Nick Bradbury

Nick Bradbury: "Introducing FeedDemon 3.1"

FeedDemon is my preferred RSS reader. It integrates transparently with Google Reader, it has tons of features to efficiently process hundreds of feeds in short order. It's also stable, fast, and integrates with all of my existing tools.

Girl Scout Cookie Time!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/holyjuan/3326572579/

This is how Girl Scout Cookie nutrition labels should be updated.  Am I the only one who eats a box at a time?

Technorati Tags: nutrition

I am pbegley

I am registered on almost every major site as pbegley and I registered the e-mail address pbegley at gmail dot com while Google Mail was in beta. 

Off and on, I have run into problems with some other Begley either giving my e-mail address to family (Patricia in Kentucky), or signing up for various services (jobs.com, Pat Begley in Wyoming).  Tonight it was someone attempting a password reset for Ubernote.

I’m hoping that posting this so it shows up in the major search engines.

Technorati Tags: identity,Internet

Tonight Show = 11:35PM

Technorati Tags: media,culture

I’m with Coco

 

The Tonight Show should remain in its 11:35PM time slot.

Technorati Tags: TV,culture,media

Fear and Loathing on Sesame Street

I don’t know why I like this so much, but the more I look, the more I like it.  Hunter S. Thompson used to write amazingly insightful political pieces in Rolling Stone, but I wouldn’t want to have him as my neighbor.

Update:  Original link from Imageshack gone, removed link

Technorati Tags: literature

Phishing e-mail today

Below is the body of the message I received.  It’s obviously malicious because I control all the services for paulbegley.com, but I was intrigued. 

Dear user of the paulbegley.com mailing service!
We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (rants@paulbegley.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:
http://paulbegley.com/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=rants@paulbegley.com&from=paulbegley.com&fromname=rants
Best regards, paulbegley.com Technical Support.
Message ID#T1SYDT2B4BVZJ72

First, I looked at the header information and the entries below flagged this as fake.  It originated in Japan (.jp TLD), there is no reverse lookup for the IP address 119.152.104.119, and it’s part of APIC (Asia-Pacific Information Center).

Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: best guess record for domain of transitioning unquotingpoy4@strl.nhk.or.jp does not designate 119.152.104.119 as permitted sender) client-ip=119.152.104.119;
Return-Path: <unquotingpoy4@strl.nhk.or.jp>
Received: from CAWADZSGG (unknown [119.152.104.119])
Received: from 119.152.104.119 by iron.nhk.or.jp; Sun, 10 Jan 2010 05:45:04 –0800

Also embedded in the message is the real link to some server in Korea (.kr TLD):

http://paulbegley.com.yhuttte.ne.kr/owa/service_directory/setting

Last, if you have a modern browser installed and configured correctly, your browser (at least Chrome and Firefox) flagged the link as a malicious site and blocked any connections.  IE let you through, but blocked the automatic download.  Screen shots below.

Chrome

Firefox

IE 8

Technorati Tags: Security,Internet,phishing,e-mail

Verizon software update ‘bug’

I recommend that everyone update their Verizon phones using the *228 feature on a regular basis.  My daughter did this last night, and after the software update (option 1), her phone reset.  No problem, this is often required after a firmware update.  However, after the reset, her security code changed.  It took us a few minutes to guess that is was reset to the last four digits of her phone  number.

Is this a bug or a feature?  This is a feature, but not well documented.  I found it after searching the Verizon forums.

Technorati Tags: Verizon,mobile,firmware

Verizon Responds To Erroneous $1.99 Fee

 

More interesting is the phantom $1.99 fee Verizon's been hitting consumers with for doing absolutely nothing. The fee was first exposed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer last summer. It only gained the FCC's attention after David Pogue at the NY Times posted a column featuring a Verizon insider -- who claimed Verizon was aware of the glitch -- but was too in love with the millions in additional revenue it generated to do anything about it.

Verizon Responds To FCC Inquiry On ETFs, Erroneous $1.99 Fee - And the excuses are just as lame as you thought they'd be... - dslreports.com

Technorati Tags: wireless,Verizon,finance

Encryption busted on NIST-certified Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives

 At first I thought this was hyperbole from ZD-Net regarding encryption of some popular USB flash drives.

After reading the article, I’m very surprised at how simple the crack is to implement:

When the correct password is supplied by the user, the authentication program always send the same character string to the drive to decrypt the data no matter what the password used. What’s also staggering is that this character string is the same for Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives.

UPDATE:  To clarify, my concern is that the NIST security specification doesn’t include a protocol for how the authentication token is managed.  I expected it to be unique between vendors at a minimum.

Encryption busted on NIST-certified Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives

Technorati Tags: encryption,storage,security