So, after four phone calls and nearly an hour on hold, I finally got the straight scoop from my ISP. The DSL they’ve been selling me for the past year is *NOT* a static IP address, as they’d claimed, it’s dynamic. Just lucky it hadn’t changed in 14 months. (They’re refunding the money I’ve paid for a static IP address they didn’t have to sell me.) They’re pretty much in a tizzy in the local office, as they have a number of clients to provision, and no IP addresses to give them. Since they’ve been bought out by a BigCo, they have to wait for the BigCo to deign to let them have a few measly IP addresses so they can pass them out again. In the meantime, I’m stuck with a dynamic IP address, and I’ll have to jury-rig something to keep the website and RSS feeds online as I can. What a pain in the neck.
Archive | March 10, 2004
What does your web server reveal? Google knows.
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal points to a Security Focus article hosted on the Register with some good tips on avoiding publishing every document on your web server onto Google, like the budget spreadsheet or your password files. Worth reading for anyone running a web server. Sometimes Google Knows Too Much. “Security Focus: The perils of Googling. Google is in many ways most dangerous website on the Internet for thousands of individuals and organisations. Most computers users still have no idea that they may be revealing far more to the world than they would want.
Everyone with a Website should read this soberly written but fairly alarming piece. It shows how much we may be exposing, often inadvertantly, on our websites.”
Every vote counts! We think. Somewhere.
Seven thousand Orange County voters were given incorrect ballots, and the efficient electronics system can’t even tell who’s voted was miscounted! I voted yesterday, too, in a local election. I gave my name to the person checking registered voters upon entering the poll, and a second upon leaving. Supervisors monitored both transactions. I was given one and only one ballot, and I feed it through the mark-sense machine myself. The paper ballots were retained in a locked and sealed container. The results were printed in the local paper this morning. I just don’t see anything about this system that needs to be more automated and made less secure!
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal reports ‘Ballots’ Lost in California: Voting Officials Blase. “A registrar of voters who seems more concerned about ducking his responsibilities is saying, essentially, that everything is fine because the margin was lopsided enough to make this screwup meaningless. Oh, that’s a relief.”