an alarming way to start the morning. It details the new attacks on the WEP protocol, which is known to be broken, but was generally assumed to be “good enough” when rotated often. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so we need to look at moving to the next generation of encryption on our Wireless LAN ASAP. In an educational setting such as ours, however, this is a little trickier, I’ve got about 750 clients spread around campus, and I can’t get that many users to turn on a dime. To make them even grumpier, this is going to “break” a lot of older wireless hardware which is sure to bring the college students out with their pitchforks and torches. In other words, I’m already having a bad day…
Symantec has updated their Corporate AntiVirus product to make it compatible with Windows XP SP2, so far, no problems for me on the 4 boxes I've installed Service Pack 2 on. If you're running version 9 of SAV, get the patch here. You'll also probably want to patch your existing SAV 9 .msi file so that you don't need to patch new installations in the future, just use the msiexec command listed here
Today is a Microsoft Patch Day, the second Tuesday of the month. My co-worker, our "Senior Systems Administrator", is gone to Russia until June 1, leaving me, the vanilla "Systems Administrator" in charge of patching all the miscellaneous Windows servers in our racks. I'm really hoping that today just brings a patch for Windows Media Player, or something equally inane, because I really don't want to have to patch all these boxes by myself...
