Fippy's Blog

I've moved my blog to my home site (http://www.fippy.net) where it will be easier to maintain and mesh with my own site template.

I shall no longer be posting here, but you are welcome to follow my new blog at: http://www.fippy.net/blog/
Over time I will import LJ entries across to the new blog as well.

For those of you embracing RSS, you can subscribe to my new blog using RSS too, in case you can't be bothered to actually visit my site. :)

This could be an interesting discussion, why not join in?
http://www.miraclesalad.com/blog/archives/2005/02/welcome_to_the.php

Literally. Over the last 2 years I have lost 54 pounds. Not bad going at all. Only another 26 to go now. :) I certainly feel a lot better for it, and when I'm done I hope to get my FAA medical certificate back.

Today I finally had to move out of my nice sunny office and back into cubeland. Luckily it's not as if I didn't know it was coming. I got warned last summer that my days there were numbered, so I had time to prepare for the ultimate reality. It seems they need it for a manager and I think I'm the last engineer in our department to keep an office, so I held out the longest. :P

Actually, it almost seems like I am going backwards. When I started here, 9 years ago, (wow, has it been that long?) I was an Engineer in a cube. Then I became a senior engineer in a cube. Then I became a senior engineer in an office. Oooh - moving up in the world! Then I became a manager in an office. Wow! I've made it now! That's when the backwards thing started. First I decided after several years that management wasn't for me - that I enjoyed actually doing work and not sitting in meetings all day. So I demoted myself to senior engineer, but kept my office. That was kind of them :) Now I'm a senior engineer back in cubeland. Hm... do I get demoted to engineer next?

To be honest though - offices, management... it's all a big corporate political thing. Doing what I'm good at - engineering - is the main thing. The rest is window dressing. The geeky truth is that I'm going to miss the huge whiteboard on my ex-office wall more than I will miss the window, or the couch, or the privacy, or the real walls instead of felt ones.... well ok, maybe offices are nice, but being in a cube won't affect my work. Not having the huge whiteboard might though....

After dabbling with it for 4 or 5 months now, I finally got inspired to work on my web site over these last few days. Thanks to **** (you know who you are!) for inspiring me by illustrating how easy web development is with CSS. :) So I've made a lot of progress on the new site which I hope to unveil in the next month or so.

I think it is a lot cleaner and more modern than the existing one, and hopefully everyone else will think so too.

Current Mood: working

This is pretty cool, it allows you to track the countries you have visited.
Wow, I still have so much of the world to see!



create your own visited country map

I'm disappointed at the sluggish response of corporations, particularly financial institutions, to the growing wave of internet crime.

If you follow cnn.com or slashdot, or probably any news agency, you are no doubt familiar with countless reports of mail scams, pop-ups, "phishing" as it is called. I used to pride myself in being able to spot web or email scams by their atrocious spelling and generally unprofessional format, but in the last few months I have received emails so authentic (with artwork and web links) that I could not identify them as phishing spam. Such authentic scams came from eBay and PayPal and most recently American Express. I actually had to email the fraud departments of these companies to determine whether the email was legitimate or not. There is no doubt that the phishers are becoming very sophisticated.

Recent reports show that looking for authentic web links is no longer safe either. You would think that performing a "view source" on a page to see that the link you click on is indeed www.wellsfargo.com would be safe, but apparently the hackers have found ways to redirect even authentic looking web links.

Just today, cnn.com reported on the latest trend of internet hacking - internet hotspots or wifi access points. Organised hackers can swamp a legitimate hotspot transceiver with a stronger signal from their own base-station lookalike. "Evil-twinning" this activity has been called. Unsuspecting wifi users happily log on to their financial institutions via what they believe to be a genuine hotspot. The hacker of course is recording all usernames and passwords before passing them on to the legitimate web sites. Clearly if you are smart you will not conduct important transactions via wifi, particularly as many hotspots are not even WEP encrypted. Using one of these is like speaking your PIN number out loud as you use an ATM.

Network security within corporations has long been all but watertight. Even if the latest biometric devices are not being used, (you can even buy small thumbprint scanners for your home PC now - the technology is affordable enough), a large number of corporations use authentication devices such as RSA's SecureID. If you aren't familiar with this technology, each user carries a tiny "fob" around with them, no larger than a typical keyring fob used to unlock your car. The fob spits out a unique time-encoded ID code every 30 seconds. In place of a constant, text password, a user logs into the network by entering their username, PIN number and the number from the fob. The fob code is usually valid for 30 seconds before being rejected by the system so capturing such a code is worthless to a hacker - it cannot be used again. Such devices are even more secure than swipe-cards, because if you steal my access fob, it is no use to you unless you know my username and more importantly my secret PIN. Each fob is encoded to a particular user.

So returning to my opening complaint - it really is time that financial corporations began to really care about their customers as they claim in their ads, and issue such devices to their customers. I appreciate that these devices, even produced en-masse are not cheap, especially when each one needs to be linked to a specific account. This isn't a problem. I am sure many people, like me, would pay $5 a month to lease such a fob to know that their internet banking is totally secure. After all, a hacker might be able to fool me into heading to their imitation bank site, but they have no way to authenticate me when I get there. Passwords are the number #1 security loophole in computers today and a time-sensitive code will remove this loophole once and for all.

Authentication devices are not new - this is tried and tested technology and would serve in the interim until more sophisticated methods can be brought to market, like biometric devices. I would be the first to complain if every financial institution that I do business with online issed a keyfob. I would end up carrying a bag full around! I am sure we can be more imaginative, but we need to act soon before doing business over the internet becomes too dangerous to contemplate and we all return to the old days of queuing in the bank to talk to a live teller. Come on banks, which is cheaper, a remote authentication device or employing more tellers.

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

This is a must-read speech for anyone remotely interested in public opinion, science, politics or all of the above. Also, read this speech if you are a believer/skeptic of global warming, nuclear winter, sencond-hand smoke, or similar "consensuses".

I won't influence you with my opinions. Make your own, but perservere with this lengthy speech. It will make you think.

My deepest sympathy goes out to the survivors and families of the Indonesian tsunami, and sincere condolences to the families of lost ones. I hope that many of those lost ones turn up alive from amongst the current chaos. Such a disaster is awful at the best of times, but worse when put in the context of most of the world enjoying their Holidays and Christmas.

As we all celebrate the dawning of 2005 today and tonight, let us all spare some thoughts - and donations - for those unable to enjoy the New Year through worrying about lost ones.

This photograph is just a small window into the devastation: http://www.fippy.net/aceh.jpg

Current Mood: sympathetic