For some time now, I have been a supporter of improving the ResCom service for students living in the residence halls. This is partly because I was formerly the ResCom student supervisor at Penn State Mont Alto and saw firsthand the shortcomings of internet service in University residence halls. With help and support on behalf of students from CCSG, I have advocated for both an increase in bandwidth restrictions as well as improvements to the registration process.
On Friday, an announcement was made that beginning this week, bandwidth limits will increase from 2GB/week to 4GB/week. Additionally, network throughput during the day would increase 120%. This is a major improvement for the residence halls. However, it should not make us forget about improving the service in the long-term. Here are my suggestions for ResCom, which I presented to University administrators 2 weeks ago in a formal letter: Continue reading 'ResCom Increases Bandwidth Limit to 4GB'»
I decided to change hosting this month. Unfortunately, my previous host had some issues with uptime and I needed a new host that supports Python/Zope/Plone. I decided to try out Webfaction. They provide support for PHP, Ruby, Python, Zope, etc. and ‘guarantee’ a certain amount of memory to each account. While the site control panel feels very awkward, the price is right. I’ll give an update sometime later on my satisfaction with Webfaction’s service.
An increasing trend lately seems to be the creation of malware targeted not only at Operating System vulnerabilities but also vulnerabilities that target popular applications such as Adobe Acrobat, Mozilla Firefox, VideoLan Media Player. In many ways, these vulnerabilities can be more appealing to an attacker.
One possible reason: most modern Operating Systems, hotfixes and patches are typically installed automatically. This means that a majority of systems can be patched in a short period of time, greatly reducing the lifespan and impact of a vulnerability. On the other hand, many applications have no automatic update mechanism. Users often forget to update software until there are significantly improved features in a newer version. This can help increase the useful lifespan and impact of a vulnerability, giving attackers more incentive to take advantage of them.
Although it has become clear that maintaining a secure system now means that all software on the system should be kept up to date, finding a solution to do this quickly and accurately has been reason enough to forget about the problem. However, there is software that may help save time performing application maintenance. Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) automatically scans a system regularly for any and all applications that have known vulnerabilities. Additionally, PSI will help resolve software vulnerabilities by providing links and instructions for updating vulnerable software.
Secunia PSI is available at https://psi.secunia.com/ . As of this posting, it is still in the Release Candidate stage. However, I have not had any issues running it on both Windows XP and Vista.
One of the most interesting things I discovered with Secunia PSI is that when I updated the Java Runtime in the past, the older versions were not uninstalled automatically. While this may be for compatibility purposes, I had several versions of Java installed on my computer that were vulnerable. Be sure to uninstall older versions of the Java Runtime if you don’t need them.
The expressed opinions, informational content and links displayed on this website do not necessarily reflect a position or policy of The Pennsylvania State University or its affiliates.
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