Thoughts From The Fringe Of The Web

My long weekend is over :( spent Thursday helping change the firewall topology at work, Check Point NG FP3 is pretty impressive from the little I've seen so far. As promised earlier here is the paper I wrote on the need for personal firewalls.

I've been doing some research on buffer overflows, something I've never really dealt with since I stopped coding years ago (and am only just getting back into it). I found a couple of wonderfully written articles. Ultimately Aleph Ones Smashing The Stack For Fun & Profit from Phrack issue 49 is the definitive paper.

For those of you who are just starting out on assembly or buffer overflows, here are a couple of beginner tutorials :
Buffer Overflow Tutorial
A Beginners Tutorial

Enjoy yourself, and remember, its only fun until someone loses an eye..

Finally fixed that damn style sheet error that was irritating me ! I read today that Kevin Mitnick has written a book on social engineering called "The Art Of Deception". I feel pretty bad for the guy, he went to jail on top of his game, spent time in solitary confinement, got released, and is now (imho) pretty lost. When he went to jail the net as we know it didn't exist. Someone even had to show him how to surf !

Got some good new music by two of my favourite bands :
Queensryche and Dream Theater.
I'm listening to Queensryche's Promised Land right now (thanks Ra, Mim ;)

Right, spent the last 45 minutes updating the look of the page. Its been a while since I put my HTML skills (!) to good use, I like how it turned out. Started writing a paper entitled "A Case For Personal Firewalls", will put up a link to it when I'm done. Also had a long discussion on religious fundamentalism (I'm a die-hard atheist). Excited about getting Red Hat 9.0 and installing it on my virtual machines powered by VMware the most kick ass virtualisation software going ! Check it out.

Ok, I'm sitting at Uttam's putting back a few beers. Tomorrow is Sunday so chances are that we wont be getting up anytime early . They're planning to involve me in a big project at work from Monday onwards.. lets see how that goes. Oh yeah check out Uttam's co's website - Flakey, Mellow & Grounded.

Flakey website - Nice flash