Category: Tech

The grandfather of Internet worms

One weekday in 1988 I was waiting in line to order at a lunch counter in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (or it might have been Au Bon Pain by then). In front of me were two MIT guys who were talking quickly and nervously about something that was going very wrong on the Internet. The problem was the first software worm, written by Robert Morris, who is now at MIT himself. His father, one of the creators of the Unix operating system, has died.

What large servers you have!

Today at work I was watching a not very useful video about VMware virtual networking. When I looked to see what else YouTube had pulled up as related material, what I saw between NIC teaming and the Cisco Nexus was a surprise.

That little blue ghost in the upper right corner of the screen shot is Ghostery. I recommend giving it a try. So far, it seems to work best with Firefox 4.

Perfect!_@#$%^&*()-=Passw0rds

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep up with Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcasts. I’ve been doing that, and last week Gibson had a particularly valuable discussion on strong passwords. I’ll embed the part of the podcast of interest, called Password Haystacks.

[audio:http://media.grc.com/Padded-Passwords.mp3|titles=Security Now! with Steve Gibson]

Gibson offers an excellent method for coming up with your own, relatively short, passwords that are suitable for portable devices. He also has copy-and-paste passwords that offer the ultimate in security.

Hastings’ pudding

I never used Blockbuster Video. In fact, 1999 was the only year I rented VHS. Before then I bought and rented LaserDiscs from a great store in Waltham, Mass., called Sight & Sound, that also did a big mail-order business. When talking to Dennis I referred to it simply as “the store.”

Note: Somebody out there will see my name, Douglas Pratt, and think I am the LD/DVD Newsletter Douglas Pratt. I’m not. He’s in New York, I’m in Boston. I met Doug once at Sight & Sound, and I still get his newsletter.

After patronizing the store for quite a few years, the assistant manager of Sight & Sound, a guy named John, told me I was one of their top customers. I asked John who was a better customer than me, and he said, only half-joking, “Roger Ebert,” who really was a customer. Between that shock, and knowing that the DVD format was on the horizon, I knew I had a problem and it was time to stop spending money on LD’s. Breaking my habit was made easier when we moved, and Sight & Sound was no longer on the way home from work.

There was a small, independent business called Video Paradise that rented VHS and, later, DVD. It was a 4-mile drive, but the owner was smart, because not only did he also rent video games — a big plus for Eric — he had drop-off boxes for returns. There was one a mile from home, so we only had to make the longer drive once per week. He was also good about hiring good help and waiving late fees for good customers.

I don’t recall exactly when Netflix flickered into my consciousness, but it was before 2003, when the owner of Video Paradise sold the store. He got out of the business while the getting was good. By then Sight & Sound was gone, swept away by DVD, that had made high quality home video a consumer commodity, instead of the specialty item for a small number of enthusiasts that LD had been.

The new owner of Video Paradise was a problem from the start. He had an attitude and seemed to enjoy displaying it. He didn’t rent video games because he wasn’t interested in them, he ended the drop boxes, and then he hired some obnoxious kids for clerks and instituted truly onerous late fees. We continued going there for another six months, but when a kid behind the counter was being too much of a jerk, I decided the owner wasn’t interested in staying in business, and in January 2004 I signed up for Netflix. Bloomberg has this half-hour profile of Netflix founder Reed Hastings.