I Live
Gah. My worst fears about not being able to keep any sort of a diary have been vindicated (note the two month gap between this and the last entry). In my defence I will say that I have been very busy. Around the time of my last entry I started a new job at NetStar Networks in their security consulting team. This has worked out well so far, with the work being interesting and challenging.
I have just returned from doing a series of seminars around Australia on intrusion detection systems (IDS). This was very enjoyable - my coworkers did an hour presentation on the history and theory of IDS and how one should go about evaluating such products in one’s own network. Following this I conducted an hour of demonstration of a number of vendors’ products, throwing real and simulated attacks against them and discussing the results (or lack thereof). Although we didn’t set out to set the products against each other, it was soon clear than none of the products we demonstrated performed perfectly. I was a bit surprised and disappointed that Snort didn’t do better - it missed a few of our attacks. More scary was one vendor’s response to the demo (they shall remain nameless). Unhappy that our very. very limited demo showed that their product missed a three year old denial of service attack and, worse, was vulnerable to a five year old evasion technique, the vendor demanded that we cease demonstration of their product (with a threat of legal action if we didn’t). Perhaps it is some vestigial sense of ethics, but as a one-time developer of commercial security products, I would have thought the appropriate response would have been to ask us to provide our environment so they could replicate and fix the problem themselves.
Another cool thing happened to me during my two months away from this page: I met up with a very old friend, whom I had not heard from since he moved to the USA sixteen years ago (Hi Paul!). He actually found me by reading my web-site (presumably after some Googling). I wish I had as much luck in searching for old friends online. Catching up was great fun and it was extremely interesting to evoke old memories and attempt to put the last sixteen years into some communicable narrative.
Other random things: saw Battle Royale (wow), chopped down trees (ouch), too busy to write free software, friends are expecting first child, another friend has first child (Simone and I are the odd ones out now), tried acupuncture (despite my rationalist scepticism, it definitely has an effect), reading more Orwell.