It has been a while since I've blogged. Once one gets out of the habit it seems so much easier to just let interesting things go, but this is just too cool. CAPTCHAs have been around for quite a long time. To a greater, or lesser degree they allow web site designers to classify visitors as human or bot. This is all very useful, but the people at CMU have come up with a very interesting twist. It seems that each day some 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved world wide by internauts requesting webmail accounts or leaving blog comments, etc. reCAPTCHA is a program that harnesses all that cognitive power to assist in converting paper only books into digital storage, with all the benefits that implies. Read about it here:
reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
What is particularly cool is that you don't have to be a Web 2.0 maven to take advantage. With Mailhide, you give them an email address you want to have available on your web page or blog, they give you the HTML code to paste into your page. In my case it looks like this:
fla...@gmail.com
What you do with this code is limited only by you knowledge of HTML, but out of the box it works quite well. People (or bots) wanting your email address have to click on the ..., and solve the CAPTCHA.
Now Google's spam filters seem to be very good, and my ravings are not the center of the blogofractal, so spam isn't a problem. Even so, it only took me a few moments to hide my mail address, and I didn't have to change the look of my blog at all.
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
GRC SecurAble: Determine Processor Security Features
GRC SecurAble: Determine Processor Security Features
For MS Windows users.
As reported on the Security Now podcast focusing on hardware data execution prevention (DEP), GRC has released a tool to determine if an Intel or AMD processor supports DEP, 64 bit instruction or visualization. The GRC site does a very good job explaining why these may be important to your machine. Suffice to say that if you are able to enable DEP on your machine it will protect your machine from the exploit that most malware uses to gain control over your computer.
In order to be in effect DEP must be enabled on the hardware and in the operating system. SecurAble will tell you if DEP is available on your machine. Then next steps are to make sure the BIOS does not disable it on boot, and the OS uses the capability. I will caution you that unless you really understand this material you should not just enable DEP. If any of your hardware drivers or critical software do not meet DEP constraints Windows may fail to boot. What is needed is a tool that will assist the average user to configure DEP in a way that will allow them to detect and work around any such issues. Happily, GRC is working on that tool now. More on this when it is released.
For MS Windows users.
As reported on the Security Now podcast focusing on hardware data execution prevention (DEP), GRC has released a tool to determine if an Intel or AMD processor supports DEP, 64 bit instruction or visualization. The GRC site does a very good job explaining why these may be important to your machine. Suffice to say that if you are able to enable DEP on your machine it will protect your machine from the exploit that most malware uses to gain control over your computer.
In order to be in effect DEP must be enabled on the hardware and in the operating system. SecurAble will tell you if DEP is available on your machine. Then next steps are to make sure the BIOS does not disable it on boot, and the OS uses the capability. I will caution you that unless you really understand this material you should not just enable DEP. If any of your hardware drivers or critical software do not meet DEP constraints Windows may fail to boot. What is needed is a tool that will assist the average user to configure DEP in a way that will allow them to detect and work around any such issues. Happily, GRC is working on that tool now. More on this when it is released.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)