http://electronicrealitysolutions.com Sat, 19 May 2012 15:12:33 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/images/M_images/ers_rss.png http://electronicrealitysolutions.com Electronic Reality Solutions main news feed. http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/556/11/ Say what you will of Twitter but the ills of social networking and DDOS attacks against controversial bloggers only scratches the surface. According to security researchers Twitter has become a command and control channel for botnets (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/twitter_master_control_channel/). IT World describes the tweets of a now deactivated account (http://www.itworld.com/security/74613/twitter-botnet-command-and-control?source=ITWNLE_nlt_today_2009-08-14) which disseminated instructions to compromised computers designed to gather personal information for a group of identity thieves in Brazil. Though the discovery is a first for Twitter it doesn't taken an expert to realize that this vector is incredibly promising and falls under the "malicious content hidden in mundane Internet traffic" channel which hackers are exploiting with ever increasing frequency. While services like IRC and chat are being blocked or falling under ever increasing scrutiny hackers are quietly moving to other methods of instructing zombie computers like HTTP/HTTPS. Twitter, in spite of obvious service problems, is a very promising method as its popularity and user base grows because botnet commands can hide amongst normal tweet traffic. Editorials - Technology Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:47 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/557/11/ Why not over complicate this? The original chart contained 66 cells (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/08/07/dumb-windows-7-upgrade-chart-sparks-spat?source=nlt_weekly) but was later pared down to 14 by blogger Ed Bott. The key sticking point is the ability to "upgrade" install Windows 7 over Vista and XP rather than forcing users to do a "clean install". In my opinion Windows users are better off conducting a clean install when upgrading their OS, especially if the prior OS is exhibiting slowness, quirkiness or isn’t running just right. I keep my systems incredibly clean but still find myself reinstalling every 2-3 years due to hardware replacement or upgrades. Regardless it’s probably a better idea to back up your data, lay hands on the original CD/DVD application media and start fresh with Windows 7. Editorials - Technology Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/558/11/ I can't remember the last time I walked into a Blockbuster, for my family Redbox has been the way to rent movies for some time. Only now are the movie studios realizing that the novel and convenient concept of movie rental at your local grocery store is a threat to their bottom line. As such both Universal and FOX have forbade wholesalers from selling movies to Coinstar (http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/08/fox-joins-universals-war-on-redboxs-dvd-rental-kiosks.ars), owner of Redbox, until 30-45 days after the initial DVD release. Coinstar has in turn pursued legal action on the grounds that the studios are "engaging in anti-competitive behavior and abusing copyright law." I'm hopeful the two parties can come to some sort of arrangement however I'm not convinced the studios will allow Redbox to keep it's $1 per day rental rate. I'm also skeptical of the touted threat to DVD sales. Redbox is more of a threat to NetFlix and Blockbuster than to other outlets due to the downright shoddy condition of some of the rental disks plus the lack of ancillary packaging materials. Editorials - Business Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/555/10/ Gloom and doom may be the rage these days as banks fail and icons of American industry fail but no dilemma so recent causes as much hand wringing as the proposition of peak oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil). Since 1956 experts have called for a peak in oil production and an inevitable decline in output as the amount of proven reserves dwindle. Though there have been different interpretations and wildly different time lines nearly all theories agree on one thing: the price of petroleum-based products will increase to a point where it diminishes demand rather than causes an outright shortage. Growing up in the post 1970s gas crisis era I was aware of peak oil but never really thought about the prospect until a few years ago. My father in law turned me on to a book by Paul Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Roberts_(author)) called The End of Oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Oil). While I profoundly disagree with some of Roberts's assumptions I acknowledge that the prospect of costly petroleum will greatly change America, and the world, both socially and economically. Articles - The Bleeding Edge Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:19:43 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/554/11/ A recent report by the Brookings Institute paints "job sprawl" as a menace ( http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/0406_job_sprawl_kneebone.aspx) is disingenuous at best. While the report laments the exfiltration of jobs from the city center it fails to recognize the benefits both in quality of life and environmental impact. Key Points: Jobs are moving out of the city to where the people are. Meaning shorter commutes and less time idling in traffic which is one of the most polluting activities. Job exfiltration is a straw man for the more alarming concern over the exfiltration residents. The article falsely assume that if more jobs were in the city more workers would choose to live closer to town. This is not the case. Atlanta, GA is a perfect example. The argument that job sprawl is bad for the economic health of the nation is false. There is no evidence that the distribution of jobs throughout a metro area have a negligible impact on either job creation or worker productivity. Editorials - General Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:14:10 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/553/10/ 3rd party integrations require a lot of skill, finesse and diplomacy if they are going to be successful. I recently had the opportunity to spearhead the development effort at my company with a OEM lead provider integration. Depending on the development shop you may find yourself with either a very rigid process or a more loosely defined experience. In either situation communication is the key to success. If you find yourself in a loosely defined process like I did then you may have to deal with adjustments to your code as well as the providers. If the process is especially new you will likely uncover bugs or flaws in the process which need to be corrected. With this in mind it's far better to keep development iterative and to communicate and address issues in a timely manner. On the other hand if you find yourself in a very rigid design process you'll most likely be provided with a firm data spec which is relatively concrete as well as a series of test cases to qualify your integration. In this case you'll need to iron out any potential issues upfront and to fully complete your design before coding. In most cases you'll want to code to the test, but also analyze your own system for any potential bottlenecks or choke points which could create and issue during testing. In the end, regardless of which type of integration you use you'll want to include numerous methods of feedback to provide monitoring and quality of service assurance after deployment. I've found that it's often beneficial to enable debugging or verbose monitoring during the initial deployment as well as when unforeseen issues are encountered. Articles - .Net Development Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:12:30 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Articles/General/Lessons-in-IT-Dealing-with-the-Conficker-worm.html Inevitably a system administrator finds him or herself face to face with a worm at some point. My latest foray into the IT battlefront happened a few weeks ago with a rather nasty worm called Conficker. The worm is a sophisticated breed and proved a worthy, albeit frustrating, adversary. Our first contact was the detection of an RPC attack on port 445 (http://www.grc.com/port_445.htm) by Kaspersky's firewall solution. A system scan revealed that several machines with a Net-Worm.Win32.Kido (http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=1db5476c766555c9995b25d19f97b9bc) infection as identified by Kaspersky or Conficker (http://www.napera.com/blog/?p=360#more-360) as the worm is more widely known on the net. The initial infection vector was an un-patched system using the vulnerability published by Microsoft in late Oct, MS08-067 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx). The patch addressed an RPC hole which allows the worm to infect the system via File and Print sharing. Unfortunately most client firewalls are unable to block the RPC requests and in a matter of hours every vulnerable system becomes infected. Our initial response was to conduct an offline scan via Live CD on all machines and to apply the Microsoft patch. We also disabled file and print sharing along with several unused but now activated system services. Articles - General Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:34:46 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Articles/Web/The-Deflating-non-Bubble.html Call it irrational exuberance, over hype or cheer leading, but don't call it a bubble. That's the take away lesson from the recent tech start up meltdown. While sites like ValleyWag delight in the misfortune of the latest gaggle of VC funded companies and spin events as the end of the world, the truth is that this has been nothing more than a simple boom / bust cycle for tech. Nearly a decade ago as Silicon Valley hype reached stratospheric levels many early pundits used words like "historic" and "new economy". Companies that were little more than a fancy website were raising immense amounts of capital with IPOs while communications companies laid thousands of miles of fiber optic cable. It was if the Internet commerce sector could not be stopped and millions of average Joes sunk their retirement funds into companies like Flooz and Pets.com. In the end many companies went bust others suffered with inventory or bandwidth they could not sell, and many others lost most of their nest egg as the stock market fell. Articles - Web 2.0 Review Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:20:11 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Editorials/Technology/Future-of-Facebook.html It seems there is no such thing as bad press, at least for Facebook. Despite a major personnel shakeup (http://valleywag.com/5070144/the-facebook-layoffs), a controversial redesign (http://www.benparr.com/2008/09/my-thoughts-facebook-revolt/) and a growing reputation as a professional liability (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/13/facebook-postings-land-teachers-in-hot-water) the site continues to enjoy an ever increasing user base and new found popularity. Among social media sites it sits firmly atop the heap and appears to have a bright future ahead. But buzz alone can not address some of the critical issues the site will face in the coming months. First and foremost the site has yet to significantly monetize (http://www.itworld.com/internet/57602/facebook-twitter-making-money-takes-back-seat-growth) anything other than advertisement. The current and project economic climate will not bode well for the online ad market and it's imperative that the company finds other avenues of revenue if it is to become a long term player. But Facebook is not alone in this dilemma as it is shared by virtually every social site on the web. Editorials - Technology Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:20:01 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Editorials/Technology/Social-web-reflections.html One thing is consistent about the future of technology, that it is always in flux. Take for example the social web revolution that begannearly ten years ago with the first blog. Since then we've seen a rapid evolution from homepage blog, to mobile blog, to video blog and then to micro blog. Beyond today the direction of progress is less visible than the certainty that it will take place. If you feel a bit left out by all of this progress you're not alone. By most metrics a large portion of the population still do not use online social media nor have any inclination to do so. For those who use social media it is more of a distraction than a way of life. Just as surfing was the choice way to waste time in the late nineties, so to is the now more popular pastime of Web 2.0 socializing. Still there are a few who've fully embraced the movement as a lifestyle, and it is those individuals that we often find ourselves enamored with. Editorials - Technology Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:30:08 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Articles/Dot-Net/Alachisoft-NCache-Review.html I recently had a chance to review an enterprise level caching solution from the folks at Alachisoft called NCache. Our development team was in the market for a scalable solution to high database load which was sapping the life from our database server. NCache (http://www.alachisoft.com/ncache/index.html) is an in-memory cache which can be distributed among a cluster of servers to both improve reliability and performance of data intensive apps. Articles - .Net Development Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/Articles/Bleeding-Edge/Interactive-Weather.html Weather Underground's latest feature presses the boundary Google Maps has been around for a while but I'm repeatedly amazed by the addition of features by both Google and third parties via the public API. I recently uncovered a new feature from the venerable meteorological site Weather Underground called the WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/). WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) is a customized weather layer atop the already familiar Google maps engine. However unlike standard radar, the WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) displays real time data which includes current storm activity and trajectory. Articles - The Bleeding Edge Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:14:39 +0100