.:Computer Defense:.

Sometimes I provide just links in these, other times I use them to house numerous "mini-blog posts"... The last one was links, this one is "mini-blog" posts.

The first thing I want to bring up is some of the "tutorials" that have been written on the Official Google Blog.  The first was Controlling How Search Engines Access and Index Your Website. It was posted back in January and covered robots.txt, it's a great intro for anyone who's never used robots.txt before. It also provides some external links to some excellent resources. The more recent of these, The Robot Exclusion Protocol, covered using META tags to issue directions to Googlebot. It covers the NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX, NOSNIPPET and NOARCHIVE META tags. Both of these are fairly short, a single page, and definitely worth taking a couple of minutes to read.

Next up we have an interesting post on Jeff Pettorino's VeriSign Blog. While it's a common sense issue, we quite often forget how many people fail to use common sense. The article speaks to home alarm systems and why they don't work with VoIP. I always thought it made sense as to why you needed a land, or POTS, line but I guess that's because of a technical background and those without the technical background think of a phone as just being a phone. My sister for example signed up with Rogers for Internet, Cable and Phone... She signed up for home phone service and it wasn't until her and I were talking one night and I pointed out that the, so called, "Home Phone Service" was actually VoIP... so I guess to most people a phone is just a phone. For you people, Jeff's post is an excellent read.

Up next we've got an interesting bill being proposed in Massachusetts that would make retailers responsible for monetary losses due to data loss... This is a great bill and hopefully it becomes a law and then, if all goes well, hopefully other places will put similar laws in place. Right now if a business loses your credit card information, the credit card company is responsible for any loss you incur. Under the proposed law the business would be responsible. I think this would drive a lot of companies to beef up the security that they have in place and start to take data loss seriously.

An article published on Dark Reading a couple of weeks ago covered a study done by the University of Maryland which determined that the average computer on the internet is attacked every 39 seconds. A second article was published yesterday with more information from the study pointing to the top ten passwords that are attempted during these attacks.

Lastly, we've got a post from Mitchell Ashley on a third type of hat that should accompany white hat and black hat... I would argue that this is actually the fourth type of hat, as the third type was grey hat.  While I agree that this described "yellow hat" does indeed exist, I wonder if we should introduce yet another hat... perhaps we should have the "green hat"... The hat of jealousy and envy... The "green hat" isn't unlike the yellow hat, except that instead of finding flaws in their competitors software and publishing them irresponsibly to make themselves look good, they verbally attack them with no real basis for the attack. Without naming names, I can think of individuals at a few different companies who regularly resort to this and I think we should label them green hats.