Posts by James

Miserly marks get smart to UK phishing fraudsters

Proving you have anti-virus?

Hmm... I don't like this very much.

I run Linux, so I don't have any anti-virus installed, or anti-spyware. However, if I were a victim of identity theft, I wouldn't like to have to explain why I don't really need it.

Also, I'm not convinced that having AVG or a free one would do the trick. If it comes down to an argument about liability, they'll be wanting is a receipt from PC World, not an "I downloaded some free thingy so that's OK".

Does this mean that to cover my ass, I now have to go and buy a copy of Norton so I can pretend to install it on my Linux machine?

This is all about liability, and the banks wanting to reduce theirs as much as possible.

How big an eco-hazard is IT equipment?

@Rich Re: More expensive electricity

Because more than temperature control is required in a server room - the aircon is a closed, filtered system to keep dust levels down, as well as the temperature and humidity right.

Also, you're probably underestimating the amount of heat that's produced by racks of servers - if the air con fails, the room is likely to heat at a rate of a degree every minute or so.

I've seen aircon failures lead to Sahara-like temperatures with servers crashing all over within 10-15 minutes.

Pakistan blocks YouTube

BGP Route Propagation is how it happenned

Pakistan ISPs were attempting to propagate a different route for the YouTube address space, pointing the IPs to their server that serves up a "You're not allowed to see this" error page.

Unfortunately, they didn't filter this route at their border and this resulted in the rest of the world receiving this incorrect route, which presumably brought their server to its knees.

Youtube were not involved in the blocking, as James Smith suggests.