Coredump

Okay, I know this is old news, but lately I’ve been getting a lot of these sorry pages that prompt me to input CAPTCHA words so I can continue with the search.

This would be understandable *if* only because I go through the Tor networks sometimes when I do searches, but this also happens at work. Weird, though, that I encounter the sorry page mostly when I go through the northern American segment of our network, but rarely when I’m on the Asia Pacific side.

(That is not to say that I search “anomalous queries”. We do have in-house Google searches {using the appliances}, but sometimes I need to go out on the internet to look for hints on some issues we encounter. {Okay, so searching for [Sara Brinsfield] from work — well it was only that one time — is a *bit* anomalous, but still…})

Online identity verification system OpenID gains steam as prominent web companies adopt its use.

Recently, AOL announced that it will implement the OpenID system for its 63 million subscribers. In the wake of that news, Digg’s Kevin Rose announced at a web conference in London that the popularity website will accept OpenID and become an OpenID provider.

“We want to give people the freedom to move around online and this is a way to do it,” Rose said.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have also become OpenID adopters.

Users of OpenID can identify themselves using a URI that they own (a blog or home page, for example). They can then log on to OpenID-enabled sites without registering or opening a new account — they only need to sign in once to an OpenID provider. This addresses the single sign-on problem that users encounter when signing up for various web services.solves

Big-name web companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft has also addressed the SSO problem by implementing identity systems in their infrastructure.

• Starting today, we’re on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.
• Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an “Amazing Race”-style tech challenge — a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn’t win, so there goes the nano.
• Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity — I didn’t get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).
• Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three “American Tail” DVDs (Gab’s current fave). Didn’t catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.
• Question: you’re a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don’t get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?
• I’m getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.
• Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I’m totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.
• On to more Lifehacking, I’m using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work — talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!

Found this through the Full Disclosure list:

A clever exploit in a little-known Google service could be used to launch phishing attacks, by imitating Google services — hosted on Google’s own servers.

Google has taken down the service.

The whiz kid behind the Million-Dollar Homepage got hit by denial-of-service attacks from script kiddies who demanded $5,000 — later upped to $50,000 — so they won’t “ddos (his) site ever again”.

Instead of giving in, his entrepreneurial mind kicked in: he made a deal with a Web security company; his site was up again, and the Feds are now after the kiddies.

Now that’s what I call ingenuity. Via Boing Boing.