Monday, August 25, 2003

Security Alert when Reporting a Security Vulnerability Google Search It If you ever wanted to report a security vulnerability to Microsoft you would probably go to the Report a Security Vulnerability page.  What is quite surprising about this page, however, is that it pops up a Security Alert notifying you that the name on the Certificate used for the SSL encryption on the page does not match the site.  Furthermore, the certificate is issued to a248.e.akamai.net, which looks rather suspicious to a non Certificate aware person like myself.   I found this rather bizarre as one would think one place Microsoft would not want to discourage visitors if from reporting security vulnerabilities.  I reported the issue to Microsoft and got back two personal responses, the second one stated, "We would like to inform you that we are aware of this and we are investigating this issue. Thanks again!"  It is nice to know that my email did not go into the email void and this will encourage me to report such issues in the future.  I find it curios, however, that they didn't also fix the issue immediately. 8:23:07 PM   []    comment []

CD-R Not a Reliable Medium Google Search It Forgive me for my innocence on this one but this article, which I came across on Slashdot, bothers me a lot.  I has always been under the assumption that once I copied my data to CD-R I was set...  It was reliably backed up.  Unfortunately, this article seems to indicate otherwise.  It points out that in fact CD-Rs are not a reliable medium the only question is whether they are unreliable in a matter of months or years.  Hmmm.... So what medium is reliable for the family photo album? 5:33:44 AM   []    comment []

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